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Comment by jimnotgym | Hacker News Reader

For someone mostly playing with Python, and using Atom, what is the great step forward that editors like Vim and Emacs offer?

I read things like this occasionally and still don't really get why? Why is the learning curve worth it?

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Vim, at its core, is a language for manipulating text. When you "think" in Vim, you are writing small one-off (or stored, in the case of macros) programs to do something to a text file. Once you become familiar with the basic building blocks, you can construct complex text manipulation commands on the fly. I've found that while programming I often spend more time reading or thinking than writing, but when I _am_ writing, I usually bump against an input bottleneck as I generally have a good idea of the changes I want to make. Vim speeds up that step.

I am a lazy person. I don't want to bother moving my hands away from my keyboard. I just want to spend my time thinking. Thus, vim is a natural choice. I'm also a big terminal fan. I have my vim and my tmux. They both fit extremely well, and I live in there. That said, at the end of the day, vim is just another editor. In my opinion, the best out there, but it's no more than that. If you are comfortable with atom, keep using it. If you are curious about vim, install a plugin that emulates the basic vim movement keys. You are not gonna be less of a programmer for not using it. That said, I think everyone would gain a lot by just using a basic vim emulator on top of whichever editor they use. You don't have to give up your current tools.

The comment below from MichaelGG sums it up perfectly for me:

> Easiest way to think of it is to think of how frustrating it is watching someone do everything with a mouse, not knowing any shortcuts. Clicking File -> Exit instead of the window's X. Or deleting a whole line of text just to change one word. Not knowing Ctrl-X/C/V.

Vim(and I guess emacs) are another layer on top of that.

My take on it, use what is easiest for you. Especially in your situation where it sounds like you are more of a recreational/casual programmer. Free time is a precious commodity and in your case it is probably better spent getting more familiar with python. If/when programming becomes your full time career (or passion), then it might make sense to start playing around with vim. But for what it's worth, I program for a living and I use Sublime. It works for me, and I spend an order of magnitude more time on other tasks (reasoning about code, working on infrastructure, code review, design meetings) than I do 'struggling with my text editor'. Until you really feel like your editor is holding you back, you are probably fine sticking with Atom.

I think you may be right, I write some code as part of my job, but it is not my main job. I fell on Atom purely because I was trying Atom out at the time when I happened to get into a larger than normal project. Otherwise I would probably have stuck with Sublime (from which it obviously takes some inspiration).

I have had to do a little with Visual Studio in the past, and I feel like you spend more time learning the IDE than you do learning to code. I think I will stick with Atom and leave Vim, Emacs et al to the full timers!

I think one of the most under-mentioned features of vim is that a line is one of its fundamental units.

Suppose you want to move a few lines of code from one function to another in a regular GUI text editor. If you select these lines with a mouse you need to be careful about exactly where you click to start highlighting and where you end highlighting. Do you start from the beginning of the first line or from the end of the previous line? Do you include the new line at the end? (Can you even?) Then, when you paste, where do you paste? Do you just put the cursor on the line you want to paste before and paste? Or do you put the cursor at the end of the line you want to paste after, hit enter and then paste? Oops, you did it wrong and now this the first line isn't indented at all, or now you have two lines of code on one line.

After a while you figure out where you need start and end the selection, and where you need to paste, but it's still easy to mess up.

This isn't an issue in vim. Using Visual Line mode selecting and pasting is super simple. 'V' to enter visual line mode, 'j' and 'k' to highlight everything you want (and 'o' to switch which end of block you're moving!), 'y' to yank (copy) or 'd' to delete. Then put the cursor _anywhere on the line_ that you want to paste after and hit 'p'.

The ease of use is one thing, but I also think it makes more sense to have an entire line be a fundamental unit. When you're editing code, you're usually moving codes around or editing single lines. I rarely copy and paste just one part of a line to another, and I think in most cases it's easier to just paste the line and change the parts I don't want.

Well, for one, it seems more natural to open vim in the terminal than opening Atom

Then, Vim automation (like doing a search/replace) seems more straightforward

It's also useful when vim is all you have (remote systems or if your X server became borked)

But Atom is fine and you shouldn't worry about it

First of all it's far easier to learn than most people make it out to be. As for why I decided to learn vim: I grew tired of having to switch IDEs depending on the language I use and most importantly memorizing their different sets of keybindings. Now I only have to learn vim's keybindings.

speed and efficiency.

some people don't care about those things, some people do.

For me, all this talk about "speed and efficiency" has put me off of trying vim for a good while—I thought it was a waste to spend time and effort improving the speed of something that was never a bottleneck to start with.

However I did give vim a try eventually and use it now exclusively, but the reason I like it is comfort. Navigating around and doing operations is sooo much more comfortable now that I don't have to use a mouse or repeated key presses, plus all the many helpful shortcuts it has.

Exactly the kind of thing I have read. But nothing explaining how it achieves that

So it has keyboard shortcuts, and I guess I could add those to another editor...

Is it one of those things you just have to take someones word for it, have a go with it and see?

It's not the shortcuts, it's how they work. The thing about vi shortcuts is that they form a composable "language" of sorts, so instead of having to memorize a set of shortcuts for doing specific things, you memorize motions and actions and the rules to compose these.

For example, in another editor you might have ctrl-K to delete a line (dd in vim) , but what about deleting 4 lines? in vim, it's 4dd.

Or you might want to delete from the start of a block to the end... The motion for block in vim is %, so to delete a block, you'd do "d%". Similarly, deletion to the end of the line is d$

In visual block mode (ctrl-v) you can select a bunch of text and apply an action (eg. a simple replace, which would be :s/foo/bar) on only that text.

Even if you just learn a bit at the surface, the free composability of motions with actions makes even classic vi (which doesn't even support arrow keys for moving around) extremely comfortable to use, and most of the time you don't need to twist your hands into uncomfortable chords involving multiple modifier keys.

"Another editor" presumably means Emacs, but isn't Vi vs Emacs dead? In 2017, the argument is really Vi-or-Emacs vs other editors.

In Emacs, deleting four lines is Alt-4 Ctrl-K, usually written M-4 C-K.

One way to delete a whole block (meaning a paragraph?) is M-h Backspace. Deletion to the end of the link is C-K.

Selecting a region is done with C-Space, running a simple replace is then M-% foo bar !

I'm not an expert with Emacs. The most useful function I use is the macros, which saves me learning many other functions. F3 starts macro recording, F4 ends it, then F4 again runs the macro. It's easy to script changes and run them in this way.

Ctrl-K is just what came to mind. I think it works in both nano and emacs, and the mnemonic is "kill"

Emacs is without a doubt superior technology when compared to vim. There are perfectly usable vi clones that run on Emacs, after all. The main benefit vi has over emacs is that it's everywhere (except windows :() in some form, so even on a completely unfamiliar machine away from your highly developed dotfiles, your muscle memory still works to an extent.

The main reason I don't use an Emacs implementation of vi is that muscle memory is really bothersome to retrain, and the differences are enough to disrupt my workflow rather badly when using eg. Spacemacs. I just haven't found the benefits to be significant enough to outweigh the inconvenience of retraining myself.

It's more than keyboard shortcuts, vim has different sets of commands that can be composed to take different actions. Say, typing di" [d]eletes what's [i]nside a pair of ["] characters. Also vim is more powerful if used as a Unix tool instead of per se, it's more of a citizen of that ecosystem.

There are different paradigms in development environments, Unix+a text editor is one. There are also those like Emacs, Acme, and usual IDEs. One has to choose which is better for their use. Say if you're a Mac or iOS dev maybe XCode is better for you, but if you're writing C, Perl, Python, etc., Unix & Vi is a nice environment. If you're doing Lisp, Emacs is the best environment out there (though Emacs and Vim are extensible, so they have some tooling for all the languages out there).

It's not just that it has shortcuts, per se, but that these shortcuts are sort of "fundamental units", which combine in interesting and intuitive ways, often resulting in efficient text editing.

The latter is rather subjective. I love vim for small projects, which, being a grad student, is most of what I write. However, I prefer IDE's for large projects with multiple files and hierarchies.

You can get vim-shortcuts for other editors. I really like using those in Intellij for example.

One thing I have noticed however is, that once you are good at the vim keyboard shortcut "language" (as someone described it above), you tend to use other features in the editor a lot less. And if you don't use the features, you might as well just use vim neat.

in your editor, without leaving the keyboard, how would you search-and-replace using a 2-variable regex, only between lines 275 and 1305, and then turn every instance of 'TEST_' into a lowercase, but only on the lines that didn't match?

How often do you find yourself doing operations like this? I feel like it would take me more time to formulate and confirm that your set of commands are correct than it would for me to just ctrl+f to each instance and then ctrl-v the ones that needed to be changed. Don't get me wrong, I think it is really cool that you can do this, but it feels like this requires a level of fu that is beyond most typical programmers.

you search and replace by hand?

... are you serious?

Thanks for the substantive reply;)

In almost all cases where I need to do a find/replace there are typically no more than 4-5 references that need to be updated. And I think a better way to phrase my behavior is I search, inspect the code to make sure that my change won't introduce a bug or some unintended consequence, and then replace. This may be slower, but in the grand scheme of things it barely registers on my overall productivity and if it saves even one bug from getting introduced into the code than the extra time spent probably pays for itself. If I need to update more than just a handful of references, than Sublime has a perfectly functional find/replace tool, but I have only ever really needed it maybe 3-4 times in the last few years.

To get back to the question at hand. How long does it take you to formulate these series of commands in your example? Because to me it feels like it would take longer to come up with a correct set of commands for your example than it would be to just search and replace 'by hand'. Of course if you are updating 100's of references than spending some extra time to formulate your solution makes sense, but in your example, you limited your search ~1000 loc, so presumably you are only updating a few lines, maybe a dozen at most? I understand that vim is powerful tool, but it seems to solve problems that I don't have (or that I don't consider to be problems), and I am genuinely curious as to the sort of problems and types of code bases that vim aficionados work on.

In vim, it would probably have to be done in two separate commands

    # Search and replace using a 2-variable regex
    :275,1305s/two_variable_regex/first\1second\2/g

    # Replace TEST_ with test_
    :275,1305g!/a_regex/s/TEST_/test_/g

But, if it's too convoluted to do something like this in vim, you can instead do something like:

    :275,1305 !perl -ne '# substitution, then print'

I would do this in awk. I could specify the line numbers. Or I could use the editor option to pass selection through said awk script. Or I could pipe xclip to and from the script.

Someone else could do it with sed, but I prefer awk.

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