Vim Editor?

Vim's interface is stupid and pointlessly awkward

Vim's interface is stupid and pointlessly awkward

I would down-vote if I could.

I've used vim for about a decade, plan old vi for about a decade before that. Brain-dead editors like Wordstar and its progeny like Visual Studio pale in comparison. Where else can you do a quick ":%!sort -fu" to re-sort your .gitignore file to keep it in alphabetical order?

To be precise, I use gvim, one window per file, and use different colour schemes for different filetypes.

I use gvim with Buffers. I used to use Windows, but buffers work great for me. If I need to have two things open, then I still use windows.

Have you binded Ctrl+W (hjkl) to Ctrl+h, Ctrl+j, Ctrl+k, Ctrl+l? If you use windows a lot it saves you a lot of time. I'm thinking about binding Ctrl+H, Ctrl+J, Ctrl+K, Ctrl+L to Ctrl+W (HJKL).

Vim uses the "emacs philosophy" for it's windowed mode for some reason. I'm probably going to change Ctrl+W to my leader key.

@Bregma

Your post kind of reminds me of THIS rant.

@Bregma
Your post kind of reminds me of THIS rant.

... and?

I've found that over time, I rely less and less on quixotic tools and their exotic features. Sorting lines in a file is not a prominent feature of my software work... being flexible across platforms, machines, and configurations is. Whether it's VS, Eclipse, vim, emacs, or even cruder fare, I am perfectly capable of being highly productive. I am often surprised at how many things techie people think they absolutely need.

Apart from all of that, I maintain that vim is stupidly designed, albeit highly capable. Much prefer emacs when I'm living in that world, but vim is much more common and I often have no interest in adding more packages than needed. So I make do with vim. But the people who insist that working in vim is worlds apart from VS are a complete mystery to me. Parlor tricks aren't productivity.

It's a possibly interesting aside that I have no interest in swiss army knives/multitools, another random affectation of geeks.

I'm 41, not young by any means, but when it comes to tools, I hate the "old style stuff". I grew up with IDEs, and I find working with these archaic editors a total waste of my time. I don't want to spend 3 weeks trying to get vim or emacs or sublime text or atom to do the same things that Visual Studio, LiteIDE (the IDE I use for Go) and QT Creator do after 2 seconds I finish to install them.

I have no interest in writing makefiles, no interest in remembering the correct spelling of my functions or what the hell is the 4th parameters in an API call... when it comes to write code, I need all the help I can get from technology, cause what I do is already complicated enough, no need to shoot myself in the balls... and I am not willing to trade that for the chance to feel like the "cool dude" when it comes to write on the forums "I use Vim/Emacs".

@Bregma
Your post kind of reminds me of THIS rant.

... and?

.

Your post ( combined with other's )reminds me of the unwillingness to change - IE

" I did it this way for so long, why should I change ?"

It's perfectly fine to use whatever you you feel comfortable with - but when bringing something this awkward and outdated ...

The point is, while one person is still attempting to find 3rd party plugins and libraries for VIM, someone else already has a large chunk of an identical project up and running using a modern IDE.

As technology improves, so must the programmer - soon it could mean the difference between getting a job, or being kicked out of the industry .

This is what I have to deal with on my end of the "business" - there is no such thing as a "permanent job" - you are hired on for the duration of the project, than laid off and have to find another project.

You are hired based on your overall knowledge of both old, and new systems - and how much experience you have with them.

To make things more "fun", your boss has a computer generated time table on how long each stage of the project should take.

If you are too slow - yer' fired .

If you can't run the latest terminal communicators - yer fired.

If you can't write update code for a MUX that came out last year - yer fired.

If you can't write injection code for a 25 year old analog transmitter - yer fired.

If you are unable to figure out how to make manual or digital adjustments to anything you are assigned to - yer fired.

I only use vim when I have to. i.e SSH'ing into a remote machine. Though I prefer to use nano if available.

I'm 41, not young by any means, but when it comes to tools, I hate the "old style stuff". I grew up with IDEs, and I find working with these archaic editors a total waste of my time. I don't want to spend 3 weeks trying to get vim or emacs or sublime text or atom to do the same things that Visual Studio, LiteIDE (the IDE I use for Go) and QT Creator do after 2 seconds I finish to install them.

I have no interest in writing makefiles, no interest in remembering the correct spelling of my functions or what the hell is the 4th parameters in an API call... when it comes to write code, I need all the help I can get from technology, cause what I do is already complicated enough, no need to shoot myself in the balls... and I am not willing to trade that for the chance to feel like the "cool dude" when it comes to write on the forums "I use Vim/Emacs".

I'm 43, grew up with old-style editing, and have no intention whatsoever of going back to it. I understand and recognise the huge productivity boost that using a really good IDE gives, and it's nothing to do with organising a project file or autocompletion (which many old-style fans misrepresent as being the sole purpose of an IDE, and then go on to make spurious claims that it makes programmers lazy: as if the ability to memorize API and syntax was the only important thing).

The acronym is the giveaway: Integrated Development Environment. Being able to launch builds and debugs from the same tool used to edit, being able to set breakpoints and inspect variables directly in your editor; these are all things that I guess if you've never had you don't see the value of, but once you're properly exposed to them you'll wonder how you ever managed before.

Your post kind of reminds me of THIS rant.

I assume that you failed to see that the 'rant' as you call it was very tongue-in-cheek?

Your post kind of reminds me of THIS rant.

I assume that you failed to see that the 'rant' as you call it was very tongue-in-cheek?

Written in 1983 by Ed Post and published in Datamation.

I am aware it's a parody, however it does quite nicely illustrate a point .

Most of the non-vim users in this thread act as if people who use vim are afraid to change or hate to use other tools. I, personally, used Visual Studio, PTVS, and Sublime Text (each for around two years) before switching to vim around a month ago. It's not that I don't like change or that I'm stuck in old times. I just find myself highly productive with Vim, and thus I'm using it. If another editor comes along which I find myself more productive in, I'll switch to that. To be honest, all of you guys are sounding very condescending and pretentious with your generalization of Vim users.

For those that say Vim's interface is archaic and such, I suggest you look at Neovim.

Don't think I choose to use vim on all the platforms I program for because I'm compensating for a lack of security in my manhood or because I'm apparently much older than most of you and unable to change my ways. I have used most IDEs over the decades, and none of them meet my needs. I could see gaining productivity advantages if I were to limit my work to a single project and a single platform at a time, but that is not a description of what I do for a living nor what I do for a hobby.

As it stands, vim is the only development environment I have used that works across every single platform I've developed for (including phones), is the only one that works nicely over ssh, is small enough and lightweight enough that it will run (and even install) on some of the smaller devices I play with, and is fast enough to start and shutdown that I could have opened/edited/saved/closed a file while most of the monstrosity IDEs are still displaying their splash screen (I'm looking Eclipse straight in the eye here). It's smaller cousins are always available on any POSIX system, even a fresh install, so no need to switch keybinding muscle memory.

I'm not trying to convert anybody. I'm just not impressed by proselytizers who feel their lack of familiarity with a tool or workflow is best explained by a flaw in that tool or workflow, and that their personal level of familiarity with another tool is the best reason for everyone to switch to it. That sounds to me more like personal self-affirmation than reasoned argument. that's the realm of religion, not engineering.

I don't care what the editor is. So long as it has syntax highlighting I'm fine. I use command line to do everything else under Linux and don't use Windows much anymore. Just old habits I suppose.

I don't care what the editor is. So long as it has syntax highlighting I'm fine. I use command line to do everything else under Linux and don't use Windows much anymore. Just old habits I suppose.

This is exactly how I felt up until I started really making an effort to learn the commands of the editors I was using (starting with Sublime). It's hard to explain, but I'll just say that if you spend a week really learning the ins and outs of your specific editor, you'll see your productivity increase hugely.

I started learning Vim about a year ago, when I was starting to build server-side apps. I knew that one of these days, I would have to SSH to a remote box, and edit some config files, and restart the server. Because of that reason, I learn Vim, the editor that works even from command line, over SSH, running inside a tmux session. I am glad I learned it. It has been useful. It is powerful for a text editor, configurable, and you could turn that into your own IDE if you wish to choose that route.

For huge development tasks, however, I still prefer a good IDE over an editor like Vim. Refactoring, code analysis, and breakpoints are among many other features that come with an IDE. They are just too hard to pass up. Vim could do the job if you have heavily configured it. Doing so, however, require almost an inside-out knowledge of vim and vim scripting, an amount of effort similar to learning a whole new API and library.

I use an IDE most of the time xcode, visual studio but every now and again I need to edit some random ruby, javascript or bash script. I will tend to use VIM for this but I also tend to download random editors every time I find myself editing javascript. So far VIM, Emacs, Sublime, Coda, Atom, Aptana, Netbeans, Webstorm and a bunch of others. A new editor everytime I open a file.

One plus point for VIM is this which is awesome:

http://vim-adventures.com/