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Comment by stevebmark | Hacker News Reader

Using Vim without knowing WAY more than this article is an anti-pattern. Vim is inefficient for editing so you have to learn a lot more than these tricks and hacks to be proficient. If you aren't learning more about Vim's nasty design every day then it's an anti-pattern to use Vim, because you'll be much more efficient with less learning in any other editor. If, for example, you don't know how to edit searches and command-line mode commands in full Vim mode, then keep learning (press control-f in search mode). If you aren't proficient in Vim's garbage VimL then keep learning. Obviously an IDE with intellisense and multiple cursors is more efficient than most of Vim's efficiency hacks. Vim's efficiency gains more apply to editing text, not structured code.

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I started using vim about 10 years ago. I am not an expert user, but I am using enough of it's features that I feel crippled when I am using another editor. I just have to think move this function to another file and my fingers will execute the vim commands.

I don't know any Vim Script. You don't have to know it to use vim, unless you want to write your own plugins.

I tried using an IDE recently (Clion), but it was not really worth it. Vim has plugins for most IDE features, including autocomplete and syntax checking. The only feature that I really miss in Vim automatic refactoring such as inlining functions.

You don't mention interactive debugging in vim ... and I'm not sure there's a good story there that's better than your CLion (Jetbrain's C/C++ IDE) -- I'd like to hear about vim interactive debugging. Perhaps there are other good debugging solutions for C/C++ but I like to edit and debug in the same environment.

Any Python code I write or review in Python I try to give a run-through in PyCharm (JetBrain's Python IDE) interactively -- having a chance to step through code lets me consider more options and corner cases and get a more expansive view on what I'm developing or reviewing.

"vim" is my preferred editor when I'm not in an IDE, and often when writing bash scripts, but over the last ten years especially I've rarely written higher-level language code outside an IDE environment ... and I stick to JetBrain's suite mostly these days.

20 year vim user here... There is a really decent VIM plugin that works with all of the jetbrains IDEs I have used that I would recommend. It will even read your vimrc file! I wouldn’t write Java or C# without an IDE (IntelliJ IDEA and Rider respectively) and the vim plugin makes adjusting to them much less painful.

Do you mean the plugin that is built in or is there different one?

This one https://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugin/164-ideavim

Can you provide the link for that plugin?

I’m not in front of my workstation right now, but I believe this is the one: https://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugin/164-ideavim

It’s not perfect, but it does visual mode and visual block mode and will use as much of your vimrc as it can. Beats the heck out of vanilla IntelliJ that’s for sure.

Vim 8.1 ships with a GDB plugin (TermDebug).

Well, TBH, that sounds naïve. I use vim for way more than 10 years, have 500 lines of vimrc with multiple plugins installed, know pretty much every shortcut by heart, never use arrows and can somewhat write VimL. It is really hard for me to code w/o vim-layout, so I was struggling for a long time, but finally moved onto using JetBrains products (with vim-mode plugin, which is meh, but better than nothing still). I don't really like it, but I have to finally admit, that vim with plugins is not "almost an IDE". Mileage would vary for different languages, but the point is that IDEA/PhpStorm/PyCharm can suggest me so much more than Vim, because it knows the AST, and writing plugins to operate it is currently easier than with vim. I mean, in theory you could install whatever backend you want onto vim, that does AST-parsing and autocompletion, there already exist pretty neat YouCompleteMe, jedi-vim (for python) and even heavy artillery such as eclim, but unfortunately it's all far from "solid support", and VimL is not the most friendly environment to write plugins for.

I really wish there was an IDE that would be IDE-first (building an AST for each file, and using it for most of the functionality + making it easily usable in the scriptable plugins), but had the UI and usability of vim, but there doesn't seem to be any.

I am currently writing C++ code. The vim plugins I am using are YouCompleteMe, Syntastic, UltiSnips and TermDebug. In combinations these plugins give me most functionality that an IDE has.

Like I said, Clion (which is a JetBrains product) has some great functionality which goes beyond that. The one I found the most useful is the refactoring functionality. I actually opened Clion just to refactor some code on Friday. But it also has drawbacks. I am working a very large codebase and Clion is very slow.

What's the loc size of codebase? I've been using clion on blender (several million loc) and it runs pretty neat.

I work at Google, so it's in the billions.

mind blown good luck with that.

edit: Let's take 2 billion. Assuming 60 characters per line, that'll take around 120GB just to keep the text in memory! Would the ast representation of whole codebase be smaller or larger in size?

You may want to keep an eye on https://microsoft.github.io/language-server-protocol and https://github.com/w0rp/ale.

Any editor that supports it will have very very high quality auto complete and other IDE-like benefits like jumping to definitions.

It's still in its early stages but it's shaping up to be a game changer if you want those features.

I am using https://github.com/prabirshrestha/vim-lsp

https://langserver.org has a very useful set of tables. It currently has 5 entries labeled "vim/neovim".

That's great. After moving that function, rename the file in Vim to reflect the change. Just kidding. Made you sweat though, huh?

Not knowing how to use a more productive IDE doesn't mean that Vim is more productive.

You believing that renaming a file is difficult in Vim shows that you don’t know Vim as well as you think you do.

Here, I’ll do it completely from memory for you, while typing on my iPhone.

    :saveas newfile.ext<cr><c-^>:!rm %<cr><cr>:bd<cr>

And of course, you could always use the command line to rename anything.

I wrote a plugin to do it, which is way better than what you posted. And they're both way worse than an IDE. And the command line is least efficient of all for this task.

I’d like to remind you that you are arguing about the efficiency of renaming a file.

This argument is so nonsensical it doesn’t bear contemplating.

yup, you're right, talking about concrete examples of efficiency in a thread about efficiency is "so nonsensical," which you only pointed out after posting dozens of keystrokes for something that takes two keystrokes in well designed editors.

Excluding the filename and extension which would have to type out in any case, there are actually only 22 keystrokes there.

So, not dozens.

You could also not bother destroying the old buffer.

You could also do:

    :!mv % newfile.txt<cr><cr>:e newfile.txt

Again excluding the filename and extension, that's a total of 12 keystrokes.

And again, this is not a task anyone spends much of their working life performing.

Give up.

I guess the point is that even such small tasks require typing cryptic commands in vim.

Nah. You can get by just great if you know movements(h,j,k,l,w,b,W,B) and I, i ,A , a, o, O, dd, f, v, and how to use numbers with all that and how to combine them and how to quit and save. If you want to look like a wizard, learn to search/replace, ciw, star(*), macros and the dot(.). By now you probably have a custom config...

>Vim is inefficient for editing

Probably the first time someone ever thought this inane idea.

>Vim's nasty design

OK, trolling, next.

> Vim is inefficient for editing

I learned vim a bit more than 20 years ago and can tell you it’s a very efficient tool. Fair enough if I was doing most of my coding in a single language it might be worthwhile to learn a different IDE. You’re welcome to use a different tool that better fits your needs. And hope that you find it at your next workplace or the legacy server that you are asked to fix.

To an extent you're right. I've used vim for 20 years, and in the first say 5 years I would spend a lot of time tweaking configs, learning new commands etc. I don't think I will ever make back the time I spend on that in saved editing time.

However, the main benefit of vim isn't so much 'increased speed' (to me) but rather 'feels like a solid tools in my hands', or even better, 'feels like an extension of my mind'. No other editor gives me that - there are always these small micro-interruptions of 'reaching for mouse, aim at menu, miss, try again' or 'take hands off home row, now my elbow isn't in a comfortable position any more when I go back'.

It's like using say a Hilti, blue Bosch or Makita cordless drill vs a no-name or even cheaper brand name one. You can drill holes or screw screws just as well, but the reduced vibrations and excess power and tighter fit of everything just make everything feel more effortless and make you spend less time on being annoyed at the tools, even if they're all just 'micro-annoyances' that don't add up to any measurable time wasted. The more expensive ones (in Vim's case, expensive in learning time) are still worth it.

Been using vim for 'years' and I am not using it 'perfectly'. What I have noticed is that like with i3wm with vim you create your own way of working with it. You just find the way that works for you.

Nice gatekeeping

The article doesn't specify whether you're coding or not. It even says "whether writing code, poetry, or prose" at the top.

Do you have an example where multiple cursors are efficient, but Vim is not?

I easily can: modifying multiple expressions that have different length, but the same ending and are separated with some lines of code in between. In vim I either do it manually (because the movement is truly faster) or record a macro. In most "modern" text-editors I could do it with multiple cursors. Recording a macro always feels a bit more energy-consuming, than just making all the changes visually.

TBH, now that I'm mostly using an IDE with vim-plugin for work, I still prefer writing macros in such situations than using multiple cursors, because such situations are rare enough, and the power of habit is strong.

Sounds like a job for the "global" ex command (with or without a macro).

Although you have to admit that Vim is excellent at beeping.

> Using Vim without knowing WAY more than this article is an anti-pattern.

VIM is about composing small and straightforward operations, like in functional programming. So with several primitives you get a lot of combinations. So the idea actually is the opposite: Learn just a few primitives and get your shit done using the combinations, which can be very flexible and powerful.

> you have to learn a lot more than these tricks and hacks to be proficient

The techniques highlighted in this article are not tricks nor hacks. It's actually more like VIM 101. Surely VIM has a lot of hacks but these definitely aren't among those. You don't sound very informed about VIM here.

> Obviously an IDE with intellisense and multiple cursors is more efficient than most of Vim's efficiency hacks.

Obvious to you, maybe. Funny you believe that something that has caused a shitload of controversy can actually be obvious. Please don't serve your personal opinion as being "obvious". To me, and I'd say to many others, it's not only not obvious, but "obviously" wrong.

Also VIM has multiple cursors for some time albeit as a plugin: https://github.com/terryma/vim-multiple-cursors

> Vim is inefficient for editing

> Vim's efficiency gains more apply to editing text, not structured code.

First of all, structured code is text, so Vim's efficiency gains have to apply to it as well, there can't be any denying that. On top of plain text, VIM has other easily applicable features for structured code such as text objects, folding, highlighting, auto-completion and tag-browsing. These are not very hard to get right.

> If you aren't proficient in Vim's garbage VimL then keep learning

VimL really is garbage, I'll give you that. The trick is that you don't really need to learn it. I'm a ~10 years VIM user and still don't know anything about the VimL syntax (intentionally). The secret is that you can have a very effective VIM config around ~50 lines which itself mostly consists of settings, file type specific settings and aliases. But if you try to make VIM behave as something it wasn't meant to be, you'll be sorry.

I think that the confusion comes from the tendency of comparing VIM to IDEs, as well as trying to make VIM behave like IDEs. In my opinion, most people in the VIM community are "guilty" of this as well.

If you need an IDE, but you want VIM's mode and command composition driven approaches and keybindings as well; the wiser choice would probably be a modern IDE that supports a VIM mode.

For me, stuff like popping fancy file browsers or git wrappers from VIM is not what I'm looking for in the VIM experience.

But if what one wants is to get stuff done in the terminal; then one should learn a couple of UNIX tools instead of installing a gazillion of VIM plugins.

In short, if you need a modern IDE, use a freaking modern IDE. No need to make ignorant comments about our beloved VIM.

Linking to that plugin means you haven't used it. Use an IDE that supports this well, not an incredibly buggy hack to get basic editing features.

You don't need a plugin to get multiple cursors in Vim.

Go into visual block mode, press j a few times to select more lines, and hit I to go into insert mode. When you finish the insertion, you'll see the same insertion has been performed across all the selected lines.

You are clearly trolling, and/or you have far less knowledge of vim than you think you have. You are only making yourself look bad here.

That's much more limited than multiple cursors. Have you used that feature in other editors?

It is more limited, yes. It is only useful in rather trivial cases.

For everything else, there’s macros. Macros are unarguably far more powerful and useful than multiple cursors.

Visual block mode is constrained by absolute cursor position. Multiple cursors is constrained by relative cursor position. Macros have no constraints whatsoever, and can even be recursive.

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