You must log in or register to comment.
Vim is a puzzle based text editor
Performing all those whacky movements and operations is nothing short of an arcade gaming experience.
Exactly, it is lovely. Editing text with it is actually enjoyable.
How did these people have “text editor wars” and yet failed to deliver a text editor half as good as microsoft’s edit.com ?
I’m sorry nano, you’re think you’re hot ?
But you put search on CTRL+W !!!
Do you know how stupid that is ?
Just go and try that in your browser …
I’m gonna laugh my ass off if someone finds out there was some obscure Emacs fork or clone designed to run Clojure or something, and it’s named Again
Sudo apt install AGAIN!
I can’t try again because I can’t exit out …
It’s a common problem but the correct solution to closing vim is quite easy, press and hold control alt and F5 to drop to a new terminal. From there you can do “killall vim” to properly close vim, then just drop back to your main session
I wish I’d read this years ago! I’ve nearly bankrupted myself buying a new machine each time, thanks!
Good, you still can get it right on the first try then
Anytime I open Vim I ask the same question.
“how the fuck do I use you?”
then go back to nano
repeat.
Have you tried micro? Nano but better.
I’ve no choice coz I haven’t been able to quit for last 7 years.
I do everything with cat, sed and awk.
Fuck your TUIs.
But how do you write your awk script?
chatgpt
cat > filename << ENDof course.
The only reason why I use Nano is so I can act like DankPods while saying it.
Na-no
na-no
NANO GANG RISE
for everything else, there’s sublime.
I tend to work on customer systems where I’m not allowed to install anything. I’ve yet to encounter one that doesn’t have
viinstalled, but I’ve seen a few withoutnano.vi is part of the POSIX standard, so it’ll be available in some form on almost anything UNIX-flavoured
Which is a great reason to at least familiarize yourself with it. It’s the lingua franca of text editors.
Unless you wanted to learn to use ed (which you don’t)
ed is sadly not installed by default on some modern distros. Even vi is often a symlink to vim in vi-mode.
The only Dad advice you nerds need:
mcedit from the Midnight Commander (mc) tool is the superior text editor.
I don’t even run arch, btw.
I remember when the GNOME file manager was this kind of interesting hybrid that used MC for the backend. The one thing I liked about it was that it could be docked in Window Maker. Yep I was using a Dock in GNOME waaaaaaaaaaaaaay before most GNOME users.
Nowadays it’s still possible to replicate my old Window Maker desktop in XFCE.
Ok, let’s try that
FIrst
Ok, that is already more storage space than openwrt needs to run a full linux distro
root@proxmox:~# mc mytestfile.txtEsscuse me, the fuck is this !?
I’m a simple man. I see midnight commander, I think ‘dang, I need to use it more, stop calling me out’
If I wanted to hear about what’s good about Vim, should I:
a) ask what’s good about vim
-OR-
b) assert blindly that there is nothing good about vim so fanboys will come crawling out of the walls tripping over each other to tell me how I’m wrong?
tl;dr: Run
vimtutor, learn vim, enjoy lifeIt’s extremely powerful, for mostly the same reason that it’s incomprehensible to newbies. It’s focused not on directly inputting characters from your keyboard, but on issuing commands to the editor on how to modify the text.
These commands are simple but combine to let you do exactly what you want with just a few keypresses.
For example:
w is a movement command that moves one word forward.
You can put a number in front of any command to repeat it that many times, so
3wmoves three words forward.d is the delete command. You combine it with a movement command that tells it what to delete. So
dwdeletes one word andd3wdeletes the next three words.f is the find movement command. You press it and then a character to move to the first instance of that character. So
f.will move to the end of the current sentence, where the period is.Now, knowing only this, if you wanted to delete the next two sentences, you could do that by pressing
d2f.Hopefully I gave a taste of how incredibly powerful, flexible, yet simple this system is. You only need to know a handful of commands to use vim more effectively than you ever could most other editors. And there are enough clever features that any time you think “I wish there was a better way to do this” there most certainly is (as well as a nice description of how).
It also comes with a guide to help you get over the initial learning curve, run
vimtutorin a console near you to get started on the path tosalvationefficient editing.I’m not against that,
But if ctrl+f doesn’t let me type a search term then I’m going to scream
The war could have been avoided if user had the option to easily rebind any key/action
But if ctrl+f doesn’t let me type a search term then I’m going to scream
It’s been awhile since I’ve bothered to remap a key in Vim, but adding this to
.vimrcshould do it for you:nnoremap <C-f> /I started with a bunch of these to let me keep using existing muscle memory while training new.
Is there a .vimrc that already maps all the standard notepad++ keybindings in one go ?
There are better editors to learn if your goal is to not learn vi.
In vi, search is not only used for searching, but also for navigation. Demoting search from an easy-to-reach single key to a difficult-to-press chorded key combination breaks one of vi’s core philosophies, natural editing flow, and will significantly reduce your enjoyment and efficiency using the editor.
Doesn’t matter we will tell you either way.
- Instead of simply shortcuts, vim uses “chords”. Every new shortcut I learn can be combined intuitively* with all the other shortcuts I know.
- Because of this there’s no faster way to edit files than Vim in the hands of an experienced user.
- this let’s me spend almost no time editing code, freeing up the rest of my time for swearing at piss poor documentation.
* I use “intuitively” here in a way that not merely stretches, but outright abuses the definition of the word.
Thank you for telling me all this neat stuff! :D
I think I get what you are intending to imply by the word “intuitively”; it’s that it eventually becomes as reflexive and fluid as touch-typing itself.
Gosh you make it sound almost like you play Vim like an instrument more than use it…!
Honestly that sounds cool _
I think I get what you are intending to imply by the word “intuitively”; it’s that it eventually becomes as reflexive and fluid as touch-typing itself.
Exactly like that!
It’s also another source of the many “I can’t exit Vim” jokes, because it is now genuinely disorienting for me to try to edit text without Vim key bindings.
Gosh you make it sound almost like you play Vim like an instrument more than use it…!
That’s a great analogy. It does very much feel that way.
Honestly that sounds cool _
It is pretty cool.
Wether it’s really worth the learning curve is probably unique to each person that tries it. But for folks who need to edit a lot of text a lot of the time, it’s pretty great.
It’s intuitive if your previous editor was ed(1) and you’re using an ADM-3A-like keyboard.
It’s intuitive if your previous editor was ed(1) and you’re using an ADM-3A-like keyboard.
Exactly! Ha!
To add to your line of query, what if I don’t give a shit about writing code and I just use Linux as a casual laptop user? I’ve never looked at vim or emacs, I use Kate and OnlyOffice
Depends on how much you write. At some point the efficiency gain is probably worth learning vim anyway, but Kate is a nice editor and does the job.
I just like vim, it feels nice.
Using Neovim with qmv had been amazing for when I needed to standardize seasion and episode numbers/titles for my jellyfin library.
What kind of things would we be gaining efficency for? Markdown? It seems graphically to be a very spartan program. If I’m only writing text, what value would I gain from learning vim versus a graphical text editor that incorporates markdown and page design?
For just regular text to be consumed by humans, it’s not that great, you probably want a word processor.
It shines when you do a lot of more structural editing, stuff like “change all quotation marks on this line to be single tick”, “copy everything inside these parentheses and paste it after the equals sign”, “make the first word on the next five lines uppercase”, these are the type of things vim make easy that are not easy in other editors.
So it’s great for code and config files. Markdown is borderline. You can have a setup that lets you live view how the markdown renders while editing in vim, so it can be pretty good, but the advantage might be a bit dubious.
If you want to do document editing, then neither vim nor Kate are editors that do that. They are for editing text. You can write markdown, if you like, and then use pandoc or other tools to convert that to a printable document. I always use LaTeX if I need a pretty output, but that also has somewhat of a steep learning curve.
What you gain is the ability to manipulate text very efficiently. It’s hard to describe, but it kind of feels like a lower overhead protocol of communicating to the computer what i want it to do to the text compared to “normal” editors. Again, if you only rarely write stuff, it might not be worth it, but it feels great
You shouldn’t talk about vim at all! Just write that vscode is the most flexible code editor.
It does have a vim plugin, so it’s a perfectly fine editor
Don’t use Microsoft’s version. Use Vscodium! :)
Yeah. And VsCodium with NeoVim is fantastic.
I’ve seen vscode fill up home directories unnecessarily when run on the machine directly as well as remotely!
IMO vscode is a perfect example of recent software that looks great from a features pov but horrible from an efficient implementation pov. I loved it until I hated it.
Vim has been around long enough that I’ve found anything I want to figure out how to do has been discussed many times on various places around the internet and have yet to fail to find what I’m looking for with a search.
They’re both fine choices.
Once you try Vim you will never use another text editor. Or any other program for that matter because you won’t be able to exit.
What are you running MS-DOS? laughs in multi-tasking.
I just drag my vi terminals to another workspace and launch a new editor.
I just drag my vi terminals to another workspace and launch a new editor.
I see what you did there. Lol.
I also had that experience with emacs, which has a built in help system. I couldn’t find a topic on ‘exit’ or ‘quit’ and refused to just search online.
Took me half an hour.
and refused to just search online
Unless you were f*cked by your ISP as I am right now, that’s having some balls. Or being masochist. But nothing in between
I really didn’t want to let it win.
I’m editor bilingual but im a bit rusty in Emacs, so skill check: its C-x C-c right?
Ctrl + meta + butterfly
Yes. Though I believe it only kills the current frame if there are multiple
No, I think that exits. C-c k kills the buffer, C-x 0 (zero) will kill the frame. But I may have changed my binds and can never remember which is window and which is frame in emacs terms.
However, it’s somewhat moot as just about everywhere you run emacs, it’ll open up in gui mode and you can use the file menu. (Or use F10 to bring up the menus in terminal, but I have no idea where on the manual it would say that)
Emacs
uses ed
Helix <3
vanilla helix is so nice, the keybindings make so much more sense and it feels really comfortable
Yeah hx. It was hx that finally made me use vi style navigation and now I choose vim over nano almost always.
I’m halfway between hx and vim, I vastly prefer the helix/kakoune philosophy of selection, then action over vim, but I’m dearly missing plug-in support for Helix
I was going to point to visual.nvim as a possible middle ground, but it’s now archived :(
Disclaimer: I haven’t actually tested it myself
I’m just gonna be patient. Vanilla Helix is very much usable for everything I need it for at the moment, with built in LSP support, and plug-in support is on the horizon. Not sure when exactly, but it’s gonna happen eventually
Yeah I’m with you there, vanilla helix meets basically 90% of my needs so I’m not in any real rush to change
