Vim GIFs
vimgifs.com
vimgifs.com
The current front page example is using 'z' to "redraw the cursor". I know what all those words means, but put together they are complete jibberish. Looking at the gif, it appears that redraw is VIM-speak for scrolling.
Also "z doesn't do anything on it's own. But it pairs with a number of other things. It is used for redrawing the screen, saving and quitting, as well as manipulating folds." doesn't sound intuitive at all.
Also, I think `z` is a fairly bad example, because nothing really starts with `z` and in some ways it's just a hodgepodge of different things that needed keys (`z` is of course not the only key like this).
`y` for example is used for everything related to yanking. `p` for everything related to pasting. `i` for insert mode. `v` for visual mode. `c` for change, `d` for delete, `w` for word. There's other various examples I'm sure, but most of the basic usage of Vim (besides, perhaps, `hjkl`) all maps to fairly easy to remember keys once you do it a few times and understand what they stand for.
At any rate, I never spent much time memorizing keys. I'd look up a thing or two, apply it, and it'd just sink in.
But Vim isn't about being intuitive, it's about being efficient. Once it 'clicks' you will be able to express incredibly complex text manipulations in only a few keystrokes. And with configuration you'll build the most powerful but comfortable environment that you'll miss anywhere else.
The operating word here being "today". Vim - and Emacs - are relics from the era when computing was much more saner than it is today. They're old, older than most of us here. It's not that hard to learn their vocabulary once you understand all those words are not weird, it's how things were called back before the industry did another circle and reinvented some wheels again.
:s/Vim/Unix/b - move cursor back
w - move cursor forward one word
p - paste from buffer
u - undo
etc.
I would not argue vim is intuitive as a whole. However, there are certain parts of vim that are extremely intuitive.
d: delete
c: change
y: yank (copy)
v: visually select (V for line vs. character)
It's also why I added the -ish to my comment (editors can be very polarising), but I feel many of vim's basic editing features are very intuitive
Edit: https://danielmiessler.com/study/vim/ It's where I learned the command meanings and started to understand vim in a more intuitive manner
:10d - to delete line 10
d99d - to delete next 99 lines
:10,99d - to delete lines between 10 and 99
:-4,.d - delete from 4 lines above to current line
this also works with other commands
Anyone fancy playing vimgolf? http://www.vimgolf.com/
being the obvious one..
That said, I had my annoying fifteen seconds when I first learned it, then just used it as intended. Honestly, my fingertips do the how-to thinking these days, and my brain does the what-I-want thinking.
Not being interested by learning a language doesn't make it suck.
[1] http://www.livingcomputermuseum.org/Online-Systems/User-Docu...
i don't evangelize vim at all. it's a very difficult tool used only by people who need its functionality and have the patience and intelligence to learn it. don't like it? not sold? then don't learn it. use something easier.
In most Unix systems you should be able to go to the beginning of a line, press Ctrl-k and then Ctrl-y to yank. At the very least your browser and terminal should understand those two commands.
That is a much different statement than simply saying "vim is intuitive", which is the statement it appears you're arguing against. I doubt there's anyone in the world who would attempt to make such a bold claim as that.
I've found the "vim is intuitive once you understand what each character means" claim to be pretty accurate. Before learning what the keys did, it seemed like a laughably impossible-to-use program, but after learning what the keys do, it feels very natural and composable. Sure, some of that is due to muscle memory, like hjkl for movement, but a lot of that are things like "p for paste", "d for delete", "n for next", and so on. Those, to me, seem like very intuitive mappings.
What I think becomes really intuitive once you understand the basic commands however is the combination of them. If you know that 'dd' deletes a line, it is very intuitive to me that '4dd' deletes 4 lines.
It's also contextual for sure, but for the word to be meaningful at all in a UI design sense, one surely must draw the line somewhere before the required context is to know the editor from experience or by having studied its documentation. Otherwise it's an absolutely useless thing to point out for the sake of discussion. Anyone can use complex things intuitively given some exercise. That doesn't make things like theoretical physics particularly intuitive in themselves.
For example d is the delete command and w is the "move by word" command, so dw is "delete word". / is the search command, so /foo searches for the first instance of foo in the document. You can intuitively figure out that d/foo is "delete everything until the first found foo", and that is exactly what it does.
"delete the first found foo"
Makes more sense to me than "delete everything until the first found foo" at any rate.
Intuitiveness is subjective.
EDIT: rereading my comment, I should have said "/foo moves to the first instance of foo in the document" to correlate how / is a movement just like w is a movement (w is "move by one word")
Yes, then it makes much more sense.
Intuitiveness becomes more clear once you realize you need to learn the language to make things intuitive.
You can't just start speaking Spanish to someone and expect to get them to do what you're asking if you don't know how to speak Spanish, yet. You can poke and prod at words here and there (memorizing what each character means) but you still aren't very effective at that point. Can you ask where the bathroom is? Sure. But can you effectively tell someone where the correct bathroom is? Probably not.
"I want to yank those two lines, paste them over there, select them, and replace all instances of 'foo' with 'bar'."
Vim:
> 2YjjpVj:s/foo/bar/pg
Like speaking other languages, there are a number of ways you could tell Vim to to do what you want.
Now let's look at other editors when you want to tell it what to do. Other editors:
> Remove right hand from keyboard and put it on mouse
> Move cursor to appropriate position
> Click the button down, and drag it until the two lines are highlighted
> Crtl+C
> Move the mouse cursor
> or move your right hand again to the arrow keys
> Ctrl+V
> Ensure your text is still highlighted in some way
> (May require repeating previous steps)
> Ctrl+F or Ctrl+R or something, depending on the app
> Get into one box and enter "foo"
> Get into another box and enter "bar"
> Ensure you have selected "selected text" so everything doesn't get replaced
> Hit <enter> or click
The infamous Stack Overflow answer, "Your problem with Vim is that you don't grok vi," is an oldy but a goody.
vim: 2YjjpVj:s/foo/bar/pg
Sublime: ^L^L^C↓↓^V↓^Ffoo<Esc>^Dbar
(This assumes there are only 2 instances of "foo", but you'd just have to press ^D a few more times otherwise.)
And sure moving your hand to ↓ takes slightly more time, but it's still no where near as bad as your screed makes out. And if you really care, you can make new shortcuts for movement (by editing a simple JSON file).
Personally, my experience is of using vim for several years, and then becoming approximately as proficient in Sublime in a matter of weeks, and then much more productive in a matter of months. And sure, I wasn't putting that much effort into learning vim, but then, I wasn't putting that much effort into learning Sublime either.
Expanding them into new lines outlines the time spent though. ^L is no where near as fast as 2Y.
A minor nitpick though, in vim you aren't pressing escape to get to that mode, it's the normal mode, it's where you should always be.
The point I was making though is that with vim you don't exit insert mode to run commands, you enter insert mode to write text and then immediately exit to normal mode.
It may sound pedantic, but it's a core part of understanding vim. Insert mode is the mode you should spend very little time in.
:help paragraph
[...] The default is "IPLPPPQPP TPHPLIPpLpItpplpipbp" [...]
If you have to understand it first to find it intuitive, then it isn't intuitive.
> At first it isn't intuitive,
Then it isn't intuitive. An intuitive UI is one that requires little to no instruction because it just works and is discoverable naturally, vi/vim are exactly the opposite, they are the most unintuitive UI practically ever invented. There is nothing remotely intuitive about vi/vim. The barrier to entry is huge and is the main reason people don't use this editor.
> Sort of like how skiing becomes intuitive but isn't at first, or such.
Skiing isn't intuitive either. Getting good requires practice, that you had to practice it to get the feel for it means exactly that it isn't intuitive. Once you're good, it's not because it's intuitive, it's because you practiced and taught yourself new muscle memory.
For a moment, try stepping away from the semantics of what 'intuitive UI' means as a holistic thing, and think of it this way: when you read an angry letter from someone, you are immediately flustered, or something. This happens intuitively. But it only happens if you already know how to read the words and what they mean. It isn't intuitive if you don't know the language. Intuition is perspectivized and based on prior context, etc. The human using the tool is defined by their history, stuff like that. The commenter is just saying, the way I see it, given X in the history of the user, where X is "understands what each character means" (this is now assumed as part of the user's identity), that some other aspects of the entire vim-as-a-text-editor process becomes intuitive.
Yet another example is, an app meant for musicians, like Ableton, where some things are intuitive because they have rhythm and/or melody knowledge or know what filters are, but isn't intuitive if they don't. It's a spectrum. The most interesting questions are often about such nuance. Vim is interesting, and it has stuck around.
I don't know, but I personally care less about semantics than about the human-processes that actually result from the way programs are. Call it 'intuitive' or not, what do you see actually happening? What I see is people making really quick edits (I often see this in myself) that I can't do in other editors that I am able to do as an extension of myself sort of the same way I feel about playing percussion in a band.
Yes actually he did say vim is intuitive; don't tell me no one said X when they very well did say X.
You're failing to understand that I perfectly well understand what he's saying and I'm objecting to the use of the word intuitive; yes, that's semantics which I care about.
I don't need to take a step back or look at it another way because I'm not confused by his message, I'm objecting to his vocabulary. If that doesn't interest you, that's fine, move along. But it interests me because I'm pedantic and I enjoy discussing how a message is conveyed as well as just what's being conveyed. Just because you don't care about semantics doesn't mean others don't. Semantics matter if words are to convey meaning and every reply to a post doesn't have to share what you value about the post. If I want to debate the semantics of a word with the OP then I damn well will and it's not your place to come along and tell me I shouldn't, nor tell me I need to see it another way.
reply to OP below: As you admit the point is debatable, then you can't question my debating it. I understood your intent as well, so what, I wasn't questioning your intent, I'm questioning your choice of words to convey that intent. So no, I don't.
I think what's happening is that even if we agree on definitions of intuitive, what I'm trying to add is the context around the "vim is intuitive" statement that it is scoped in. It is scoped by the "... once ..." qualifying fragment after it.
Also I'm not really saying what you should or shouldn't do. I'm saying try, because it could be fun; I want to see what happens when you take it there, sort of as a "hmm hey can we try this?" situation. It isn't as much a convincing as a "hey here's how I understand what he said--what do you think of that?" situation. More about going away with things to think about than "cool, I think I'm the person that won this argument." You're welcome to not try this, and I'll walk away, it's totally fine.
FWIW I agree that the unqualified "vim is intuitive" wouldn't be reasonable to say. I'm just trying to explore the nuance.
Edit: funnily enough I added it (the -ish?) 30s after posting because I imagined this scenario, guess I could have been more clear.
In fact I just tested it and I'm still not clear what c2aw does. It seems to just do the same thing as c2w.
"a" can mean "append" but in this context (as the argument to a command) it means to change "a word". See :h aw for details.
been using it since beta. has grown to cover quite a bit more since then.
https://github.com/antirez/kilo
Lots of people have forked it and are actively making it their very own editor. Sure, none of them may ever take off and become a new emacs or vim competitor. Or maybe they will. Let's not discount innovation.
Plus it's amazing to me that to make a full fledged terminal editor, almost all you really need is the ability to read from stdin and write to stdout. Only a tiny little bit of glue C code is needed (for handling signals like SIGWINCH, or for setting or unsetting raw mode in the terminal), but almost the entire rest of it can be written in, say, Lua.
"The xi editor project is an attempt to build a high quality text editor, using modern software engineering techniques. It is initially built for Mac OS X, using Cocoa for the user interface, but other targets are planned."
https://github.com/martanne/vis
It already has Lua extensions.
Or I might play with a pure python editor
https://github.com/jonathanslenders/pyvim
which is based largely on prompt_toolkit that iPython just adopted
Both editors are "vim like".
Or Lisp. :)
Two things:
1. A "TV mode" that cycles between examples with a pause in between so I can sit going "oooh, okay!" for a few minutes
2. A random mode, with a link that's accessible without scrolling the page down
Bonus: Maybe using cookies/localStorage, remember what's already been seen, and avoid showing it again too quickly.
At least until I started to seriously use it to level up my vi skills. Some of the links (say, for `a` or `g`) goes to the wrong places -- to the entry for `b`. When I stepped back and looked at how to navigate it, I realized the structure is disordered so I have no idea how to get to the info I'd like to see.
I think I can edit and navigate through text as fast as Vim users, using the native OS text editing hotkeys.
This is where I think you are wrong. An experienced vim user has so many faster ways to edit text than someone limited to what the OS provides. Here are some examples:
yt( - Copy characters up to the nearest (
ci{ - Replace text enclosed by curly braces
:g/\(['"]\).*\1/d - Use regex to delete every line containing a string literal
A vim master has thousands of permutations of commands at their disposal the specify exactly how they want to manipulate text in 5 or less keystrokes. But navigation is just one great feature. Vim users can travel backwards in time (:earlier 10m), can have multiple clipboards with different content at the same time, easily record macros on the fly.
But other editors aren't limited to what the OS provides, they build on those basics to provide most of the same features, but in a way that's intuitive to modern users.
For example in Sublime:
>ci{ - Replace text enclosed by curly braces
Ctrl-Shift-M selects text inside brackets. Subsequent presses work outwards through layers of brackets.
>:g/\(['"]\).* \1/d - Use regex to delete every line containing a string literal
Ctrl-F Alt-R (['"]).* \1 Alt-Enter Ctrl-L Delete
>yt( - Copy characters up to the nearest (
Not available out of the box, but there are plugins for it. Although, in my experience of using vim, the mental effort of working out what character I needed for t/f tended to be far more disruptive than just using arrow keys/mouse.
Honestly that was my experience of vim in general. Whenever I had to do anything slightly non-trivial, it took a lot of mental effort to work out the exact command I needed. Whereas Sublime's multiple selections are more intuitive and flexible in unusual situations.
To use your regex example above, depending on the context, I'd probably just use Ctrl-D to step through instances of " checking whether each one is a string (which it probably is), skipping any that aren't, and then Ctrl-L Delete. (And repeat for ') If it's a short file, this is probably about as fast, it flows from muscle memory, and it means I'm actually checking through the changes I'm about to make. (And if it was a massive file, I'd use the regex. My point is just that Sublime offers a more ad-hoc way to do bulk edits where you're not exactly sure what you need to match on.)
Vim is humbling in a way. I have been using it for 5 years and while it destroyed my ability to use a non-vim textfield, which shows me what is already ingrained, there is always a faster way to do a task and always room to improve.
I like that. You come across a better way to do something and now you just remember to do that one thing wherever it applies until you do not have to think about it anymore.
I think you maybe didn't give it enough time. What really happens after a while is that you don't have to do any mental effort to do very complex things fast and efficiently. My experience is that after three months I had some sort of clicking in my head and everything made sense.
Said that, I wouldn't mind Ctrl-D on vim though, that's one of those sublime's features that I really like (and non consecutive multi line editing).
Likewise, some editors are similar enough that you can chop and change quickly, others not so easily. Atom and sublime are like members of the guitar family, while vim is like a piano. They can all produce lovely text files in the hands of a skilled musician
Atom's not attractive to me. It's a ~100MB near-IDE written and extended in web-oriented languages that I'm only lukewarm on learning, and which can't be used remotely, or on all the computers that I'll touch in a given month.
Sublime looks nice, but not so far ahead of vim that I want to take the time to learn it and pay for a license. I suppose that it's worth a trial, but I haven't gotten around to it.
I use vim these days, but to be fair to Sublime, the license isn't really required. Every so often (maybe every 10 times you close a file?) it asks if you'd like to buy a license, but there's no functional restrictions on an unlicensed copy and no consequence for perpetually ignoring the pop-up.
I wouldn't worry about getting around to it too soon. Sublime is great, and it has a plugin to support normal/insert modes and most vim bindings, but I've found that anything I can do in Sublime I can do in vim, and I can't run Sublime on remote hosts. It's an editor, it's always going to be subjective preference.
I understand that, and that's great for trying it out and deciding if I'd like to stick with it or not. Eventually, I'd buy the license, if I liked it well enough. Either I'd spend a bunch of time and learn some concrete reasons for why I didn't want to use Sublime, or I'd find a new best friend, pay $70, and change my workflow to doing more work locally rather than on the remote machines.
It may be worthwhile, and it may not be, but there's a guarantee that I'll be spending a bunch of time finding out. In the end, I was just trying to give a concrete answer for why I was using vim rather than something newer and trendier.
I had to add 200 textboxes to a wpf form two weeks ago. Took me 60 seconds to generate the boilerplate with vim. If you can do it in under 5 minutes in notepad I'd be impressed, here's something similar to the data I was given: http://pastebin.com/Y7hyi2by
note: a) you can do this in excel with stringconcat, and b) the project could have been better designed to prevent the boilerplate but that was outside of my control
1. Select lines. Shift-Ctrl-End, Alt-l, Home.
2. Type up to the first quote.
3. Move 3 words along. Ctrl-Right, Ctrl-Right, Ctrl-Right.
4. Second quote, comma.
5. Go to start of next word. Ctrl-Right, Ctrl-Left. It's also easy to normalize spacing at this point if you just hold shift then press space.
6. Type "StatusType."
7. Press End, type ");".
Most of the time was spent in point 2.
Admittedly Alt-l isn't OS-native, but multiple cursors are so useful that you kind'a learn to assume them.
Even in the rare case that I do something local, I prefer to keep using VIM becuase I know it so well and it is super lightweight.
As some of you mentioned here, it is a professional tool, not easy to learn, requires patience and dedication, but I think in a long term, you will save much more time by doing so and mastering it, rather than sticking to some gui editors where you select with mouse.
Crazy to see this thing on the front page of hacker news.
First off - I JUST started putting the site together and didn't expect any attention yet. So apologies for the bugs and mismatched content. Pull requests welcome at github.com/mrmrs/vimgifs :)
I created vimgifs because I have found gifs to be an effective way to help people learn vim commands. And I really like helping people become more efficient at building out their ideas.
The long term vision is to have a comprehensive set of examples that can be searched in a myriad of ways i.e related commands, all motion commands,all commands available in insert mode, .etc. If it's in :help I want a gif of it!
I don't have an opinion on whether or not vim is 'intuitive' but I will say it is much easier to learn than people make it out to be. I'd say it is infinitely less complex than whatever language you are trying to write in.
It took me less than a week to become more proficient in vim than in textmate - and I knew most of the command and shortcuts in textmate.
To people who say they don't have time to learn vim, a counter: If you are pressed for time so much that you are debating whether or not you have time to learn something... it sounds like vim is definitely for you!
Vim isn't just about key strokes, commands, shortcuts, and the like. The more I learn about vim's capabilities the more I fundamentally think differently about editing and manipulating text. It has branching history, native ability to step through compile errors for ANY language, and navigation methods that truly changed how I think about exploring/navigating a code system. It's also ubiquitous which is pretty rad. I can't remember the last time I touched a computer that didn't have my favorite editor already installed.
I would encourage people not to denounce something they have never possessed. If you are not proficient in vim - it is difficult to denounce how intuitive it is. It's tough to denounce its ways and how much time they might save you.
I have become quite proficient in atom, sublime, textmate, and a few other editors. Even with 'vim mode' enabled these editors do not come close to the power that lies within vim.
But rest assured you can write amazing software with any text editor. I've met a lot of people who are excellent at writing code that never use vim and don't like it much.
In short - I hope this project makes it more fun and less intimidating to learn vim. I was lucky to have some amazing teachers when I got going and would love to pay their efforts forward a little bit.
Thanks for flying vim.
The only disadvantage visible is Internet Explorer users who don't have the plugin installed, in which case you could provide a gif fallback.