937
Me giving advice about text editors
(lemmy.world)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 30 Sep 2024
937 points (100.0% liked)
linuxmemes
21355 readers
1463 users here now
Hint: :q!
Sister communities:
Community rules (click to expand)
1. Follow the site-wide rules
- Instance-wide TOS: https://legal.lemmy.world/tos/
- Lemmy code of conduct: https://join-lemmy.org/docs/code_of_conduct.html
2. Be civil
- Understand the difference between a joke and an insult.
- Do not harrass or attack members of the community for any reason.
- Leave remarks of "peasantry" to the PCMR community. If you dislike an OS/service/application, attack the thing you dislike, not the individuals who use it. Some people may not have a choice.
- Bigotry will not be tolerated.
- These rules are somewhat loosened when the subject is a public figure. Still, do not attack their person or incite harrassment.
3. Post Linux-related content
- Including Unix and BSD.
- Non-Linux content is acceptable as long as it makes a reference to Linux. For example, the poorly made mockery of
sudoin Windows. - No porn. Even if you watch it on a Linux machine.
4. No recent reposts
- Everybody uses Arch btw, can't quit Vim, and wants to interject for a moment. You can stop now.
Please report posts and comments that break these rules!
Important: never execute code or follow advice that you don't understand or can't verify, especially here. The word of the day is credibility. This is a meme community -- even the most helpful comments might just be shitposts that can damage your system. Be aware, be smart, don't fork-bomb your computer.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
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?
Doesn't matter we will tell you either way.
* 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 ^_^
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.
That's a great analogy. It does very much feel that way.
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.
Exactly! Ha!
You shouldn't talk about vim at all! Just write that vscode is the most flexible code 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.
It does have a vim plugin, so it's a perfectly fine editor
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 to ~~salvation~~ efficient editing.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
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.