Vim After 11 Years (2013)

http://statico.github.io/vim.html

by mparramon • 12 years ago

107 132 12 years ago

statico.github.io

snarfy• 12 years ago

The author mentions a lack of good smart completion, but if you use C# there is omnisharp, which works quite well.

https://github.com/OmniSharp/omnisharp-vim

shocks3• 12 years ago

Why do you advocate using vim in a terminal?

I prefer unite[1] to ctrl-p[2], it's much more flexible.

1: https://github.com/Shougo/unite.vim 2: https://github.com/kien/ctrlp.vim

wahnfrieden2• 12 years ago

I wanted to like unite, but couldn't get it to behave as I expected: when opening a file via unite, it doesn't respect the active window, it ignores the splits I have. IIRC it always opened the file in the top left window.

shocks3• 12 years ago

That's weird. Unite doesn't exhibit this behaviour for me.

My config is here: https://github.com/wridgers/vimto/blob/master/rc/25-unite.vi...

swartkrans2• 12 years ago

I also prefer cntrlp, it's much more performant in my experience.

sooheon4• 12 years ago

This is true (something like junegunn's fzf is even faster than either), but I think the tradeoff is between performance and consistency of interface. Unite can provide the same interactions for recent files, buffers, file navigation, grep results, etc.

shocks3• 12 years ago

Really? With unite you can use vimproc to fork out the searching process. Much quicker. Using unite and ctrlp with a 30k file source base, ctrlp was far to slow for me.

to3m• 12 years ago

Apropos of nothing in particular: a good way of spotting vim hipsters is that they don't know what ; does, because they never used t or f. They do however very carefully use hjkl to move around, because the cursor keys are for squares ;)

gfodor3• 12 years ago

Eh, I've been using vim for 15 years and find it incredibly rare to repeat t or f's. Usually they're one-offs.

yen2232• 12 years ago

Exactly. The gain from remapping ':' to ';' far outweighs the losses from not being able to repeat finds

fensipens• 12 years ago

Eh, I've been using vi{,m} for 15 years too and I `ftFT;,' things on a daily basis.

Remove two `a' characters of the current line:

fax;.

Note: no mode change necessary

Also, line editing in /bin/{,k,ba}sh -o vi without `ftFT;,' is a pain.

function_seven2• 12 years ago

I remapped ; a long time ago (to ":", because I can't be bothered to hold down the shift key) because I rarely need to repeat a t/T/f/F motion. I typically already know how many times I need to invoke it (and use "3f)" for example), or I use a quick "/" followed by a couple of letters in the word I want to jump to.

hrjet• 12 years ago

That's a great idea; never thought of it before. The only worry is that it is not going to work on remote systems out of the box, confusing my muscle memory.

swift• 12 years ago

That's exactly what I do and I find it to be a great improvement over the stock bindings. I also bind "q;" to behave like "q:".

Unlike others in this thread, though, I do find the original behavior of ";" useful occasionally. I bind that behavior to ";;", which is still quite fast to type whenever I do need it.

pmoriarty3• 12 years ago

"It’s so useful that I’ve bound it to ; (and nobody remembers what ; does anyway)."

The original binding of ; is super useful, and I would argue it should not be rebound.

; repeats the last f, t, F or T command.

There's also , which is the same as ; but in the opposite direction.

sooheon4• 12 years ago

I agree. I initially found many recommendations to bind "," as leader, and it was convenient, but after learning what ";" and "," do, I've changed my leader to <space>.

pmoriarty3• 12 years ago

SPACE is good as leader, and also as :

But I've found it to be most useful as page-down (with BACKSPACE as page-up).

deckiedan• 12 years ago

I'm also using <space> as my leader. In case anyone else wants to try it, and struggles to make it work, I had to do the following to make it work:

    map <space> <leader>

rather than simply setting mapleader to space directly. If someone else knows why, I'd be interested to know!

lucb1e3• 12 years ago

What's a leader?

Googling some, it seems to mean a backslash in the vimrc... but I don't really understand what you mean.

lucb1e3• 12 years ago

Yes! Glad I'm not the only one who uses ;.

The only thing I never understood was why ; doesn't go beyond the current line (n does). Is there a way to make it?

placeybordeaux• 12 years ago

I have always just used / and n N. What is the difference with f and t?

csandreasen• 12 years ago

f jumps to the next occurrence of a particular character on the same line. F jumps to the previous. t and T do the same thing, but jumps to the character immediately before.

For example, if you were at the beginning of the following text:

foo(bar, baz);

Typing f,dt) would change it to:

foo(bar);

btipling2• 12 years ago

I'd add to that to try and start using neovim. I've switched to it on Mac without a hitch and we (Floobits) have already moved our vim plugin to use the new neovim python-client plugin for much better async behavior. Making an async plugin for NeoVim is pretty trivial, here's a clock in your status bar:

https://gist.github.com/btipling/0d6faa80b24ccee5caea

Note this requires +python, :he nvim-python for how to get that (involves pip install neovim)

You can't do something like this clock in vim without the feed keys cursorhold hack that breaks using leader keys. Otherwise I'm still using vundle and have made 0 changes in my .vimrc other than move it all to .nvim and .nvimrc. All my plugins and vundle worked out of the box.

sooheon4• 12 years ago

I had put neovim out of mind and settled for emacs/evil, but seeing an actual use case for the new plugin system makes me hopeful for it's fast growth and adoption.

tuhdo11• 12 years ago

Imagine that one day you want to use 10 plugins and have to setup all 10 language environments to use those plugins, and you have to set the whole thing on Windows...

teacup502• 12 years ago

Remember that floobits are the people that threw a tantrum when upstream vim wouldn't accept their patches, and have a vested ego interest in pushing a vim fork.

Gracana• 12 years ago

Does vanilla neovim offer anything that a vanilla vim user might like? I imagine I will make the switch at some point, I just wonder if there's any compelling reason to do so sooner rather than later.

btipling2• 12 years ago

It's pretty much still the same experience. Once plugins that take advantage of the async and when gui's take advantage of the API I'm pretty sure neovim will not just be equal, but far superior.

eridius2• 12 years ago

Why is iTerm2 being suggested for OS X when the built-in Terminal.app also supports 256 colors?

Also, I find MacVim to be a better experience than Vim in the terminal.

swartkrans2• 12 years ago

I also prefer using the terminal, but I've switched to neovim anyway. I found macvim to be difficult to configure and I just prefer having tmux terminal splits next to my vim split and I can see stuff happening as I edit the file. I also prefer iTerm2 to Terminal.app but I think it's just personal preference. I know how to use the iTerm2 settings pretty well by now to get configurations I want.

ChristianBundy• 12 years ago

iTerm 2 has way more options than Terminal.app, my favorite being the ability to set your color scheme.

yen2232• 12 years ago

The killer feature for me is Hotkey Windows - I set it up so that pressing Ctrl+Space from anywhere will slide out a terminal. So convenient.

http://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/48796/iterm-as-a-sl...

eridius2• 12 years ago

Terminal.app has had color schemes since forever.

bwilliams• 12 years ago

For me it's definitely mouse reporting. If my hand is already on the mouse I really like clicking tmux panes. Sometimes it's also easier to just scroll with a trackpad too.

iTerm lets you do this, but Terminal.app doesn't.

TheDong2• 12 years ago

Another person who recommends pathogen... There's multiple better plugin managers now including Neobundle and vundle... I find neobundle to be unquestionably superior and well worth using.

krick4• 12 years ago

They aren't "better" and most of pathogen users are well aware of them. I don't think they are bad enough to discourage anyone from using them if it woks for him, but when asked I'm always recommending pathogen as the only option, which I'm using myself.

Why? Well, there could be multiple answers, but essentially there's one main reason: it's just dead simple, while vundle and other ruby-inspired ones are not. Pretty much for the same reason I like pathogen+git thousand times more than emacs' package manager.

So even if it could be arguable that pathogen is better than vundle, there's completely no reason not to advise it.

jqm2• 12 years ago

Just curiously, what do you find superior?

pathogen loads the plugins which is all I need. Does Neobundle do something else?

TheDong2• 12 years ago

Here's a vimrc that showcases some of its features: https://github.com/bling/dotvim/blob/master/vimrc#L324

Pathogen loads plugins, but it doesn't manage them. Neobundle lets me list some plugins in my vimrc and it'll take care of installing them, updating them, and even only loading them on filetypes where they're useful.

Pathogen does none of that and I find every one of those features useful. One of the big ones, honestly, is just the simplicity of listing a new bundle in my vimrc, syncing it to all computers, and having it deal with getting it. Much better than syncing large git repos across computers.

9diov• 12 years ago

There is a new one coming out recently called vim-plug: https://github.com/junegunn/vim-plug/

The major feature is that it can install plugins in parallel. I've switched from vundle to it and have been quite happy.

agersant• 12 years ago

I have a hard time understanding vim users. All the cool features listed in this article exist in any modern text editor. I personally use Notepad++, but I'm sure the same goes for Textmate, Sublime Text and many others.

The only advantage I can see in Vim over a modern solution is that it runs in the terminal (which I guess is useful if you like to remotely modify files in your production environment?). Is it that after they have spent so many years learning the arcane controls, users feel obligated to stick with it in order to justify all the time they've already invested?

I must say I've only spent ~2 months of my life using vim before giving up, which I think is already pretty long for an evaluation. I have never experienced or even witnessed the productivity gains you're supposed to get from mastering vim. All I've seen is very unintuitive shortcuts for Ctrl+Backspace advertised as unique features in the world of text editing.

I would be very happy if someone could point out to me the elephant that I am not seeing here.

Alupis2• 12 years ago

I personally use Notepad++

Vim is a Linux/Unix text editor used via the terminal. Notepad++ is for the Windows GUI environment. Apples and Oranges.

Why is a good terminal text editor important? When you are SSH'ed into your server and you need to adjust a configuration file, you require a good terminal text editor. It also is very good for C programming, and a lot of C programmers use it extensively. There are many other reasons. From a Windows GUI environment, you won't really be able to compare or relate, or understand why vim is so good.

pmoriarty3• 12 years ago

Actually, vim is a cross-platform editor.

You can use it on Linux, MacOS, and Windows (among many other operating systems).

vi is even more ubiquitous. Even if one doesn't use vim as one's primary editor, it would behoove one to learn the basics of vi, as it's available on virtually every operating system.

cbd19842• 12 years ago

Vim is a Linux/Unix text editor used via the terminal.

Vim in specific actually has a rather nice GUI called gVim. It's what I used when I used vi-style editors, which overlaps with the last time I used Windows seriously. So, yeah, gVim works on Windows and has for well over a decade now.

pjmlp8• 12 years ago

Almost any sane programmer editor/IDE allows for remote editing.

cageface• 12 years ago

I know Vim well enough to use it for this kind of thing but, IMO, if you find yourself doing a lot of hot edits on live servers you're doing it wrong.

Almost all of the editing I do is in a consistent environment on my development machine and I don't see the point of using a lowest-common-denominator tool when I don't have to. I'm sure with some work you can bend Vim into something approaching the power of an IDE but why would you bother? Text editing is a pretty small part of the work of development, after all.

vertex-four2• 12 years ago

When you are SSH'ed into your server and you need to adjust a configuration file

This is pretty much exactly what you're not supposed to do in any form of modern system administration. How would you rebuild that server, or move it to a different provider?

Edit a local definition of your server for Ansible or Salt or Puppet or whatever else, and let those systems deal with making the server match your definition.

ayrx3• 12 years ago

This is coming from someone that used IntelliJ before moving to Sublime Text 3 before moving to vim for Python development.

I am by no means a master of vim's varied features but the best productivity gain for me is vim running in the terminal. I use a lot of command line tools (grep still beats most things for search and the git command line tool is still better than any editor plugins), it's just much more convenient for me when it's all in the terminal and I can switch between them seamlessly with keyboard commands especially when using something like tmux.

netheril963• 12 years ago

Much as I like vim, I think IntelliJ is still better than whatever tools one can cobble together for pure Python development.

gfodor3• 12 years ago

Once you're good at vim you can edit at the speed of thought. Not really much better way to put it. Watching non-vim users edit text is eternally frustrating.

sj4nz• 12 years ago

Totally have to agree with this. I've tried a lot of other editors, but keep coming back to Vim. Drew Neil's "Practical Vim" really helped me increase my leverage on using it well, and its tag line is of course, "Editing Text at the Speed of Thought."

Whenever I find myself repeating something painful, it is almost always solved by searching the resources in the Vim community for solutions.

coldtea• 12 years ago

I'd say it's mostly busywork and the placebo effect of thinking it took less time to type a Vim text-editing command than do it in another editor.

And that's for a marginal use case programmers don't fall much into (if you're frequently re-arranging lines or performing the same actions of blocks of text, then you aren't exactly programming).

jqm2• 12 years ago

Flexibility, configurability, work in the terminal, oh... and did I mention snipmate?

That's just scratching the surface. I've been using VIM for around 3 years. Most of the day almost every day. And I feel like I'm barely acquainted with what it can do. Still, it is one of the most important and vital work tools and its hard to imagine life without it. I'm pretty sure I would leave any job I wasn't allowed to use it.

Admittedly I went through a rough month or two getting started, but I could see right away that the potential gains in productivity were worth the cost and I'm glad I did. Sort of like learning to type which some people refuse to do because hunting and pecking is faster and easier short term. I'm sure you have seen people like this. And some actually type at amazing speeds for two fingers, but it doesn't compare with what they could do if they took the time to retrain themselves.

The problem now is that Vim is so ingrained in muscle memory I type splotch all over any other editor and web browser I touch. Hold on a second, I need to arrow back and clean up this comment... bbbbhhh

zefei• 12 years ago

The stuff listed in this article are the places where Vim was trying to catch up with modern editors, not where Vim excels. Vim is an old editor, for modern features, Vim has been the one that's catching up, and luckily it did. But that has nothing do with why people love Vim.

Vim, in pure code editing sense, has two unique advantages that no other editors have or dare to have: modal editing and ubiquity.

Modal editing makes code editing absolutely DRY, as users can avoid any repetitive typing/clicking that they wish to avoid. It doesn't necessarily increase your code throughput much as a lot of the time you'll be thinking instead of typing, but it reduces the frustration of editing to almost zero when you do have to type, hence reducing distractions and cognitive load. Once you are familiar with Vim, its commands have close to one-to-one mapping to ANY ways you want to edit code.

For example, you want to change the html text two lines above? kkcit. Then come back to the place where you left? g;g;. Re-indent the lines? =ip. They look foreign and unintuitive to non-vim users, but are actually muscle memories for vim users. This is probably why vim users swear by it, but non-users find it hard to love.

Ubiquity is something you can only appreciate when you have to. If your work environment is Windows, this probably won't occur to you. But if you have to code in different OSes, or in SSH sessions, or in git commit, or in less/man commands, you'll find vim invaluable.

After all, Vim is just a tool, a very good one. But if your work doesn't have the need for it, you won't find it useful.

netheril963• 12 years ago

It doesn't increase throughput much because most of the time editing/typing is not the bottleneck. Thinking is.

But it is frustrating to reach for mouse and click several times for a task that can be easily done quickly with keyboard. In another words, it interrupts the flow.

brandonmenc4• 12 years ago

Former longtime emacs (and previous to that, vi) user here.

vi and emacs seem like magic if you're coming from something like SublimeText. Compared to modern IDEs like VisualStudio or IntelliJ products, however - not so much.

vi users tout the rapid text editing features, but you can generate and navigate code just as fast with an IDE - out of the box - no configuration incantations or third party packages required.

Until very recently (early to mid-2000s), IDEs for open source web frameworks were non-existent, unaffordable, or slow. Once you have a working vi or emacs setup, there's a lot of inertia in place that discourages switching.

That explains the continued popularity of vi, imo.

cbd19842• 12 years ago

Compared to modern IDEs like VisualStudio or IntelliJ products, however - not so much.

Those IDEs only work on some languages, and force you into their workflow. Emacs and vi are both more all-encompassing and less restrictive.

mercurial• 12 years ago

vi users tout the rapid text editing features, but you can generate and navigate code just as fast with an IDE - out of the box - no configuration incantations or third party packages required.

You can navigate code and you benefit from powerful autocompletion (well, depending on your language, because it may quickly degrade to "laughable" with something a bit dynamic). However, the pure text editing experience with vanilla Eclipse/VS is rubbish compared to Vim. In addition, there are languages for which IDE-based code generation/autocompletion is not that interesting due to the language being a lot more compact. And with something like syntastic + the right language plugin, a strongly-typed language gets syntax checking, a description of the type of a variable, and possibly autocompletion. I use both Eclipse (with a Vim plugin) and the real Vim, and it feels much nicer not have to deal with the resource and mental overhead of a full-blown IDE. I think the only feature I really miss when working OCaml/Merlin in Vim is being able to get a list of call sites of a given function in the current project.

tuhdo11• 12 years ago

You can easily have that if someone builds a starter kit specific to your workflow with all necessary packages. But then, when you want things your way, at least Emacs allows you; for Eclipse, better use the default one. Maybe you are not up to date but Emacs has features like code navigation/completion for many languages. Emacs's file navigation is superb that I could not find elsewhere: http://tuhdo.github.io/helm-projectile.html

See all my guides for more demos: http://tuhdo.github.io/

Dewie• 12 years ago

IDEs are great for development. All they need now is decent editors.

wyclif2• 12 years ago

Yeah, the learning curve is steep. Also, if you're using a common productivity setup like vim + iTerm2 + tmux + zsh, it takes way too long IMO to both figure out how they work together and configure them (with both plugins and editing config files—do I use Pathogen? Or do I use vundle? Should I dive into oh-my-zsh, or prezto?). But once you do get it set up...wheeee! You can really be efficient in ways that just aren't possible with non-modal, not-in-the-terminal editors.

I hope Neovim is a pathway out of that, and makes configuration a breeze.

fsloth2• 12 years ago

"I would be very happy if someone could point out to me the elephant that I am not seeing here."

The one thing where vim beats hands down any vanilla text editor, such as you have listed, is the speed of text editing facilitated by its mode-based usage paradigm. It's not the number of features, but the pure effortlessness of the frequently used editing actions vim offers.

The technical details are detailed in many vim tutorials. The speed comes from the fact that for a large set of common non trivial operations there is a one or two key sequence that establishes the precise edit you wanted.

The way to discover these actions needs a bit of self conscious learning: You notice you do something repeatedly (sometimes painfully obviously) and figure out if there is a quick set of operations in vim to do the thing you wanted to do.

To get the full power of vim you need to spend enough time with it so the frequent editing actions you want to achieve are automatically decomposed in your backbone to vim operations, at which point you can edit text at the speed of tought.

Also, the split window dual or triple document editing combined with fast commands for switching to different places in the documents is really nice.

Notepad++ is my second editor of choice as well.

kansface• 12 years ago

There is no elephant in the room. Vim will not make you more productive, period. Vim unequivocally takes the fewest keystrokes to effect changes, but its certainly not the fastest editor. At Floobits, we sometimes have 3 devs working on the same code at the same time (normally when something goes really wrong). When ggreer is around, he is always the fastest to edit text bar none. He uses ST3 and a trackpad. If someone is using some Intellij (PyCharm, Idea), that person is the fastest and safest at refactoring bar none.

It may be true that some magical Vim invocation is the fewest key strokes in any text editor to edit text. In practice real world Vim users probably lose just as much time as they save trying to find the magical incantation. Beyond saving a few keystrokes, consider how wasteful it is to devote months of effort learning a new text editor when editing text is such a small fraction of the time we spend programming. Are programmers ever limited by how quickly we can type? No, we are limited by how quickly we can think!

Having said that, NeoVim is a fairly decent choice for a text editor. It is open source, runs in a terminal, is actively developed, and (vim) is installed on nearly every *nix by default.

swah• 12 years ago

Great point - the editors still can't process code as well as compilers. This should be hapenning already.

StevePerkins5• 12 years ago

(quotes paraphrased for brevity)

  Vim will not make you more productive.  At [gratuitous company plug!], the
  dude with Sublime is the best touch-typist, and the guy with an IDE is
  good at refactoring.

These are false comparisons, and have absolutely nothing to do with Vim.

Does your Sublime guy code fast because he's an amazing touch-typist, or because he has better command over Sublime's shortcuts and special features than your Vim guys do? If it's the former, then it's irrelevant. If it's the latter, then it clashes with the point you tried to make in the next paragraph.

Of course your IDE guy is better at refactoring code. (S)he's using an IDE. That's what they do, better than any text editor. Comparing editors to full-blown IDE's is fairly "meta" to the topic at hand. However, it should be noted that almost every major IDE has built-on or plugin support for popular editor keybindings. I use Vim keybindings with IntelliJ... and even with my fairly baseline Vim familiarity, I'm able work several times more fluidly than on vanilla IntelliJ.

  It may be true Vim requires the fewest key strokes to edit text.  In practice,
  you'll lose more time finding those ideal keystrokes.  It's wasted effort to
  learn a text editor, because programmers are not constrained by typing speed.

This is just outright nonsense, and tells me that you personally have never learned to use any text editor well. Sure, I would agree that it's unproductive to scour StackOverflow for a magical one-step incantation for EVERY thing you ever do. However, that is not what being proficient with Vim (or any other text editor) means. It means you organically pick up on things over time, such that you aren't having to think about it when using them.

If you pick up Drew Neil's book "Practical Vim", it's structured around 121 "tips". Each one is short, clear, and something that you can pick up and internalize in an hour. After the first 24 or so, you will absolutely be more productive that you would be with "Windows Notepad" bindings in the same situation.

It's not about crazy incantations that refactor your entire codebase in one keypress. It's about simple little things, that add up:

* I want to add an extra parameter to this method I just wrote. So rather than taking my hand off the keyboard and clicking there with my mouse (or hitting the arrow keys over and over), I just press "f)" to jump to the closing parentheses and start adding text.

* I want to replace everything on the current line, starting from my cursor position somewhere in the middle of that line. Rather than moving my hand to the mouse and dragging a selection, or holding <Shift> while hitting the arrow keys over and over, I instead just press "c$" and start adding text.

Sure, commands can be a bit arcane, but I learned them organically over a period of time... and these are real-world things that I do many times almost every single day as a coder. I probably only use 10% of Vim's available functionality, and that's enough to make my coding a much more fluid experience than it was before. Until you've experienced it first-hand, it's hard to grasp just HOW DISRUPTIVE it is to your flow and thought process to move your hand from the keyboard to mouse and back!

I don't care which editor (or IDE keybindings) you use. Vim, Emacs, Sublime, whatever. But you will absolutely be a more productive programmer if you pick one and dig into it over time. You ARE limited by your typing flow, and just don't realize it. If anyone really believes that isn't the case, then why bother to learn touch-typing? Take your two index fingers and try coding with the "hunt-and-peck" method, and see how it doesn't limit your thought process.

sohooo• 12 years ago

One famous answer to this is: Your problem with Vim is that you don't grok vi. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1218390/what-is-your-most...

pjmlp8• 12 years ago

I agree.

I used vi, vim and was an Emacs user between 1996 and 2005 when coding on UNIX platforms.

But I have came to UNIX from the home computers, so I was already spoiled with Borland IDEs and Amiga editors before my first UNIX experience.

Got to experience Smalltalk and Oberon environments as well.

Always looked for IDE experiences in UNIX land, and since I moved 100% into JVM/CLR land, I only use Emacs or VIM for editing configuration files or when on systems where my beloved IDEs aren't available.

Even for C++, thanks to LLVM work, IDEs can offer much more that vi or emacs do, even with CEDET.

tuhdo11• 12 years ago

Your knowledge about Emacs was outdated then. And what make you think that Emacs cannot use Clang and LLVM? Currently, there's already rtags that uses Clang for live analysis: https://github.com/Andersbakken/rtags. Here are some nice features that Emacs provide:

- Powerful automatic indentation: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Bruce-Connor/aggressive-in.... It does not only indent the current line, but the whole Semantic context around your cursor.

- Live grep: http://tuhdo.github.io/static/live_grep.gif

- Access to a list of project with a few key strokes: http://tuhdo.github.io/static/helm-projectile/helm-projectil...

- Quickly access any file in your project, as large as Linux kernel, instantly, regardless of where you are in the project, and within a few keystrokes: http://tuhdo.github.io/static/helm-projectile/helm-projectil....

- Jump to any file depends on context, even if the file path is in a plain ASCII text file: http://tuhdo.github.io/static/helm-projectile/helm-projectil...

- Copy files from anywhere to anywhere: http://tuhdo.github.io/static/helm-projectile/helm-projectil....

- Delete files anywhere; files are always at your finger tip to do whatever with them: http://tuhdo.github.io/static/helm-projectile/helm-projectil....

- Switch between other files with same names but different extensions: http://tuhdo.github.io/static/helm-projectile/helm-projectil.... Work not only for C/C++ but other languages, and is customizable. You don't have to configure anything, like adding include paths for the command to search. Everything is automatic. Just use it as it is.

- Jump to tag definition, from Emacs's own parser or external parser like GNU Global: http://tuhdo.github.io/static/c-ide/helm-gtags-jump-dwim.gif

- Jump to any definition from a list of definitions in source tree, even for Linux kernel: http://tuhdo.github.io/static/c-ide/helm-gtags-select.gif

- Jump up to parent: http://tuhdo.github.io/static/c-ide/senator-go-to-up-referen....

- Do you like outline tree?: http://tuhdo.github.io/static/c-ide/sr-speedbar.gif

- Interactive outline tree: http://tuhdo.github.io/static/c-ide/helm-semantic-or-imenu-w...

- Easily move back and forth using the interactive outline tree: http://tuhdo.github.io/static/part3/helm-semantic-or-imenu-2...

- References retrieved from its Emacs internal parser: http://tuhdo.github.io/static/c-ide/semantic-symref.gif.

- Beautiful compile output: http://tuhdo.github.io/static/c-ide/compilation-compile.gif

- Frontend support for GDB: http://tuhdo.github.io/static/c-ide/gdb-many-windows.gif

- Code completion: http://tuhdo.github.io/static/c-ide/semantic-boost-demo.gif.

- Open man page for symbol at cursor: http://tuhdo.github.io/static/part3/helm-man-woman.gif.

- Emacs open 39MB C file: http://tuhdo.github.io/static/performance.gif

- Emac opens multi-gigabtye file: http://www.emacswiki.org/VLF

- Emacs is a bit torrent client: https://bitbucket.org/ukaszg/aria2-mode/

You can see more demos in:

+ Emacs Mini Manual: http://tuhdo.github.io/emacs-tutor.html + C/C++ Development Environment for Emacs: http://tuhdo.github.io/c-ide.html + A Package in a league of its own: Helm: http://tuhdo.github.io/helm-intro.html + Exploring large projects with Projectile and Helm Projectile: http://tuhdo.github.io/helm-projectile.html

Note that in the demos you may see me type in the commands. You can think of it like the start menu in Windows, but actually those commands can be executed quickly with a shortcut. I type in the commands for demonstration purpose to Emacs users.

Those demos are just tip of the iceberg.

hedning• 12 years ago

It's not about speed. It's about finding the vocabulary of vim natural (which it seems you don't, which is fine). 'di(' for instance deletes the inside of parentheses. Which is a natural action to perform, if your cursor is inside parentheses.

JelteF• 12 years ago

The key feature in vim for me is that I never have to move my fingers from the typing position on the keyboard. I never have to look away to find the home key or the arrow keys.

All the things mentioned in the article are just there to not miss the nice features of other editors.

super_mario• 12 years ago

The hippopotamus in the room you are missing is vi.

http://www.viemu.com/a-why-vi-vim.html

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1218390/what-is-your-most...

The elephant you are missing is UNIX itself. The best IDE ever made.

johnchristopher• 12 years ago

I absolutely hate having to lift one of my hand off the keyboard to grab the mouse. Vim's text navigation is the top killer feature that all modern editor are lagging behind.

The second one is modal mode (editing and navigating/command).

I am trying to warm up to ST and the vim plugin is okay but some things are really missing (capital R)

lucb1e3• 12 years ago

The only advantage I can see in Vim over a modern solution is that it runs in the terminal (which I guess is useful if you like to remotely modify files in your production environment?).

ssh -X host

Then remotely run whatever tool you want, including Sublime or Geany or Kate or even Wireshark if you wish.

I must say I've only spent ~2 months of my life using vim before giving up, which I think is already pretty long for an evaluation.

Hmm yeah that is pretty long, you should see the advantage of it by then. Have you used it a lot in those two months? Because I've alternated between Geany and vim for like 6 months before being fluent enough in vim that I could get work done at the speed I could in Geany (or Notepad++ for that matter). But if I had seriously used vim for everything that I used Geany for, I think I would have easily gotten there in 2 months.

I would be very happy if someone could point out to me the elephant that I am not seeing here.

Beyond that it's simply faster in text editing (code, plain text, or something like Markdown for that matter), I guess it's also a way of using a computer. I've never liked the mouse for anything besides games or GIMP and even navigate many websites by keyboard in Firefox. Ideally I'd spend all my time in a terminal, typing away with my hands almost never leaving the home row. But that's just me, I know noone else who is so fond of their keyboard vs. a mouse or touchpad.

krick4• 12 years ago

backslash isn’t bound to anything by default

Actually it is. That thing is called "leader" and is used exactly for the same purpose as author uses backslash. So better way to write

    :nmap \o :set paste!<CR>

would be

    :nmap <leader>o :set paste!<CR>

Reasons to use "leader" are discussed more than once, so I'll leave reading the docs/blogposts to you.

krick4• 12 years ago

Emacs has a useful mode which highlights hexidecimal colors in CSS and SASS

There's plugin for it in vim. Even several of them, as always. I don't remember which one I used and if it was completely ok, but I can find https://github.com/skammer/vim-css-color right away.

tuhdo11• 12 years ago

Emacs can highlight colors in ANY text buffer if you activate it.

krick4• 12 years ago

There're things I agree or disagree on with author (for example, I still have NerdTree installed, but find myself almost never using it, instead I use tree -f in separate terminal window) but probably only one thing I'm still not sure about:

I don't use buffers explicitly at all, only tabs instead, like in any IDE. Sometimes vsplit. I even have custom mappings for ctags to open stuff in new tabs instead of buffers. I treat hidden buffers as legacy needed mostly for technical reasons. Yet I keep seeing other people using multiple buffers, switching between them. So, should I reconsider, maybe? And why?

fsloth2• 12 years ago

I used tabs, but nowadays I don't seem to need them. One day I thought I could try if I could survive by just using buffers, and apparently I do. Might depend on the way you want to navigate the project and so on. For me personally the most common buffer switch is between two or three documents at a time and for those needs split windows are absolutely the best for me (which removes any needs for tabs, naturally).

alanning• 12 years ago

The switch to tabs for me came after I started using vimperator/pentadactyl in my web browser, which I find glorious. (Sorry no links, on mobile)

I used "lusty juggler" before but 'gt' is a very natural way for me to "go tab" now and I like it better. Macvim makes it trivial for me to arrange tabs in a consistent order, for example html file to the left of its js file. The tabs also give me a kind of quick view of what my current "project space" is.

Two tab-y things that I find useful are:

* alias "vi -p" (to open files in tabs)

* "vi --remote-tab" (to add a file to an existing session in a new tab from the command line)

Part of why I like tabs may be because I don't do split windows often in vim. When I want to have two files side-by-side I use my os window manager (CMD+right to move current window to right side of screen, etc).

virtualwhys2• 12 years ago

I've found split windows and buffers in vanilla vim to be somewhat lacking -- CtrlSpace [1] and GoldenView [2] plugins are truly awesome enhancements. The latter I wish I could have at the OS level, just incredibly efficient usage of screen real estate, and the former makes buffer management a breeze.

[1] https://github.com/szw/vim-ctrlspace [2] https://github.com/zhaocai/GoldenView.Vim

e12e4• 12 years ago

Not familiar with goldenview - but it looks like something similar could be achieved with eg xmonad? Or are you not using Xorg and a tiling wm?

virtualwhys2• 12 years ago

I do use a tiling WM, just not Xmonad ;-)

With i3[1] you get split windows out of the box, but the splits are fixed by 1/2s (kind of a Russian Doll box model) that you can then incrementally resize via hotkey by some percentage of your choosing.

That's different than GoldenView which automatically gives the focused window the lion's share of screen real estate, thus providing a kind of distraction free mode with the added ergonomic benefit of not having to crane one's neck to left and right when working with split windows on a 27" monitor.

Maybe Xmonad, Awesome, and other highly programmable TWMs provide such functionality (or are trivial to pull off), although haven't heard mention of it (spent a couple of months with Awesome before switching to i3).

[1] http://i3wm.org/screenshots/

Gonzih• 12 years ago

In my experience nerdtree is bad. You loose a lot of goodnes that splits can offer you. Netrw or netrw+vinegar is more vim friendly way to do file navigation.

statico• 12 years ago

Thanks for reading! Don't forget to check out the follow-up to this article, "Everything I Missed in Vim After 11 Years" - http://statico.github.io/vim2.html

Vim After 11 Years (2013)

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