Vintageous: Vim emulation for Sublime Text 3

http://guillermooo.bitbucket.org/Vintageous/

by superchink • 13 years ago

34 43 13 years ago

guillermooo.bitbucket.org

rzendacott3• 13 years ago

Ah, I love vim mode for Sublime. As the end user, what will be different about this package? Better support for commands?

Additionally, is there a page that lists how much progress has been made? Is the support at least at the same level of Vintage's yet?

avolcano• 13 years ago

I'd love to know this too, but the author doesn't seem interested in explaining it: https://github.com/guillermooo/Vintageous/issues/267

I installed it, and it works exactly the same, as far as I can tell.

rzendacott3• 13 years ago

Wow, he/she does seem to be quite disinterested. That's disappointing. It would be really useful to know..

rzendacott3• 13 years ago

Another contributor commented - it looks like it supports more Vim commands and is being actively maintained, unlike Vintage.

eob• 13 years ago

For the vim -> Sumblime switchers out there on HN, what caused you to switch?

I use vim exclusively but I'm not a religious zealot about technology. I've noticed all my students are using Sublime these days. Is it just the latest TextMate (i.e., the best GUI option if you don't like command-line editors) or are there truly features that will convert command-line folks to the GUI?

I'm really hoping for an editor like Brackets (Adobe) to take off, which has really good support for cross editor-browser communication for web development.

tiziano88• 13 years ago

Real command-line folks will not easily move away from command-line apps, since one of their greatest advantages is that they run in a ssh shell from any terminal. For people who often log in remote servers for more than a few minutes a day, this is a dealbreaker :)

lucisferre2• 13 years ago

I've tried a few times and just can't do it. The completion isn't actually that great (not that VIm completion plugins are very good either) and Vintage mode is at best a poor-mans VIm emulation. There is no sane way to control splits with the keyboard and block selections just don't work well. Search and replace functionality is also not great compared to my experience with VIm. Too many deal breakers for me.

superchink2• 13 years ago

You likely will still not be convinced, but some of those issues (off the top of my head, at least the splits with keyboard) seem to be addressed by Vintageous (and some [plugins][0] for it).

[0] https://github.com/rodcloutier/Vintageous-Origami "Vintageous Origami"

cpeterso• 13 years ago

I recently tried switching from Vim to Sublime, but its window splitting just didn't work for me. In Vim, I make :sp and :vsp splits for quick edits all the time. Sublime's splits were cumbersome and didn't have (easy) side-by-side views into the same file.

madlynormal• 13 years ago

The ease of which it is to get started with Sublime Text may be a factor. It's nice not having to worry about managing plugins and custom settings. Though I see no reason to switch if you have taken the time to customize vim to your liking. Once you get a decent package management system for it (Pathongen, Vundle) it's hard to beat.

JonnieCache2• 13 years ago

The thing that really makes it stand out is the multiple cursors. You can go very deep with them because everything that happens in the editor happens in parallel for each cursor. They each have their own clipboard, any scripts you run happen once per cursor. "Find all" can be made to select all the matches. You can do some crazy stuff. I love it.

However, if you've customised and become proficient in vim to any serious extent it likely won't be that impressive to you.

sanderjd• 13 years ago

I prefer GUIs strictly for better window manager and system copy-paste integration, but I think that is irrelevant to vim/Sublime, as you can (and I do) use gVim or MacVim. I like vim movement and editing commands a lot, but I'm not much of a configuration fiddler - I fiddle if I must, but I find no joy in it. I switched to Sublime because it gives me adequate (if somewhat mediocre) vim commands, plus other fiddle-free features that I had to fiddle into my vim, most notably command-t file fuzzy-finding (which also works much better, on top of being fiddle-free). I also really like the command palette (which I haven't seen a vim corollary for) and the package manager (which is much easier than the various alternatives in vim IMO).

edit: For balance, it also has its annoyances, and I sometimes wonder if I should switch back.

xaviorm• 13 years ago

If you are just looking for a Vim replacement don't.

If you want to code faster and easier and are willing to spend a couple of hours learning sublimes shortcuts, then you will like it.

Sublime's autocomplete and plugins can reduce your errors and clean up your code. (Linters)

It's cross platform and runs the same pretty much on any OS.

I don't use ST3 much but for remote editing with ST2 http://log.liminastudio.com/writing/tutorials/sublime-tunnel.... it works well enough for most cases. Where it doesn't I just mount an sshfs and work from there.

w1ntermute2• 13 years ago

I've used Vim for years and recently switched to Sublime for Rails because of the fuzzy search. When working with so many different files, it significantly increases your productivity, such that it is a net gain despite losing Vim's editing paradigm. I tried Vim plug-ins that emulate fuzzy search, but they didn't work very well.

justinmk• 13 years ago

I tried Vim plug-ins that emulate fuzzy search, but they didn't work very well.

What issues did you have with CtrlP? https://github.com/kien/ctrlp.vim/

w-m4• 13 years ago

As someone who just started another attempt at picking up vim (actually vintageous in this case) last week: how do I keep myself from forgetting that I'm in a vim editor?

It'll happen every so often that I'm in the middle of something, switch to Sublime and just start typing - as it's second nature. By the time I notice whats going on, I typed half a dozen characters. I'll curse, undo the random commands, get into insert mode and will effectively have lost my train of thought.

It may sound ridiculous, but it's actually the biggest hindrance to adopting vim for me. Am I the only one with this problem?

benjamincburns5• 13 years ago

how do I keep myself from forgetting that I'm in a vim editor

I think actually using vim would help...

Edit: Sorry, that's a bit snarky. All I can say is that vim proficiency comes from muscle memory. Once you adopt vim and feel the "vim flow," it's really quite painful/distracting to use a modeless editor.

It's to the point where I was doing a phone interview recently where they had me code in a live editor. Because I'm so used to vim I had a really hard time just writing the code without a bunch of random-looking keystrokes. Fortunately the person on the other end recognized them as vim commands, but it was still distracting.

w-m4• 13 years ago

I have no problem with you being frank.

My goal is to become more efficient at editing files, the typing/changing/refactoring part especially. I don't want a new way of opening/saving/handling files, search/replace, version control or debugging - it would just be too much to learn all at once.

So I thought Vintageous would be a great opportunity for me to learn the text editing part of vim without burning down my ecosystem. You're right, it's probably part of what leads to my confusion. Still, I thought I'd ask, maybe someone took the same route and managed it somehow.

hibbelig• 13 years ago

I think vintage and vintageous can be configured to be in insert mode or in command mode by default. (I prefer command mode, but I think you might prefer insert mode -- as then you could just start typing.)

w-m4• 13 years ago

It won't really help when switching between applications, as I would have to put the editor in insert mode every time I left it.

Maybe I should just look into classic conditioning and have someone beat me up every time I enter text in command mode.

dasil003• 13 years ago

You just need to use vim for a while, and then it becomes second nature that "normal mode" is a powerful set of chordless commands at your ready disposal. Once you get used to vim then the problem becomes that you constantly hit escape after typing a block of text, which can wreak quite a bit of havoc in certain contexts ;)

larister• 13 years ago

I'm very much hoping they allow find in Visual mode. I enabled Vintage mode in ST 2 a little while back and love it, but visual find would be very handy.

Edit: it does. Awesome.

benjamincburns5• 13 years ago

Am I missing something here? Sublime's an editor last I checked. So's vim. If you want a vim-flavored editor, why not just, I dunno... use vim?

Wouldn't this be a bit like building a 'vim mode' for emacs?

psuter• 13 years ago

...which is something people have done [1]. The goal of these extensions is usually to have the best of both worlds. E.g. block selections in an editor you can script with elisp.

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

hillbillyjack• 13 years ago

Vim's modes are quite powerful and easy to get used to.

To some extent it is probably people not learning their new editor completely and another part is sometimes the vim-way is just easier/quicker.

Being able to escape insert mode and start modifying the text is great to a vim user things like editing inside quotes `ci"` are easy to do without a mouse, as is moving around the file without leaving home row.

jdc• 13 years ago

Some people just aren't down with the "worse is better" design philosophy that Vim and *nix in general share.

owenjones• 13 years ago

I am a dedicated Vim user, but I would assume people looking for an IDE instead of an editor, with tab-complete, file browsing etc but don't want to install and configure the myriad plugins required to get Vim into this state; would prefer Sublime.

nilkn2• 13 years ago

Sublime Text has a much better GUI front-end than gvim or MacVim. So for someone who doesn't want to work in a terminal and wants to use a GUI based editor, they may feel that a fully featured vim mode in Sublime Text would offer the best of both worlds: rich keyboard-controlled text editing and a beautiful front-end GUI.

I just use vim inside tmux, but that's mostly because I have to write a significant amount of code on a remote machine via ssh.

Also, I will say that even as a dedicated vim user I wouldn't be thrilled to use vim without a large number of plugins that more or less just offer features something like Sublime Text can offer natively, like a decent file tree browser. So a vim mode in Sublime Text can make the barrier to entry lower by reducing the need for the modern programmer to load up vim with plugins.

benjamincburns5• 13 years ago

The combination of using vim and having to debug stuff in awkward places (on boats in rough seas, 20ft in the air on hydraulic scaffolding, in garages) with text-only interfaces (serial terminals), has totally changed me. I went from having 4 monitors to working on a 13" rMBP.

My personal preference is vim in a quake-style terminal (yakuake on linux or iTerm2's hotkey window in OS X) with a minimal amount of transparency so that I can "read through" the terminal and see whatever's in the browser/document window behind. After getting this set up, it's going to take a lot for me to switch back to an IDE full time.

And yeah - gotta love screen/tmux.

I personally try to use a minimal number of plugins. Command-t is the only one I use daily. I gave eclim a shot for java stuff, but ultimately found I didn't use it very often. It's better to just not fight "the vim way," though I definitely see how that's a barrier.

jbrechtel• 13 years ago

As psuter pointed out there is Evil mode for Vim. There's Viper mode too, which I believe is older. This isn't a new thing. Vim as an editor isn't anything special....infact it kind of sucks. The script/plugin/extension ecosystem is nice but that seems to be in spite of vimscript. Evil mode in Emacs is pretty nice.

Evil mode is one of the better Vim emulation layers for non-Vim editors...and there are quite a few.

adamors• 13 years ago

I'm stuck on ST version 2 because a plugin I bought and use daily (Sublime FTP) doesn't work with it yet.

What's the point of having a great editor if the ecosystem is this crappy?

Guess that concludes my great closed source editor experiment, Vim here I come.

elithrar• 13 years ago

What's the point of having a great editor if the ecosystem is this crappy?

ST3 hasn't even been officially released yet. I think you're getting ahead of yourself: you could also always fork & update the package yourself.

superchink2• 13 years ago

Actually, I don't think you can fork it, since it's a paid plugin and I don't think the source is published.

farslan• 13 years ago

Anyone out there who still want to use Vim but with Sublime features. I've created back then the project Subvim: https://github.com/fatih/subvim

It's Vim combined with SublimeText features. It has even SublimeText like shortcuts. If you are curious give it a try and see if it fits you :)

iguana• 13 years ago

This works a lot better than the included "Vintage" mode.

I've spent the majority of the past 15 years in vi(m), and have recently switched to Sublime for working on projects with many, many files, plus mouse support.

Vintageous: Vim emulation for Sublime Text 3

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