VsVim Update Released (Version 0.9.3) (VIM extension for Visual Studio) | Hacker News Reader

VsVim Update Released (Version 0.9.3) (VIM extension for Visual Studio)

blogs.msdn.com

16 pointsrayvega12 comments

I always imagined the intersection of the programmers who love Vi and the programmers who love Visual Studio was very, very small...

Not really. Both are excellent tools (in completely different ways).

I think the intersection of programmers who use Vim and programmers who use VS for their day job is much higher. I do a mix of .NET, Perl, Javascript, and HTML at my job, so depending on my current task, I may be using VS2010 or Vim, so it is very nice to use the same set of keybindings between applications.

It's not entirely about loving Visual Studio, it's mostly about VS being something you have to use.

Curious: why use vi inside VS and not a standalone vi or gvim?

Mainly because of the benefits VS provides, e.g. intellisense, refactoring with Resharper, macros such as Go To Declaration/Implementation, compile within the IDE and navigate to any compilation errors, run unit tests etc. etc.

How does this relate to ViEmu? Does it work equally well?

Disclaimer: I've not used ViEmu.

As I understand it, VsVim is a much younger project that is open source, rapidly progressing and has set itself the goal of being good at the things it does and not trying to expand those too fast.

ViEmu (not having used it!) seems to try and replace more of the VS functionality, while VsVim seems to try and be "vim for the editing, leave as much of the rest intact as possible."

Hmm I'm not sure, there isn't anything I can think of that it 'replaces' in VS; only the editor parts, obviously. I mean you can still Ctrl-F to search in a file, but a vimmer would use /<regex> of course. But well if vsvim works... I'll keep an eye on that project.

(as a side note, I wonder what motivates people to write plugins like this for fun. If the rage-inducing experience that is writing addins for Office is any indication of what it's like to write plugins for Visual Studio, I'd rather burn off my nipples with a hot poker than writing one of them in my spare time).

Anyway what I love about ViEmu is how over the years it has managed to incorporate things to give it the true Vim experience that VS couldn't do, like search highlighting, easy 'search for word under cursor' etc.

(maybe newer versions of VS have these things build in, I've been using ViEmu and Visual Assist since VS 2003 so I'm not 100% sure any more of what comes from these plugins or what is 'native' functionality :) ).

viemu just makes the VS editor act like vim. It doesn't replace much, if any, existing functionality.

Both viemu and vsvim have the problem of vim key commands and VS key commands clashing quite a bit.

My experiences with it have been that it is less feature complete than ViEmu, but the author has been great at implementing things that I create a bug report about on the github for the project. So if you use it and you find something not working equally well, make a bug report https://github.com/jaredpar/VsVim

This plugin has been a god send for me. It works well for most basic command and some complicated ones. The developer is very quick to respond to bugs and issues; and is accessible via twitter.

Interesting side note is that the developer works for microsoft and as a result he cannot accept external patches. Which sucks because this is written in F# and it would be neat to learn some and help out.

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