In every post of this kind I am amazed at so many people using nano instead of micro which is SO MUCH BETTER while being the same thing at the same time.
When you help manage thousands of servers with vim and nano already installed, it’s just faster to use one of those than installing something else nearly ever single time.
I prefer nano for quick edits of small files, but vim for hunting down things in larger files.
The problem I had with nano is that, for the time being, it was supposed to be easy to use. With that in account I always get lost when saving a file and closing the thing because one’s used to doing something else with Ctrl+O and Ctrl+X.
Whereas with Vim (and Neovim for a little while, and now with Vis) I knew it had a steep learning curve from the start so I always had it in mind. And all the funny stories about quitting vim.
The problem with using nano for years is that I now try using nano shortcuts in other programs. Random new windows opening is confusing, until you figure out Ctrl+o isn’t save in that program. Then it’s just annoying because you still have your inappropriate muscle memory.
Vim (or emacs, or any other advanced text editor) is much easier to use than nano when you need to do something more complex than type couple of lines.
But easier?! Hell no! Easy means you can use it without a lot of training or studying. It is self explanatory. And there is no way on earth that vim is easier than nano. I don’t need to know anything to use nano I need to check docs for hours before I can even start using vim
Right, it’s remembering them and using them efficiently that’s hard. It’s amusing watching coworkers try to flex in vim and then struggle at the most basic tasks.
No, some piano plays are still harder than others, mo matter how long you practice. Editing text with vim is easier than with nano after some practice.
VIM may have been a very useful tool 20 or 30 years ago, but today it’s nothing else but a tool for one’s sense of superiority. It’s the vinyl of editors.
If you have to type that much code in a terminal, your infrastructure is outdated. Simple as that.
You seem to believe that people only use the terminal if they HAVE to. I doubt anybody these days HAS to type any amount of code in the terminal, but choose to anyway. Like probably anyone else I have access to modern tools and infrastructure, but I choose to do work in the terminal because I’m more productive there. I use (neo)vim because I like it more than any other text editor I’ve used, and have no problem writing code and debugging in the terminal.
You’re using the terminal, because you’re used to it. It is not the better tool, it’s simply what you happen to know already.
People who argue with productivity because of some key bindings live in the world of the 80s. You don’t just sit there and type code 12h a day, that’s not how modern software development works.
And all those blockheads down voting me are caught up in their weird superiority complex. They are the powerful superhackers, and don’t understand that we are just highly qualified plumbers.
I’m actually fairly young and wasn’t around in the 80s. I graduated college with a CS degree in the past 5 years, where I was exposed to many different tools and software. What did I come out of that experience with? I like the terminal more than any IDE I had to use in any class.
Now in the real world, we don’t always get to use our favorite tools for every task, obviously. I do need to use other, more enterprise, software from time to time for work. But whenever possible I go to the terminal because I’m faster there, and I can quickly automate things.
I’m not saying the terminal is the best tool for every job, I’m just saying it is the best for ME. Notice I’m also not putting down other tools here. It seems to me like you might be the one with a superiority complex.
No, I’d argue you simply didn’t want to invest in the other tools.
Think about it, you probably spent hours on customizing and automating vim, and then say you’re faster in that. Well, that’s called a habit.
IDE are objectively more powerful and since you can actually see options and navigate quickly, you don’t need to memorize every obscure feature.
All the terminal editor enthusiasts are actively holding us back, because they insist everything outside vim is garbage for enterprise and kiddies.
If your tool of choice is actively hostile to new users for no reason other than “that’s how it’s always been, and thus it’s better”, well then you’re digging a moat to automate your gatekeeping.
vim + terminal is actually objectively more powerful than any IDE, and most IDEs include a way to pull ip a terminal as a crutch for things they can’t do. In any case It seems you can’t be reasoned with. Your argument is just a strawman about what you say other people are saying.
I actually use VIM bindings in PyCharm, slightly cursed but actually works really well and meshes fairly nicely with the other IDE shortcuts. Being able to use it in any terminal is a nice bonus.
VIM may have been a very useful tool 20 or 30 years ago, but today it’s nothing else but a tool for one’s sense of superiority. It’s the vinyl of editors.
So, because you don’t understand something, it’s outdated?
If you have to type that much code in a terminal, your infrastructure is outdated. Simple as that.
Ok, I can see you have no idea what you’re talking about.
I understand it very well. And that’s exactly why I’m writing this.
Ok, I can see you have no idea what you’re talking about.
Then say, grandmaster delusion, what purpose does vim serve, where it is actually the best tool? Writing code? Hardly, it’s way too limited and requires a ton of upfront investment and headspace. Writing config files? Hardly, because if you write these by hand, you’re living in the 90s, that’s what Ansible, Terraform etc are for.
You just don’t want to admit, that vim is nothing more than a habit. Muscle memory.
Easy is relative. What are you trying to do? Replace a value in an yaml file? Then nano is easier. Trying to refactor a business critical perl/brainfuck polyglot script in production? Then you probably want to use vim (or emacs if you are one of those people)
Honestly, roll back to previous release for production and use best IDE your developers are used to on their local machines, test the fix in a non production environment then release to prod. When is editing business critical scripts in production really needed?
I’m a bit slow on the uptake there haha. I started with vi and moved over to nano at some point and never looked back. I can refactor code in production with the best of them. There’s still some tricks I’ve seen done in vi that amazes me that I haven’t tried to figure out in nano, but for the most part it’s fairly easy to use to do nearly anything in. Even supports color for supported files, YAML, etc.
That acronym usually stands for “Input Method Editor” and describes the program that makes people able to type east Asian characters with a usual keyboard.
For vim I had to config or install something just to be able to COPY something to use outside vim, how backwards is that? Isn’t this the most standard feature one can expect to work as default?
Once again proving that the easiest way to work out how to do something in vim is to post something along the lines of “vim sucks because it can’t do x” online :)
You mean you couldn’t copy some text from vim and paste it into another application? if yes, what did you have to install/configure for that? I’ve never had any issues copy paste from/to vim, console/GUI windows/Unix.
Sadly I don’t remember. Sometimes it comes preinstalled, sometimes not, depending on OS or something. (Maybe Manjaro gnome). I could copy and paste inside of vim, but not to/from outside vim.
What you observes could be OS depended,. Vim has its own copy paste buffers (y,p etc) and the OS has its own. Traditionally highligh to copy and middle mouse button to paste on Unix. Windows has 2 methods, ctrl-c,v but those are also bindings in vim so only the older less known crtl-insert,shirt-insert works.
Copy paste is definitely built in, there is no need for extra plugins.
it actually does work by default, you just probably missed how to do it in the help pages in vim. For those curious, the system clipboard is its own named register in vim (:help registers to learn more) and can be accessed with either “* or “+ depending on your how your system is configured.
So I need to dive into the manual to do something as basic and universal as “copy and paste”? Why not make it Ctrl+shift+c or have it shown in the info text when pressing this almost universally accepted keypairs? Or at least make it somewhat similar to this. I find it bonkers why some programs decide to just have radically different shortcuts or defaults, the complete opposite of what feels intuitive. Same with the design of some doors that need actual SIGNS on them to tell you which direction they open. Just bad design choice.
Edit: just remembered. Same story with tmux. Want to copy something? Surprise, it’s not anything you expect it to be. Some ctrl+b + [ or some shit
Nano is the tool that people use when they don’t have a need for TUI editors in general and therefore don’t want to have to memorize how people with teletypes decided things should have been done 75 years ago and who also don’t want to get dragged into endless pointless bickering arguments about which set of greybeards was objectively right about their sets of preferences.
I’m glad people enjoy the editors they use and also I just wanna change a single fuckin line in a config file every once in a while without needing to consult a reference guide.
And yet Emacs users don’t fight vim users. Emacs users decided vim’s interface was pretty cool and added it to Emacs. Somehow people still call it a war though.
Bruh 😂 the Emacs user community absolutely constantly shit on Vim users. When they added Vi(m) bindings they literally named it ‘evil mode’, and they constantly make fun of people who use it, and spacemacs, and the latest flavor of (neo)vi(m), and all the extensions necessary to make vim halfway useful as an ide, etc etc etc.
Evil or the extensible vi layer is super popular and improves the one area that emacs was lacking i prefer the emacs keybinds but have never seen peeps chat shit about it
Which Emacs community? I’ve been following it for ages in a few places (Reddit is the most common) and I literally do not encounter any of that. Calling it evil was humor - as if people who went to all the bother making it would be trying to push people away…
Using the evil package is very popular and often recommended, which means literally using it like vim, but with all the Emacs ability on top. I don’t know what on earth you’re talking about.
Oh to be clear, it’s all humor. At least mostly, I’m sure there are RMS level fanatics somewhere that truly believe some of the BS.
This is something as old as time. I’ve seen it prolifically on Reddit (though not in the Emacs community, they generally discourage memes), various Linux forums, old Usenet, various programming forums… I’m not trying to be evasive, but it’s hard to provide examples that aren’t specifically cherry picked, which wouldn’t benefit the conversation much.
How close to vim’s functionality is evil mode? I’ve been toying with the idea of learning Emacs but I rely on Vim’s langmap and that is rarely implemented in Vim emulations / bindings.
Although I came from vi (pre-vim and pre-evil) and still have the muscle memory, I don’t and haven’t used it myself.
I hear it described as a “nearly complete” and “very comprehensive”. There is definitely a solid community of people using and enjoying it, but on the other hand there are always some reports of getting tired of having to work through, and sometimes extend, an additional interface layer, so in the long run being happier to just adopt the default bindings.
I know there are a few areas where trying to follow common vim workflows doesn’t work as well. Historically the performance of line number display been weak in Emacs, though I believe it’s recently much improved. A lot of people seem to make heavy and constant use of it in vim but conversely for me (and I think it’s more common in Emacs) it’s only an occasional, transient need when some external log or error quotes a line number, so I have them only displayed when I hit the go-to-line binding.
Overall, I think the most frustrating issues people have trying to adopt Emacs from vim are due to trying to impose their specific familiar vim workflows. The most obvious example is people concerned with startup time, but for more typical Emacs workflows it’s a non-issue. Users typically stay in Emacs rather than jumping in and out of it from a terminal (and if you really want that workflow, you run one instance as a daemon and pop up a new client to it instantly). My Emacs instance’s uptime usually matches my computer’s uptime.
The draw of Emacs is not about it only being an editor so much as a comprehensive and programmable text environment. It is a lisp-based text-processing engine that can run numerous applications, the primary being an editor (the default, or evil, or others…) but also countless other applications like file managers, VC clients, subprocess management and many others. It 95% replaces the terminal for me, and many other tools. So it’s the environment through which you view and manipulate all things text that is very accessible to modify and extend to fit your needs. Hence the joke about it being an OS is pretty apt, though to believe it needs a good editor implies vim isn’t a good editor ;).
The biggest diss I have on emacs users, as a vim user, is that emacs is the only text editor where people routinely need to keep a book about it on their desk!
I used to work with a bunch of emacs guys and they all had an emacs book or two on their desk or as a monitor stand. They usually also had one on awk and/or Perl to go with it.
I’m sure they’d probably make fun of me for being unable to edit a file with anything but my specific vim config, which is not compatible with any other human’s vim config.
(I would never seriously judge someone on their editor, but I will bust an emacs users chops and accept a good natured jab back)
Vim: Clearly evil, lightning fast. Relies on vimscript for any interactivity and can barely be used outside of the editor.
Emacs: the hippie brain child of some of the brightest minds at the MIT AI lab, funded by military contracts. Slow, but uses a near-universal language that can easily escape the bounds of the editor, (and often does (, and holy shit where did those parentheses come from. (Oh no, it’s becoming self-aware… fly you fools!
Vim: Clearly evil, lightning fast. Relies on vimscript for any interactivity and can barely be used outside of the editor.
I don’t know why you want use Vimscript for anything outside of the editor. But if that your issue, then there is Neovim. It uses Lua instead Vimscript, but what is the benefit of using Lua outside of Vim? That changes nothing.
Lua outside of Vim has huge applications in embedded products. Dude I would kill for Lua. Do you know what we have? Common Lisp. Yeah, it’s great and fancy and all, but try adding that to your CV and applying for an embedded system job.
My point is, then use Lua outside of Vim. What does this have anything to do with the language used in Vim? You can use Vimscript in Vim, and still use Lua outside of Vim. So what’s the problem? It’s not like Lua gets available to you outside of Vim, just because you switch to Neovim. What do I miss here?
(it was mostly a joke, but) the skills you acquire tinkering your Vim to your needs using vimscript can’t be used elsewhere, whereas Emacs has the (small) advantage that at least most of one’s elisp skills can be translated to common lisp quite easily (with the joke being that common lisp really isn’t that useful, hence my Lua jealousy rant).
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