Comment by cornedpig | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cornedpig | Hacker News Reader

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I have, XEmacs -> Vim.

I had a very simple reason. I spend 4 hours a day in front of an editor, so I need something very powerful. I had standardized on XEmacs, but I had to stop when the pinky muscle strain got too bad (this was years after having remapped caps-lock to control). My hand would hurt when I got home.

I usually program in C/C++, Perl, and some XML & text editing, so I wasn't using Emacs' dynamic or programmable features much.

Vim is attractive because there's not really a need for modifier keys, just key sequences. Additionally, the great text navigation features are good when working with large existing codebases, it makes reading other people's code easier.

I kept going back to Emacs for XML editing for a while, but the mental overhead of keeping track of two systems is a bit much, and I found Komodo Edit a nice replacement (that incidentally also has a Vi-mode).

The only thing I really miss from Emacs is being able to "Ctrl-K" 3 times and pressing "Ctrl-Y" once to move 3 lines. With Vim you have to count the number of lines ahead of the operation, which is a real speedbump.

> With Vim you have to count the number of lines ahead of the operation, which is a real speedbump.

With Vim 7.3, a new option 'relativenumber' was introduced to help with this.

From :h relativenumber

Show the line number relative to the line with the cursor in front of each line. Relative line numbers help you use the |count| you can precede some vertical motion commands (e.g. j k + -) with, without having to calculate it yourself. Especially useful in combination with other commands (e.g. y d c < > gq gw =).

"The only thing I really miss from Emacs is being able to "Ctrl-K" 3 times and pressing "Ctrl-Y" once to move 3 lines. With Vim you have to count the number of lines ahead of the operation, which is a real speedbump."

V-jjj-x

If I understand you correctly. I don't speak emacs.

> The only thing I really miss from Emacs is being able to "Ctrl-K" 3 times and pressing "Ctrl-Y" once to move 3 lines. With Vim you have to count the number of lines ahead of the operation, which is a real speedbump.

I agree this is a big problem, and here are 2 ways I combat this in vi.

One way to combat this: Use } and {. These cursor controls in vi move to the next blank line. If you structure your source code such that you have paragraphs sections or blank lines between major operations, this works very well. Arguably, good code should have a brief comment explaining what or why something is happening, followed by somewhere between 1 and 8 lines that do the work. If your code follows this style, then the } and { keys in vi navigate that code ultra quickly. Say you've got 2 paragraphs that now need to go into an if statement, you press 2}>> and it just indented those lines for you, without you having to count how many lines it was.

Another way to combat the problem of counting lines is with named markers. Go to the first line and press mk. This creates mark k. Go to the end of the section you're interested in, and do something like >'k. This indents the code starting from point k down to where you're at.

> The only thing I really miss from Emacs is being able to "Ctrl-K" 3 times and pressing "Ctrl-Y" once to move 3 lines. With Vim you have to count the number of lines ahead of the operation, which is a real speedbump.

I suppose you are a recent Vimer. I'd suggest to once in a while peruse threads offering Vim tips, such as in Stackoverflow. You might find some true gems in there. As noted by auxbuss, [shift-v jjj x] solves your issue.

That's the main thing I use visual mode for in Vim: to avoid having to count the number of lines. From the start of the block you just press 'v' then move the cursor to the end of the block; once you've got the lines highlighted, the yank and delete operations will automatically use them.

There are actually three visual modes in vim:

  v

  V

and

  CTRL-v

It's well worth your time to learn them all.

See

  :help visual-use

for more info.

Thanks! I knew about CTRL-v but didn't know about line-wise block mode ('V').

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