You don’t ever close vim. You pray to the gods and hope that vim chooses to quit for you. (technically accurate if you think about it - i.e. otherwise you leave swap files all over the place:-P)
And hope that you do not mess up and summon a daemon instead:-P.
If an IDE doesn’t have vi key bindings it isn’t going to be used by me. That’s what finally get me to change from terminal only dev to vscode. Until I found the vi editing extension the IDE wasn’t of interest.
Yes, vi is just that good.
I hear emacs bindings are also great, but I just know how to save and exit from emacs.
I use doom emacs and have to say, it takes everything that I like about vim and adds to emacs, plus a lot of useful features that i would have to install myself otherwise that can be enable by just uncommenting a feel lines in the config file.
It’s can feel a bit bloated at first but allows me to have the perfect IDE (for me at least) in a matter of minutes.
And the best of all is that I don’t need to use the emacs keybinds if I don’t wanna (and I don’t).
One of the interesting aspects of humanity is how much people like given text editing methods. There’s a handful of approaches and after learning one or two, people really figure out what works for them.
I am more than happy to say I like vim, but in the end you should use what you like best. Just done be surprised when I can write and edit a ton of text really fast while your nano session is comfortable, but slow.
So then what makes vim special? From what I understand it’s just a “standard” for shortcuts to features that can be shared between different editors, right?
The special thing about vim are the different modes. In a editor which does not support modal editing, you can’t bind a letter key directly to a function, or else you can’t type that letter any more.
The reason is b/c vim predates GUIs. Yes, as in all of them:-D. (Or rather, its predecessor vi did and vim unlike others very much remained true to its origins)
Even now, there are many places e.g. when doing server maintenance or accessing a compute cluster via SSH, sometimes you do not have a handy GUI environment accessible, at which point your choices become extremely limited, and it helps that vim has been installed on every Unix-i/Linux-ish machine since the 80s.
GUIs are superior, ofc, when they work. On a daily basis I even use a GUI for vim - MacVim (for Windows there used to be Cream but I am very out of date there), and there is always gVim. I could use something else but I am familiar with vim and it is EXTREMELY powerful - e.g. I could indent 100,000 lines in the middle of a file without having to manually select all of them at once first, or better still only do the indentation based on matching a pattern.
It is very advanced, and thus not for everyone, and even those of us that use it often prefer the GUI way for simple tasks like select a contiguous block of 5 lines, but it offers the benefit that it works in the widest possible number of scenarios - e.g. more than nano. emacs does too, except its commands are so configurable that the X-windows GUI number 1, X-windows GUI number 2, and command-line versions all use entirely different shortcuts, so a cheat sheet would not help. vim offers consistency that, afaik, is absolutely unmatched anywhere.
Even when Emacs had two GUI versions, the default keys were pretty much the same between them, as far as I recall, excepting features missing from one or the other. For a very long time now, it’s all been reconciled as GNU Emacs, anyhow, whether CLI or XWin GUI, or even on a Mac or (shudder) MS Windows. I just use my local running Emacs, with my preferred configuration, to edit files anywhere, such as inside a running container on a remote server in AWS, so it’s pretty consistent for me.
Thanks for the update - I so rarely use emacs that I might be guilty of misinformation here, as in what may have been true two decades ago is not any longer. I’ll try to remember that.:-)
I was shoved into Linux by a nearly dead HPC expert who was definitely angry about the advent of electricity.
Wasn’t given any indication of a text editor, I ran across vim for one reason or another and enjoyed his Palpatine-like reaction from seeing me using vim enough to keep using it. And if you’re enjoying something, why not
Having a mentor like this is unfathomably valuable. The kind that knows exactly when a printer problem should be fixed with a sledgehammer and are not afraid to apply the “fix”.
Because no editor can or should try to do everything for everyone. Plugins mean an editor can do a few things well and let others bring specific features they want later.
You get everything Vscode does, vscode’s LSPs, vscode’s element rename/jump to definition (which I realise nvim has but I can’t get it to work properly and code does it out of the box), live share sessions, built in split panes and git integration etc etc
It carries over everything as far as I can tell (besides the graphical changes obviously), motions, plugins, shortcuts
I’m sure you can achieve most things Vscode does in neovim but using Vscode/ium and nvim is a massive shortcut
As far as I’m aware none of the things I mentioned work out of the box in neovim (jump to definition does but only within the same file which is kinda useless for me
Vim actually has a surprising ammount of features already built in, you don’t even really need any Plugins. It has a file browser, terminal emulator, and window tiling built in
I looked up miter joint and butt joint and I’m beginning to understand what you wanted to say.
Yes, maybe.
It doesn’t hurt to know the basic commands to insert, copy, paste with vim. But with bim, handling the tool always consumed a too big percentage of my attention in respect to doing the task at hand. I still use it for small file changes.
My comment really applies more to vi than vim but everyone’s using them interchangeably nowadays. When implementing systems where internet connection or excess install size aren’t possible or recommended, you gotta be able to work with the tools at hand.
Of course, the comparison is custom cabinetry to ikea. Your local meth head needs to understand how to use hand tools because he or she may need to use them for myriad reasons ranging from “I don’t have the power version of this” to “it’s faster” to “the cut is cleaner” to “they pay me more to use this”. The person designing hudfł needs to be concerned first and foremost with how to shave a sixteenth off every panel so his accounting department doesn’t have to pay to reforest an extra hundred acres this year.
Perhaps someone working entirely in programming has good reason to not know vim, but I still cling to the antiquated notion that the person designing furniture out of manufactured materials ought to be able to build a box you’d feel comfortable with company seeing.
I can’t confirm this. when using vi, I have syntax highlighting, split windows and even search and replace. Even my Termux installation states it’s vi improved, when issuing vi -h.
That’s what I’m trying to say - in the probably most upsetting way - All of my distros - Ubuntu, Nobara, Debian and so on: all of them have vi as a symlink - only, these days.
Not all! My arch Linux install definitely has the original vi – the one where when you cw it doesn’t delete the word until you go back to normal mode to save on screen refresh. Plugins? Custom commands? Multiple buffers? Forget it!