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Comment by nirui | Hacker News Reader

I started to heavily using vim since the last few months because writing code through SSH is very attractive for my current situation.

For me, learning vim is like learning an foreign language, a few hundred words (or few hotkey/:commands for vim) can get you started, but it's not easy to reach the level of native speakers, and some old rules in your language (for example, HJKL keys in vim vs the "natural" arrow keys) will interfere your progress.

Maybe I'm going to piss many people off here, but vim is not an user-friendly text editor. An user friendly editor should pop some kind of prompt when I pressed the first g/G key and show me what I could press the next, not telling me to read :help (which probably has the volume of a dictionary at this point).

Based on my 2 minutes with Micro and the information I read from it's `help defaultkeys`, the size of it's hotkeys are more healthy and manageable. So that's a plus from me.

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I would say that vi (at least the more modern ones) is user-friendly, but not beginner-friendly. You really do need to start by running vimtutor.

Eh, I wouldn't even call it that. I consider it to be similar to git: you can do some incredible things with it, and people who know how to use it can do so effectively, but there is a lot of room for improvement.

and read an introductory text about the basic concepts like https://stackoverflow.com/a/1220118/5208540 (2800+ Votes, not mine)

> An user friendly editor should pop some kind of prompt when I pressed the first g/G key and show me what I could press the next,

See vim-which-key [1] and which-key.nvim [2] for something similar to this.

[1]: https://github.com/liuchengxu/vim-which-key

[2]: https://github.com/folke/which-key.nvim

For those add-ons, don't you have to provide them with the prompts? You still need to actively _know_ how to do something to have it provide you with information.

You can use something like LunarVim which has everything already setup.

Absolutely agree that it's not a user-friendly text editor. It _does_ increase productivity when you're proficient. TBH being proficient took me a lot of time, mostly fueled by wanting to be cool in my first job (it failed), all in all I'm not entirely convinced it's a good investment.

But being able to edit using Vim at all is very very useful to edit files on servers, which happens very often in various situations.

I will 100% agree that neither emacs nor vim are "beginner-friendly", I would hesitate to call them "not user-friendly", they're just very particular about what users they're friendly with.

> Maybe I'm going to piss many people off here, but vim is not an user-friendly text editor. An user friendly editor should pop some kind of prompt when I pressed the first g/G key and show me what I could press the next, not telling me to read :help (which probably has the volume of a dictionary at this point).

For anyone that wants this: these kinds of plugins are usually called "which key" after the Emacs mode. Most of the Emacs distros ship with which-key by default and it works very well with evil.

I get the sense that they're less popular on the Vim end, though I'm not sure why.

There's always VSCode with the Remote SSH plugin, unless you prefer the minimal setup.

> An user friendly editor should pop some kind of prompt when I pressed the first g/G key and show me what I could press the next, not telling me to read :help

You might be interested in the Kakoune editor. Despite being superficiality similar it's not Vim compatible, which may make it a nonstarter, and it has its own flaws that keep me from using it, but it makes a point of showing on-screen help for almost every command as you're typing.

Some IDEs support full development over SSH now - VSCode and IntelliJ - so you can be freed from vim.

"freed from vim."

... Does not compute.

Vim is simple but not easy.

https://youtu.be/rI8tNMsozo0

Vim is user-friendly the same way Unix is user-friendly: it's not. It's user-centric.

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