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Comment by AdmiralAsshat | Hacker News Reader

To go to the reverse route, I'm a SublimeText and Vim user that's debating going back to pure vim.

Much of the functionality that I used ST for I found Vim could do naturally, with no plugins. This presentation taught me alot (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3TX3kV3TICU), such as basic command completion.

There is some stuff that Sublime can still do that I don't think Vim can (multi-cursor editing comes to mind, and that's still really handy when I'm making edits to HTML). Other stuff can be done by both but I happen to like ST's better (the awesome GitHub package comes to mind).

And finally, I did pay $70 for an ST license, so I imagine I'll keep using it for another few years or so. But given that I do alot of remote administration on RHEL/CentOS boxes where vim is the only thing I can safely assume to be installed, it doesn't hurt to stay fluent in vim for such a day.

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> There is some stuff that Sublime can still do that I don't think Vim can (multi-cursor editing comes to mind, and that's still really handy when I'm making edits to HTML) […].

https://github.com/terryma/vim-multiple-cursors

I use this with NeoVim and it works perfectly.

Good to know! Although based on my scenario above, I'd prefer to keep it to vanilla vim, at least until I feel I've mastered it. I thought I had at least a moderate understanding, but 20 minutes of 'vim' searches on youtube demonstrates that the rabbit hole goes far deeper than I could have imagined.

I'm trying this route as well. ST is so much easier to use and learn because it's like all the other editors I've ever used. Vim is completely different in everything, it's an entire other language.

My underlying thought is though, that if I can become fluent in Vim's world, the layer between thought and coding becomes thinner.

I do want to write a translators guide from ST to Vim. Simple things like 'Tabs = Buffers' (which are different to Tab pages) I had no idea about until recently.

I'm strongly considering Spacemacs or evil mode having seen some of the cool things emacs can do, but aside from that, no text editor has ever grabbed me like vim. n++, Sublime, Atom, VS Code - I just don't achieve the same level of flow with any of them.

I've been dabbling with Spacemacs for a while now (after having looked at Vim to the point of being able to handle day-to-day editing well enough), and have to say I quite like it. The mnemonics work well enough.

I have previously been using ST too, though, and so far find two of its nicer features lacking in both Vim and Spacemacs:

1) Ctrl-Shift-P. ST's menu is really nice and I always seemed to search for the right words in order to find what I was looking for. You can emulate it with plugins in Vim, and Spacemacs' ´SPC :´ comes close, but they both end up being a bit more awkward than necessary (with emacs, it's mostly due to the function naming scheme and the terminology used).

2) I found the various flavors of multi cursor support in both Vim and Spacemacs not to be equally elegant as in ST. ST allowed you to do some amazing edits with Ctrl-F and some basic Regex knowledge (using Alt-Return). On the other hand, I learned that this can mostly be mitigated by the usage of mostly simple on-the-fly macros with Vim-syntax, so it's not that much of a problem.

Thank you you have just saved me weeks worth(or more) of time over my future lifetime.

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