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Comment by learc83 | Hacker News Reader

Vim has been a bit of a mixed blessing for me. I rarely actually use vim, but I use the keybindings everywhere.

It's great because I can fairly comfortably move between most editors because most editors have a vim mode.

The downside is that most editors don't have a complete vim mode, so it's never 100%.

Ah see what really bugs me is that most vim modes do try to be a complete vim mode (and the fact that they never succeed just adds insult to injury), they always try to be a vim emulator instead of providing vim-like keybindings that make sense in the context of the editor.

I do appreciate that I'm very much in the minority here though.

Neovim has a plugin api that let's it be used as a "real vim" back end for text editor plugins.

And I'm still searching for the good Python and PHP IDE that implements it. I'm hoping that Jetbrains will, as I use IdeaVIM in a few if their products, but right now I always have to switch between the IDE for general editing and VIM 8 or NeoVim for terrific macros or some hardcore surgery. Having that power right in PyCharm or any other decent IDE would be a dream.

I'd argue that evil is the exception to this. It's vim emulation is astoundingly good.

Bonus points for using vim mode on browser editors like CodeMirror or ACE, and then trying to delete a word via <C-w>.

I have 'command' on the mac mapped to meta, sometimes I try to delete a word or reflow a paragraph...

Add to that using C-q often in Emacs to insert literal characters when using sth. like quail, and then forgetting you're in a text area and not in Emacs and hitting C-q. Fortunately Firefox restores the content of the text area...

I use vim bindings in zsh, tmux (tmux modality plugin) and chrome (vimium). Pretty much 95 percent of my computer interactions right there.

Why not just use vim? Why bother with other editors? I have changed jobs but carry my dot files with me.

>Why not just use vim? Why bother with other editors?

Because I use C# a lot and I really like all the support I get from Visual Studio.

That's quite like my experience. I started out with Emacs, but I learned Vim along the way and the key bindings are awesome. I use them in other editors, but often they conflict with the editor's defaults, or they're not emulated properly. I don't use Vim exclusively (I couldn't get to customize it, couldn't get to learn vimscript), but the key bindings are great.

Exactly this is what I was thinking when I concurrently left kind of the same comment but with a lot less clarity: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16552613. I am stuck in vi mode everywhere, but different flavors. And yet I like it a lot. (The latest version of JetBrains' vi mode with zero latency is great!)

VS Code comes close though. Would still rather hit Vim/Neovim to do work in.

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