Hacker News Reader

Comment by grantm | Hacker News Reader

"I never run gvim, are there any real advantages that I am missing?"

If you're an Emacs user, probably no particular advantage. I use GVim because as a GUI app it allows me to use my mouse for stuff like selecting areas and copy/pasting. I also like the workflow of having my file open for editing in a separate window and getting my shell prompt back straight away.

View on HN

If you are running vim in a terminal, then try ":set mouse=a" and it will use the XTerm mouse extensions. Most terminals support this (gnome-terminal, xfce4-terminal, rxvt-unicode, xterm). I don't know about the level of support in Putty, Terminal.app or iTerm.app though.

Works pretty well in PuTTY, but you lose your local mouse support since clicks/drags are now passed straight to the server rather than selecting/copying/pasting text from PuTTY to the Windows clipboard. It's a tradeoff between easier text manipulation in vim, vs easier text transfer between the PuTTY window and other local windows (and vice versa).

However, PuTTY only switches on XTerm mouse reporting when an app needs it, so it should be easy enough to bind ":set mouse=a"/":set mouse-=a" to a hot key, and toggle mouse support on and off depending on the required operation.

There are some terminals which support tabbed windows, and copy and paste. If you have access to those terminals, the reasons you gave for using gVim don't apply. Though I'm not really sure that being able to use the mouse for copy and paste in vim is an advantage. I thought that one of the big productivity boosts when using vim was being able to ditch the mouse. Aren't you suppose to use v[movement]"+y to get something to your clipboard?

If you do want to use the mouse for selection for copy/paste, then selecting across the terminal text doesn't really work. Things like line numbers, folds, line-wrap characters and ':set list' characters end up in the selection when you don't let vim intelligently filter these things out for you.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com