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Comment by syncopatience | Hacker News Reader

I wonder why text editor preferences are so personal. I use the same editor and probably 90% of the same config as this guy and was nodding along until I saw he remapped B and E. Horrifying! Those are fundamental motions.

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I’m always surprised at the number of people who recommend mapping `,` as their Leader key; it’s almost as useful as its counterpart, `;`. I suspect that such people never learned vanilla Vi and use `f`, `t` and related line movement commands.

When I learned Vim, I started with the `vimtutor` tutorial. At the end of the tutorial, it suggests Learning the Vi Editor - by Linda Lamb (O’Reilly)[1] for further reading. I found this book to be excellent for providing a solid grounding on Vi – and its descendants such as Vim. For a while, I constrained myself to using Vim in Vi-compatibilty mode before using the many wonderful features provided by Vim.

I try to keep my vimrc as lean as possible so that I’m not reliant on having it available (even though I have it in a Git repository on my VPS) and it’s only in the last couple of years that I’ve started adding plugins to it (Syntastic and Unicycle).

[1] http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9781565924260.do

"I’m always surprised at the number of people who recommend mapping `,` as their Leader key; it’s almost as useful as its counterpart, `;`. I suspect that such people never learned vanilla Vi and use `f`, `t` and related line movement commands."

I've been using vim for years, but I completely disagree with your statement. I rarely find the "," key useful, so to me it was a no-brainer to switch to using it as the leader. I just have ",;" mapped to the functionality that "," used to do.

I use ";" all the time, but searching backwards just barely comes up. Usually, I'll hit "home" and then repeat my "f" search if I need it.

Thanks for different perspective (and to otterpro and tasuki). I use `;` much more often than `,` but I still find the `,` useful when I’ve gone past the position I want to go to, e.g., typing `5fx` when I should really have have used `4fx`.

> I’m always surprised at the number of people who recommend mapping `,` as their Leader key; it’s almost as useful as its counterpart, `;`. I suspect that such people never learned vanilla Vi and use `f`, `t` and related line movement commands.

I use `,` as Leader, as well as to search back if I happen to `;` over something I was looking for. I don't mind waiting 400ms (my `timeoutlen`).

I agree that we shouldn't use "," or ";". I prefer to use SPACE as the leader key, as it is probably the most prominent key and also easiest to reach, but I can understand why some would use "," or ";" because of it's easy reachability and the fact that those keys aren't as used as often (at least for novice users). Perhaps it should be part of "best practice" in Vim.

I was listening to a recent TalkPython podcast with Dougal Matthews titled "Effective Code Reviews". Host Kennedy asks every interviewee what is their favorite editor. Dougal's answer: (44:35-44:48) "I use Vim all the time. Yeah, I work in so many remote servers and VMs that I have some scripts to kind of set up my Vim environment on that machine, and then it's just great."

Who knew it would be that easy to switch to your own personal VIM setup?

It is easy once you have put in the hours (days? months?) learning what you need and then scripting the setup... :)

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