Vim Creep

Oddly, I've found myself using vimacs (https://github.com/andrep/vimacs) to have emacs keybindings available with the quick startup / easy configurability of vim.

I make no claim that emacs keybindings are superior to vim's native keybindings, but for whatever reason, I type more naturally using them at this point. (Which somewhat mystifies me, since for years I used vi/vim as a primary editor with it's normal keybindings.)

I still think that vim keybindings are faster than Emacs for actually editing text, but the emacs keybindings feel more pleasant to me (unless I'm using something without a dedicated control key - like a phone or tablet).

kennethologist• 14 years ago

This article has changed(or at least I hope) my life. I'm installing Vim today on my Windows Laptop. Does anyone know of a good guide for beginners?

Smudge• 14 years ago

:help tutor

Or, if you get bored: http://vim-adventures.com/

solutionyogi3• 14 years ago

I would highly recommend 'The Practical Vim' by Pragmatic Bookshelf. http://pragprog.com/book/dnvim/practical-vim

It will teach you 'The Vim Way' which is a MUST if you want to get most out of it.

When starting with Vim, it can be very daunting and I can't emphasize that enough. If you are in NJ/NY, please email me and I can walk you through 'The Vim Way' to make it easier to get up to speed.

icarus_drowning• 14 years ago

I learn by watching and following along with examples, so the following YouTube videos are the ones that I've found the most useful:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=71YTkxUNwmg <--Covers the basics and helpful commands. I had never used vim before watching this video, and now I'm reasonably competent at basic text editing.

I needed to do find and replace on a short story I'm working on (changed a character's name), and I found this one helpful: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J1_CfIb-3X4

I wanted to understand/use the .vimrc file, so I googled until I hit this one, which I found quite informative: [UPDATE: put in the wrong link, serves me right for picking the last history item with .vimrc in it instead of watching it. The actual video I found helpful was this one of a guy showing his .vimrc file and what various things in it do: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xZuy4gBghho]

Lastly, once you're comfortable using it, try going into command mode and typing Shift-a, and notice that it moves your cursor to the end of the line and puts you in insert mode. I saw this tip on HN awhile back, and I hadn't seen it in any basic tutorials, but it is the single most useful command I've come across.

FuzzyDunlop• 14 years ago

Shift+I moves your cursor to the start of the line, and enters insert mode, too.

possibilistic• 14 years ago

It is NOT going to be easy, but please stick with it. In time you will gain a muscle memory and proficiency for its use. And you will only continue to get better.

I can't speak for how vim feels under Windows (I'm not knocking your OS, just commenting on possible issues you may have). If it seems non-native it may serve you to spin up a virtual Ubuntu instance and give it a try there.

Also, temper your expectations. The comment above by StavrosK [1] is good to keep in mind. Using vim feels liberating and fluid, but it will not improve your programming ability.

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4236181

johnsea• 14 years ago

Smash into vim I + II (screencasts) helped me a lot.

Link: https://peepcode.com/screencasts

mun2mun2• 14 years ago

Start with Darek Watt's novice tutorial series[1]. He presented basic features of vim in a simple and a bit funny way.

http://www.derekwyatt.org/vim/vim-tutorial-videos/vim-novice...

jng• 14 years ago

http://www.viemu.com/a_vi_vim_graphical_cheat_sheet_tutorial...

ciderpunx• 14 years ago

Nice. Very nice.

I even tweeted it. With TwitVim, naturally. http://vim.sourceforge.net/scripts/script.php?script_id=2204

karmajunkie• 14 years ago

Can we all stop patting ourselves on the back for being vim badasses now?

Yes, its a fantastic editor. Yes, its probably going to make you more productive. Yes, its every bit as capable as any other IDE or editor out there.

No, it will not make you a better person. No, mastery of vim does not make you fart sunshine. No, it won't make you an enlightened buddha.

Produce• 14 years ago

No, we can't.

Yes, it is. Yes, it will. Yes, it is.

Yes, it will. Yes, it does. Yes, I am.

StavrosK• 14 years ago

Also, it doesn't even make you that much more productive. I love it to bits and use it exclusively, but it's just a bit faster, it's not going to reduce the time it takes you to actually think about the things you have to write.

RegEx• 14 years ago

I agree. The most utility I get out of VIM is quick formatting. I'm very particular on how my code looks, (I want to make things as painless as possible for the next guy), and navigating code in normal mode is much faster than anything I could do with a mouse. As far as writing code goes, typing 120wpm makes me fast, not VIM. As far as thinking goes, Jarnal and a Wacom tablet help me do that, not VIM.

pfraze3• 14 years ago

I think it's more about mastering tools with a high learning curve. It's our trade; it's fun to feel good about it.

thetabyte• 14 years ago

I think that's something we as a community forget. It's ok to feel proud of being good with your tools. It is fun. As long as we don't turn it into a "holier than thou" situation, it's neat to have an editor that you have such mastery over that you can control blocks of text with keystrokes.

Note: I don't quite have it yet myself. I'm been using vim for about 6 months (with only 2-3 of active use) and I'm actually right on that cusp he mentions--where you are searching less and less, and only for more powerful and obscure commands, and things are just starting to all become extremely useful. It's beautiful.

dredmorbius3• 14 years ago

I like to remind people that the flipside of a steep learning curve is a high payoff function. If you can exhaust a tool's potential in a day, or a week, or a month, it really doesn't have much to offer you.

zem2• 14 years ago

i think it's not even so much about the learning curve, it's about the sheer amount of leverage the skills get you. it's very similar to the way chefs are chuffed about their knife skills - all of a sudden you're doing so much with so little effort that it'd be sadly jaded not to feel a thrill.

crazygringo3• 14 years ago

This feels like an article about a religion or cult, not a software program.

I just don't get it. Ever since newer editors got block editing or multiple insertion cursors, and RegEx find & replace across multiple files, and searching filenames to open... I feel like I've already got everything I need!

What am I missing out on? I don't feel like my text editor holds back my productivity. Using something like Sublime, I never think, man, if only Sublime did x, it would save me five minutes, twenty times a week!

I've never had anyone explain to me what specific kind of code editing is so much more productive in vim than in any other editor. Can someone give me a real-world, commonly occurring example?

Or is it not about productivity? Is it an interface thing? People like the way it feels to use? The article explains the "feeling" I always hear about, how vim is so much better, but for the millionth time, fails to tell me why, in a way a non-vim-user can understand.

heretohelp4• 14 years ago

I don't understand vimmers, but I use Emacs and I can say that having your work environment be 100% programmable is pretty damned nice.

pfraze3• 14 years ago

I used emacs for about 6 months, and just recently switched to vim to see what I think. It's been pretty subtle so far; close enough that I don't know how much the choice matters.

crazygringo3• 14 years ago

So what kind of stuff do you program inside of it? What kinds of problems do you solve?

I mean, I've never really felt the need to program an add-on to text editor. I download syntax highlighting packages, and there are common macros like "remove trailing whitespace" already installed. Keyboard shortcuts can be changed in lots of editors and OS's. In the past, I've definitely been upset that a particular editor didn't support a particular feature, but by now they've progressed enough that I don't really feel that anymore.

dsrguru• 14 years ago

That's why I use Evil (http://emacswiki.org/emacs/Evil). I get all the programmability benefits of Emacs with the more powerful editing model of Vim. In fact, the whole of Evil is actually greater than the sum of its parts, since it provides a high level interface for extending the Vim editing model itself in Emacs Lisp. Creating new text objects, for example, becomes trivial.

rcourtie• 14 years ago

For me it's the insert/command modes. The command mode allows me to do all sorts of things without contorting my fingers with combination commands, which is something that annoyed me about emacs. Also makes the macro recording easy for me to understand.

sliverstorm• 14 years ago

Cursor navigation via the keyboard, and not just the arrow keys.

Rudism• 14 years ago

I'll admit that when I wrote this, I did intend it as both a tribute to my favorite text editor as well as a tongue-in-cheek response to the cult-like following that it has. For me, membership to the pseudo-cult is just another reason why I love Vim.

jdludlow4• 14 years ago

It's mainly about muscle memory. If you're using Sublime, emacs, TextMate, or any other "real" text editor then you're fine.

I don't have to think about how to perform most tasks in vim. My fingers just execute what my brain wants to see happen. That doesn't mean that vim is the greatest thing ever, just that I'm used to it and it's fast enough to get the job done.

One concrete benefit to vim is that it works very well over crappy network connections, and it's installed on most every Linux system you're going to touch.

greyfade2• 14 years ago

Or, if Vim isn't present, at least some version of `vi` will be. (Whether it be busybox-vi, nvi, or Ritter's Traditional Vi.)

JangoSteve• 14 years ago

I think you don't feel it, because vim doesn't save you five minutes, twenty times a week; it saves you 0.75 seconds, eight thousand times a week. Same time savings, but much harder notice the pain before you've solved it.

I never felt it either, back in my TextMate days. But one Thanksgiving holiday week, I told myself, you know there's got to be something to this if all these people I respect swear by it. I decided to use vim-only for two weeks, no matter what, and I'd switch back if I wasn't hooked. I was.

bhamrick• 14 years ago

I switched to vim after years of IDE use, and I find it painful to go back to the IDE when I'm working on projects that require it.

The biggest advantage I find in using something like vim or emacs is that you never have to switch between the mouse and the keyboard — in fact its awkward to use the mouse and that makes it difficult to get accustomed to. It allows you to seamlessly transition between code navigation and code writing, and you develop a kind of rythme that I never felt like I achieved with a graphical text editor.

Other nice features are the ability to write custom scripts and repeat actions, but these can generally also be done in other editors. One huge reason I made the switch is I end up writing code on remote machines on occasion, and I can almost always do so in my everyday editor: vim. All my personalization can be transferred over to the remote machine in a single scp command and the experience remains the same no matter where the files live that I'm working on.

xutopia2• 14 years ago

You really have to sit down and see a vim user work to start to understand.

In vim you don't just move around with arrows, then delete and then replace the text you want. What happens is you can use noun-verb associations to do things.

For example on a line like this:

    var foo = "bar";

I could be at the beginning of the line and type the following keys to change the inside of the quotation marks:

    ci"baz<esc>

In sublime I would do the following:

    <cmd>→←←⌫⌫⌫baz

The difference between the two was an epiphany for me. In vim I could actually use verbs and nouns to determine how I will edit the text in front of me. I now have a language that I can use to edit text rather than editing the text using the most manual of tools and the verbs and nouns combination are only limited by my imagination and the plugins I install.

anextio2• 14 years ago

Actually you can do it with:

<cmd>-<right>, <option-left>, <option-shift-right>, baz

And considering you didn't have to press <mode>: beforehand, it can be just as fast.

I'm a vim user, but using it for something like Objective-C in place of the wonderful autocomplete in Xcode would be a totally dumb thing to do. It's simply not smart enough to improve my productivity, even with the slight speed increases with text-manipulation.

recursive2• 14 years ago

If you're into that sort of thing, you can do Ctrl + F, bar<esc> in Sublime too. Most of the comparisons in this discussion between vim and non vim demonstrate high proficiency in vim, but not as much elsewhere. Of course you are more proficient in the tool you know best.

andyl• 14 years ago

Wow - I never realized ci"baz<esc> would work with the cursor starting in column 0 - thanks for this tip !!

wonderzombie• 14 years ago

Is there a reason why you wouldn't use Vintage with ST2? ci works better in Vim, for sure. But ci is still incredibly useful with Vintage:

    f"ci"baz

tripzilch• 14 years ago

It probably helps to explain that ci"baz<ESC> means: change (c) what's inside (i) the apostrophes (") to baz (baz), end (<ESC>)

kicweed• 14 years ago

First time users of vim would use the arrow keys too. Only after you gain some experience do you start thinking with motions.

The same holds true for Sublime Text. Instead of using the arrow keys, you could do any of the following:

  Ctrl+H : Replace
  bar : Find what
  baz : Replace with
  Ctrl+Shift+H : Replace first match
  <esc> : Exit replace mode

  Ctrl + I : Incremental Find (finds and selects finding)
  bar : Find & select text
  baz : Overwrite selection

  Ctrl+<Right>+<Right>+<Right>+<Right> : Reach the word bar
  Ctrl+d : Select word under cursor
  baz : Overwrite selection

  Ctrl+P : GoTo Anything
  # : Goto word
  bar : Goto word 'bar' & select it
  baz : Overwrite selection

I agree that vim's vocabulary is very expressive and very powerfull. I switched to Sublime Text because tweaking vim to meet my needs was just too much effort, even for simple things. Couple this with even more effort to make it play nice with Greek (my native language), and the switch came naturally.

a3_nm2• 14 years ago

> I never think, man, if only Sublime did x, it would save me five minutes, twenty times a week!

You often don't notice how useful something is until you're used to it.

andrewtbham• 14 years ago

the most common example is moving up or down a row. most editors you have to reach for the arrow keys or the mouse. in vim, you use j key for down, k key for up. the most commonly used functions are near the home row.

agumonkey2• 14 years ago

Not only that, it's also a point of view on computers/computing. Automate everything. Kinda like lisp macros. When you refine these manners you gain reduce workload, boilerplate, and focus on fundamental issues.

gcb2• 14 years ago

It talks about nostalgia. there's nothing else besides that.

either you share this or not. If you saw anything else, you are probably misreading or reading too much there.

olalonde• 14 years ago

A video is worth a thousand words.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pCiVCiku3cM

http://blog.eleutian.com/download/vimteaser.wmv

http://blog.eleutian.com/download/vim2.wmv

http://blog.eleutian.com/download/vim3.wmv

sbochins• 14 years ago

I don't see what is bad about having religious or cult like feelings around a tool. This sort of thing already exists for various programming languages. There wouldn't be any of the advancements we consider standard today in most high level programming languages if it weren't for LISP. If people weren't fanatics about homoiconic and functional features in their languages, we would be in a much worse place. Fortunately languages gaining popularity nowadays resemble LISP much more than they do FORTRAN. This probably wouldn't be the case if there weren't very smart people evangelizing the benefits of LISP over the past half a century.

freshhawk• 14 years ago

People will get into the whole verb-noun editing language, which is great, but the biggest and first real world improvement is much simpler:

You don't use your mouse to move the cursor around a document.

After a while you just look at the document and your fingers move and the cursor moves, you can get anywhere in the file in just a few jumps. It's not the same as using a mouse or a touchpad where you need visual feedback to place the cursor in a specific place and the movement is continuous. It feels like it takes less mental processing to do that and it is less distracting while you are concentrating on actual work.

It's hard to explain, and I'm one of those people who using vim, vimperator and vim keybindings in his shell. The only other times I've reached the same levels of muscle memory taking over complex behaviour (besides sports) is when playing video games or driving a car. You concentrate on what you want done and some lower level part of your brain and your hands just takes care of it.

A pointer based system just can't compete in terms of immersion.

I have a feeling I just typed a lot and didn't do any better of a job explaining it.

danneu• 14 years ago

I think that's exactly it.

Explaining nifty Vim backflips is the wrong way to sell Vim. A 15 minute session of `vimtutor` was enough to enlighten me. If I had needed a proficiency in Vim to appreciate Vim, I would've never started.

lelele13• 14 years ago

For me, it's about the interface. In descending order: intuitive, consistent, modular, comfortable, portable.

Intuitive: most commands resemble natural language, without awkward or arbitrary mappings. For instance:

- w: (forward) word;

- cw: change (forward) word;

- c2w: change 2 (forward) words;

- 2cw: twice change word;

- ciw: change inner word;

There is no intervening translation. For instance, to change a word in mainstream editors, you delete it first, then start entering the new text. In Vim, it's one command: you think "change forward word", you issue the "change forward word" command.

Consistent. For instance, double letters work on lines:

- cc: change line;

- dd: delete line;

- yy: yank line;

and capital letters work till the end of the line:

- C: change till the end of the line;

- D: delete till the end of the line;

- Y: yank till the end of the line (not so in vanilla Vim, but I've remapped it because consistency matters to me).

Modular: you compose commands. For instance, / is the search command and then:

- d/testo: delete until the next occurrence of "testo";

- c/testo: change until the next occurrence of "testo";

- etc.

Comfortable: limited usage of modifier keys. Vim saved me from RSI.

Portable: letters and Shift keys are in the same position on any keyboard, be it on a desktop, a laptop, etc. whilst each laptop manufactures has its own idea about where Control, Alt, Arrows, PageUp and PageDown should be.

Hope this helps.

msluyter• 14 years ago

I'm sorry, but although I'd agree vim is awesome, there's no way I would call its commands "intuitive." Take 'y', for 'yank.' Would anyone really argue that the word "yank" is a natural way of expressing "copy?" "Yeah mom, just yank and paste that into an e-mail... " And there's nothing inherently intuitive about '/' for searching, unless you're already familiar with unix commands like sed. Or ":" for go to line. Or "x" for delete letter. Or "jkl;" for movement, for that matter. Etc... etc... etc...

A lot of people here have made the point that vim has a steep learning curve that eventually pays off, which, to me implies that intuitiveness is either lacking or besides the point. Still, I agree with your other points. I'm thinking of going back to it to minimize hand strain.

blablabla1232• 14 years ago

Main stream editors work differently...

Change forward word is in a mainstream editor: [Shift]+[Ctrl]+[Right]

Change line: Home, [Shift]+[End]

...and so on...

Moreover you forgot to mention that you always need to switch modes...

Mainstream editors are pretty efficient, unfortunately in the UNIX World there are hardly any good ones. The best ones I can think of are Eclipse and gedit.

Unfortunately there is no Notepad++-like thing on UNIX. (And Kate just became messy and buggy when KDE4 came out.)

BTW: Has any vim fan ever used the refactoring feature in Eclipse? Or edited Code during runtime using the Graphical Debugger? I doubt it... ;-)

dasil003• 14 years ago

It's all about building up a maximally powerful keyboard text editor from potent primitives. When it comes to out-of-the-box editors, nothing gives more bang for the buck on arbitrary text files than vim.

That's not to say it's the best overall. If you like to customize your environment, emacs is better. If you like tight OS integration and advanced GUI features, many editors are better. If you want the most productive environment for a specific programming language then some IDE is probably better.

But when it comes to raw keyboard editing, why is vim so powerful?

Well, it starts with normal vs insert mode. Because insertion is a specific mode, it means every single key on the keyboard is available for direct editing commands. Of course you can have modifier commands as well, but that's nowhere near the convenience and efficiency of plain typing.

So right off the bat you start with an order of magnitude more command possibilities in an easier to access position (chordless). The commands of the basic keys are designed to be a solid fundamental set of building blocks for all common editing tasks, and they are assigned mnemonically.

The power of the fundamental commands is then multiplied by the vim grammar, whereby commands are applied to objects, which again are a terse and mnemonic description of some chunk of the file.

In practice this means that very short unmodified alphanumeric strings you type can produce powerful changes. It's not just keystroke-counting, it's the fact that these keystrokes are also a meaningful language that makes sense mnemonically, not just through muscle memory. The more you practice, the more different ways you start to see to effect a given change. As you become more proficient, you can do more and more with a single command.

This is important because commands are atomic, and you can repeat the previous command by hitting '.'. The power of this isn't really apparent until you grok the breadth of things a single vim command can do, but have you ever wanted to do a regexp search and replace and spent a long time crafting it and still had to step through it because you were afraid it might screw something up? With vim commands you can often times use simple command repetition to avoid complex regexps ('n.n.n.n.n.n.n.n.' to find next/repeat command).

Sometimes I'm surprised by the mileage I get out of that, but it's really the tip of the iceberg. Because you also have macros, which are just recorded sequences of commands. But the cool part is that commands are made up mostly of regular characters, so the macros look like plaintext, and vim treats them that way as well. Vim has 26 clipboards called registers, and these registers function both as text storage and executable macro space. Meaning you can record a macro, and then paste it into a buffer, and tweak it via normal text editing, and then pull it back in and run it. Because the commands are so simple and mnemonic, it's actually astonishingly easy to do this. Once you are comfortable with it, you find yourself recording, running and dropping macros in less than the time it takes to write a single regexp. I have spacebar bound to a specific quick-macro slot so I can record and then hold down space to mass-apply a macro (my key repeat-rate is maxed as well :), this lets me do the types of things in seconds that previously would have me busting out the sed/awk book. It's very hard to communicate the impact this has on your editing workflows to someone who doesn't get it. It's sort of like a git user telling a svn user why easy branching is so awesome, the svn user just doesn't get it because they've already convinced themselves they don't need branches precisely because they are so hard to use.

In short, the vim advantage is about powerful editing primitives and easy ways to compose them. There are certainly many great editing ideas that are not in vim, but in terms of the fundamentals for keyboard editing, it's hard to imagine anything better.

crazygringo3• 14 years ago

Thanks. That's the best explanation I've ever heard. That makes sense!

MattSayar• 14 years ago

Thanks, I really appreciate how you broke it down. One thing that I was wondering about that you don't address directly is: how do you compile/execute your code? Do you have to exit vim every time, run your compile/execute command, then relaunch vim? Sorry if this is really specific.

jaggederest• 14 years ago

It's about a text editor that you learn more about and customize until it fits you like a glove.

Then you reap productivity benefits for the next couple decades.

mixmastamyk3• 14 years ago

When I'm coding the bottleneck is my brain, not input speed... so vim seems like a micro-optimization to me.

I use CUA and can be productive everywhere immediately, even if it may be a bit less efficient.

flyinRyan• 14 years ago

It is in a sense. For some reason, vi[m] gets more play on this site, but pretty everything you can say about vim also applies to emacs, with one critical different (and the reason I switched): vi* is modal editing. Every report I've seen on the subject says that modal editing is a no-no. As a vi user, after seeing this for the first time I realized that, indeed, it had happened to me several times that I thought I was in text mode but was actually in command mode.... oops. I type 80+wpm so by the time realized the mistake I had trashed my file beyond recognition and had overran the undo buffer. There was nothing to do but lose all changes and start again.

This can't happen in emacs because editing isn't modal (though commands are very contextual). vi* is certainly easier on the hands than all the cording but getting rid of modal editing means no more wasting time when your brain is out of sync with the editor.

Having said all that, I'd still pick a nice IDE over either of them, since the IDE understands the language I'm editing and can e.g. change from simple minded "mass edits" to actual refactoring.

rsbrown• 14 years ago

No, I didn't.

jdludlow4• 14 years ago

My first week in college a distant relative of mine at the same school pulled me into the Sun lab. The sum-total of his instructions were:

* This is how you log in.

* This is ls.

* This is cd.

* This is man.

* This is apropos.

* Learn vi.

* Have fun.

What came from that 5 minute intro to Unix has been applied orders of magnitude more often than anything from 5 years of an EE degree.

xutopia2• 14 years ago

Can you explain to me what apropos does?

shazow• 14 years ago

This is why `man` came before `apropos`. :P

http://www.unix.com/man-page/Linux/1/apropos/

anextio2• 14 years ago

It searches for a keyword in the manpages and tells you what page contains the text.

    $ apropos printf
    fmtcheck(3)              - sanitizes user-supplied printf(3)-style format string
    format(ntcl)             - Format a string in the style of sprintf
    fwkpfv(1)                - FireWire kprintf viewer
    fwprintf(3), swprintf(3), vfwprintf(3), vswprintf(3), vwprintf(3), wprintf(3) - formatted wide character output conversion
    printf(1)                - formatted output
    printf(3), fprintf(3), sprintf(3), snprintf(3), asprintf(3), dprintf(3), vprintf(3), vfprintf(3), vsprintf(3), vsnprintf(3), vasprintf(3), vdprintf(3) - formatted output conversion
    wprintf_l(3), fwprintf_l(3), swprintf_l(3), vwprintf_l(3), vfwprintf_l(3), vswprintf_l(3) - formatted wide character output conversion

Symmetry• 14 years ago

It lets you find other commands, basically. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apropos_(Unix)

jdludlow4• 14 years ago

  $ man apropos
  
  apropos searches a set of database files containing
  short descriptions of system commands for keywords and
  displays the result on the standard output.

It answers the question "I wonder how to do [this English word]."

For example: "I wonder how I copy a file."

  $ apropos copy

Dumps out all of the matching entries from the man pages for the word "copy". If you just wanted general commands, as opposed to library functions, and assuming your system organizes man page sections in the typical manner, you can filter it down with:

  $ apropos copy | grep "(1)"
  cp                   (1)  - copy files and directories 
  cpio                 (1)  - copy files to and from archives

neckbeard• 14 years ago

Not to detract from your point, which was similar to my intro to Unix, but I've always preferred 'man -k' to apropos, because it means remembering only one command plus it is slightly less typing.

stack_underflow• 14 years ago

'man -K' is also useful, for when you want to search the contents of man pages and not just the descriptions.

andere• 14 years ago

What a feel-good piece.

SwellJoe3• 14 years ago

I've said it before, and I'll say it again...

Editing text is a solved problem: vim or emacs. Pick one and get back to work.

a3_nm2• 14 years ago

While vim is very cool, there is certainly a lot of room for improvement. vim's codebase doesn't look like something that I would like to hack, and don't try to tell me that things like vim plugins or vimscript are supposed to be the best that we can ever hope to do.

SwellJoe3• 14 years ago

I'm not trying to tell you anything about the codebase, vim plugins, or vimscript.

I'm trying to tell you that it's probably a waste of your time to agonize over text editors, when there are two very powerful editors available to you, with decades of development and refinement, millions of active users, hundreds or thousands of contributions of plugins and scripts and support tools, copious documentation and examples, and the tools you need to embark on any text editor task you may have without ever feeling limited by the editor (assuming you have learned your editor).

Do you want to work on your software, or do you want to work on text editor scripts? Sure, sometimes you need to write a macro or script or something...but, I can count the lines of vim code I've written in my entire 20+ years of programming on my fingers and toes (if I count vimrc stuff, it'll require a few other people's fingers and toes, but it's still statistically zero compared the amount of code and docs I've written in that time).

I'll leave it to Bram Moollenaar figure out how to improve vim. He's added Python support to vim years ago. Is Python really insufficient for you? I've never needed it, but if I were making something big for vim, I'd probably look into it. But, again, I'd rather be working on the stuff I'm passionate about. Editing text is not a problem I'm excited about; if it's your bag, that's great. But, for the rest of us, it's just a form of procrastination to fiddle and futz around with new tools when the old ones are more than sufficient (and probably superior, on the whole, to new ones...sure, TextMate is super-badass and awesome; but it's missing tons of capabilities that vim and emacs have, and you'd probably be better off learning how to maximize your efficiency in those more powerful editors, than learning new tools which will come and go).

zem2• 14 years ago

the problem is that there's a lot of accumulated work that has gone into vim at this point, and none of the attempts to reproduce that atop a cleaner, more modern codebase ever went anywhere. emacs's evil mode[1] looks like the most promising current alternative.

[1] http://emacswiki.org/emacs/Evil

Androsynth• 14 years ago

Although I agree with you, IDE fans feel the same way: "Writing code is a solved problem: eclipse or xcode or visual studio. Pick one based on your environment and get back to work"

An argument I hear a lot is: 'vim is fine for editing files on a remote server, but not suitable for everyday work'. I believe it is a common belief outside of the HN crowd.

thedufer2• 14 years ago

But in your example, IDE fans are suggesting a demonstrably worse set of options - when I switch from iOS to Android development, I have to learn an entire new editor. Using vim, I have to learn the `adb` command.

SCdF4• 14 years ago

On IDEs: I have the 'pleasure' of being one of those chaps who spends parts of his day job reworking massive Java projects. There is no way in hell I'm touching that without an editor that deeply understands Java.

spahl• 14 years ago

Programmers love their tools, everybody has had different experiences.

What is wrong with sharing them?

xentronium• 14 years ago

Oh please...

    "Ed is the standard text editor." 
    
    And ed doesn't waste space on my Timex Sinclair.

VMG2• 14 years ago

Nope. Don't get me wrong, I love vim, but I don't need to have it everywhere. It makes no sense in the browser. It's lacking some features Eclipse has (although if Eclipse had a proper Vim mode, I'd use it in a heartbeat).

zship• 14 years ago

Have you heard of Eclim? It's a sort-of "bridge" between Eclipse and Vim and I couldn't be happier with it. http://eclim.org/

osa1• 14 years ago

I'm using viPlugin( http://www.viplugin.com/ ) for months now and I'm pretty happy with it. I don't think I could use Eclipse without it.

VMG2• 14 years ago

Thanks, I'll have a look

jamesaguilar• 14 years ago

I've never found that symbols -> buffer is the bottleneck for me. Instead, it exists somewhere between problem -> symbols.

regularfry• 14 years ago

Yeah, but having got through the problem->symbols bottleneck, it's nice not to have another one waiting.

AndyKelley• 14 years ago

Somehow this reminds me of an Everything2 article about Nethack titled "You have a sad feeling for a moment, and then it passes."

It inspires the same kind of nostalgia.

http://everything2.com/title/You+have+a+sad+feeling+for+a+mo...

kevinalexbrown• 14 years ago

This is an extremely awesome, fantastic, exhilarating use of hyperbole.

What I gained from the article wasn't any explanation of why Vim is great; indeed, there was little included in this respect, aside from moving "entire blocks of code with the flick of a finger." Even the cool feeling of proficiency you get from knowing a tool well, and the fun of getting to show off a skill to a "how did he do that!?" audience was secondary.

My favorite part was the implicit reminder to relax about my tools. The most effective use of hyperbole is not the emphasis of a particular point, but a caution not to take ourselves too seriously, and place our self-satisfaction in proper perspective. The most powerful instances border on satire, and in that respect, this piece was perfect.

Addendum: I use vim and pentadactyl. They are extremely awesome, fantastic, and exhilarating.

mun2mun2• 14 years ago

Just watch the video of the page http://blog.extracheese.org/2010/11/screencast-custom-vim-re... to get the gist of "entire blocks of code with the flick of a finger".

solutionyogi3• 14 years ago

Wow. That guy's VimFu is crazy. I wish I was half as fast as he is.

noonespecial• 14 years ago

Thanks for posting that. I'm a bit of a VIM noob. I learned * and '' from that. Most useful. So much awesome yet to discover.

astrofinch• 14 years ago

I'm pretty sure that "re-factoring" could've been accomplished equally fast with the mouse. In most editors, you can double-click to select a token and triple-click to select a line. So the mouse version would be: double-click 10, copy, double-click ten, paste, triple click the line you want to delete, press delete. Pretty fast, really; especially if you're using a laptop where the cost of moving your hand to the mouse is negligible.

I tried Vim for several months and got reasonably competent. But then I timed myself doing the Vim tutorial with Vim and Gedit, and Gedit won handily. For this reason I'm convinced that Vim is only popular because using it gives you hacker cred.

I'm open to changing my mind based on solid experimental evidence, but for now I only use Vim occasionally, for the macros.

grammaton• 14 years ago

Great screencast, and thanks for including it - but man, that guy really should get a quieter keyboard.

babarock• 14 years ago

Also, years of evangelism will teach you that you cannot convince someone that Vim is better, let alone great. A lot of the propaganda out there starts by telling people "you're doing it wrong! Let me show you the better way!".

Vim is one of these tools that isn't obviously better, so that you don't really understand its power until you try it (for a few months or so).

I enjoyed this article exactly because the author didn't try to rationalize the superiority of his tool, rather depict in an entertaining way, a familiar (to me) feeling of empowerment said tool can give you.

dredmorbius3• 14 years ago

Many worthwhile revelations are inherently experiential. There are a very, very few people who are sufficiently gifted in communication to be able to sell large numbers of people on them. In most cases, though, people simply have to achieve enlightenment or experience the concept for themselves.

The Zen koan of the seeker told he would find enlightenment by acquiring the shirt of the happiest man in the world ... who turns out to be shirtless ... captures something of this essence.

einhverfr2• 14 years ago

Exactly. This is one reason why I never tell people they are wrong regarding a choice of text editors. Keep in mind I usually have multiple VIM instances open and an instance of gedit (because I do some things that VIM is a little clumsy at regarding my todo list).

What I usually say is something like:

There are text editors and then there are text editors. If you are only spending a few hours a month in front of a text editor, you are probably better off with something simple. If, on the other hand, you are going to be using it all the time, it is well worth your time to learn an industrial strength one like VIM or EMACS. These have learning curves, but they have big payoffs as well regarding productivity.

re_todd• 14 years ago

I love Vim, but I don't ever recommend it to anyone. I think it gives me an advantage. Whey would I want other people using it and thus lose that advantage?

guscost2• 14 years ago

I recently discovered a way to learn Vim without fear: learn undo ('u') first! If you know that, you can just mess around with Vim commands until you inevitably screw something up, undo the changes, relax, take a deep breath, and Google whatever you're trying to do.

helpbygrace2• 14 years ago

and Ctrl + R for redo.

irahul7• 14 years ago

If you are familiar with vim, install gundo.vim and enjoy traversing your undo tree.

adito• 14 years ago

And he end it with

:wq

This part make me smile... Wonder what others tough when see that?

tsm2• 14 years ago

For rhetorical effect, `:wq` is right. But in the real world, `:x` is the better choice.

SilasX3• 14 years ago

>Addendum: I use vim and pentadactyl. They are extremely awesome, fantastic, and exhilarating.

Hell yeah! In fact, I came to Vim through pentadactyl because I wanted a way to browse without using the mouse. I second the description of "exhilarating": navigating pages from the keyboard is much, much faster than clicking on links (except in those cases where the poor site design makes the clickable buttons undetectable to pentadactyl... Psst, HN search result navigation, that means you)

icebraining2• 14 years ago

And the ring that binds them together is Pentadactyl's Ctrl+i, which opens the the textarea with focus in GVim, and then loads it back when you close the editor. I'm typing this in it ;)

kstenerud• 14 years ago

I started using vi in high school. Used it extensively throughout college. Then I had my first taste of a proper GUI IDE.

Since then, I've only used vim for editing config files on a remote unix system.

gatordan• 14 years ago

Not so subtly the author is telling the reader if you program with Vim you'll be just like "all the really great programmers" who can write 4 line solutions to problems that take ordinary programmers 10 pages. You'll produce "impossible patterns of code and text manipulation", and be able to "fill dozens of registers" (admittedly I don't know what that means). This is all bit silly and reminds me of "hacking" in the Hollywood films.

I understand that this post was tongue in cheek. I also understand that not all text editors are equal, if you see someone writing their first hello world program in Notepad yes you should tell them about much better alternatives. But this post confuses ability to program with ability to use Vim.

Being really good at using Vim will definitely let you say you're part of the club of people who are really good at using Vim. It just might make you more efficient at manipulating code. But let's not perpetuate the elitism that is pervasive enough in hacking, it's a text editor. It doesn't make you more intelligent, better at problem solving, or writing more efficient code.

thedufer2• 14 years ago

He's not saying that using Vim will make you a better hacker. You're the one who's confusing remarks on correlation for causation.

Its probably likely that there is such a correlation; those who are willing to put in the time learning vim/emacs are probably those who spend the most time coding, and thus have the most practice.

moron• 14 years ago

I still can't believe people love that damn thing so much, even after all these years. There are way better tools in my opinion.

Of course, if you like it by all means continue using it. But if you think it has anything to do with your talent as an engineer, you are wrong. And if you see other engineers not using it and think it implies anything about their talent, you are wrong.

Side note: if anyone wrote in such a breathless tone about Apple, they would be skewered as a fanboy and a drinker of the Kool-Aid.

lisper• 14 years ago

You could do a global search and replace of "vim" with "emacs" (or pretty much any other development tool for that matter) and it would not change the semantic content of this article at all.

m12r• 14 years ago

why vim creep, it should be titled "ode to vim"

lukejduncan• 14 years ago

For me pragmatism wins the day. Vim has been installed on every machine I've ever ssh'ed into. Not true for emacs or even nano or pico.

dredmorbius3• 14 years ago

Vim, really?

Some vi variant, save but for a few instances. But not necessarily vim.

Being stuck to use old-school vi a few times in the not-to-distant past made me realize how massive an improvement over it vim is.

Yes, I can GSD with vi, but I can really GSD with vim.

mixmastamyk3• 14 years ago

sshfs allows you to use any editor you like.

tikhonj5• 14 years ago

Yeah, but I always ssh from Emacs using Tramp. When all I have to do is C-x C-f /user@hostname:~/path/to/file, there is no reason to use anything else.

Just as pragmatic, and I get to use all my nice normal Emacs features at the same time.

farinasa• 14 years ago

Being somewhere in the middle of that timeline, I'd watch that movie. This piece reminds me that an authors vision is always more important to communication than the subject itself.

mikebell• 14 years ago

I'm all for vim or whatever other editor you prefer.

But to somehow claim that one editor or another is going to make you a better programmer and make your 10 pages of crap code become 4 elegant lines is pretty nonsensical.

No matter what editor you use; if you're not good at problem solving, you're not going to make a good programmer.

thornofmight• 14 years ago

How do people use Vi on large projects? Do you just manually type in the name of the file you're looking for every time?

moconnor• 14 years ago

I use the CommandT plugin: ,/ and then start typing fragments of the filename / path to open.

zmicier• 14 years ago

Check NERDTree plugin for Vim. Using it all the time

pacomerh• 14 years ago

Nice writing, this goes straight to the HN monthly. Ultra nerdy nonetheless.

helpbygrace2• 14 years ago

I definitely save this article not for the awesome main post but for the useful comments and replies.

Thanks all.

kator• 14 years ago

LOL so in my early days it was "vi" but I too use "vim" now a days.

Either way the funny thing is when someone asks me "how do you do THAT in vi?" I often find myself typing in the air to replay the muscle memory that executes those instructions.

For better or for worse I've become muscle programmed to execute vi commands in flashes of thought that really never reach my normal cognitive functions. I love to watch people stunned as they see me do something I've taken for granted for years or figured everyone else knew how to do.

All that said, all tools are not for all situations and all people. I do at times find myself jumping into eclipse (Java I'm looking at you!!!) because of the many additional features available in a good IDE.

I know you can run the vim extensions in eclipse but I've never bothered. I figure if I'm going to mouse my way through an IDE I'm not sure what having vi commands will do to make my life easier. :-)

Xcelerate2• 14 years ago

You know, I'm doing an experiment like this with Tetris. I was looking at the world record for 40 line clear (20.55 seconds at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WzUUKKuye24) and I realized that the limit is not how fast he thinks, but how fast he is pressing the keys.

So I designed my own system. One key press drops the piece instantly into the correct spot, with the correct rotation. It's making my brain hurt practicing because it requires so much thinking, but once I get it into muscle memory, things are going to get really interesting. My 40 line best using the arrow keys is 45 seconds and with my new scheme it is 2:21. But I'm dropping time quickly and I'm sure very soon I'll beat my record.

Xcelerate2• 14 years ago

Okay, maybe you didn't see how this related. I should have made it clearer. There are a lot of discussions on this page about how Vim's advantage comes from the muscle memory adaptation, relegating text editing to a subconscious, effortless activity rather than something that requires active thought.

I was expounding on this concept with an idea of my own and speculating about its potential benefits using analogous logic to that used in the reasoning about Vim's efficiency.

Better?

modarts• 14 years ago

I admit that this is beautifully written, even though I strongly disagree with the premise.

kabdib• 14 years ago

I'm like that, exactly, but with Emacs.

A long time ago I narrowly escaped being like that exactly, but with TECO :-)

I've learned not to fret about people's choice of editor. FOr instance, if someone was happy in NotePad, as long as it didn't affect me, I learned not to care. (I might grit my teeth in frustration, watching them flail for minutes at something I could do in seconds with my choice of editor, but that's my problem).

mdonahoe• 14 years ago

I chose vim because it was radically different than anything else.

All text editors have crazy shortcuts that do magic, but only vim has the ironically named NORMAL mode with its verbs, movements and registers...

I treated it like a new game to learn. Sometimes I will write a macro because it is more fun, even though it might not save me raw time.

wangweij• 14 years ago

If someone can always "churned out 4 line solutions for an assignment that took you 10 pages of code to complete", he can use any editor or maybe simply "cat >".

devin• 14 years ago

"Knife skills" don't make you a good developer. Cook a great steak and worry less about cutting it. Tools are boring. People are far more important. A post like this is akin to "I LOVE BRITNEY SPEARS." Please God, make the programmer pop culture stop.

kragen• 14 years ago

Coincidentally, I've been working on my knife skills lately. In the past, I often served dinner late because I took so long to chop the vegetables. (I'm vegetarian.) Now that I'm focusing on proper knife technique to chop quickly, I find that I can get dinner served faster — but also I have more flexibility to respond and experiment in the kitchen, because I can, for example, put the skillet on the stove before I start chopping the onion I'm going to sauté. And I'm less likely to burn things, because chopping takes less of my time and attention.

Of course, knowing how to cut isn't the same as knowing how to cook. Vegetables chopped slowly taste the same as vegetables chopped fast. But if you already know a thing or two about food, you can cook a little bit better if your cutting technique is better.

jordo37• 14 years ago

Fully recognize I am outing myself here but the timing seems great given the Vim articles that have been coming up lately, as well as my Lead Engineer keeps bugging me to really get into Vim. I have used it before, but never GOT it. Is there an online guide that is great (and not just a story like this one) or do I need to get the O'Reily Vi and Vim book?

Vim Creep

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