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VimConf

vimconf.org

255 pointsflippingbits51 comments

As far as topics are concerned, I'd really like to see a vim plugin created from start to finish. The tutorials and docs that exist leave a lot to be desired, and this seems like a nice venue to demonstrate (and explain!) the capabilities of the vim plugin system.

While this is an excellent topic for advanced vim users, I suspect that the majority of us would benefit more from a "Beyond the basics" topic.

I'm comfortable with using vim to edit files now and then, but for that role any editor will do. Now I'm willing to invest some time to learn how to harness the full power of vim. Signed up.

There is a chapter on Vim scripting in my online book, please take a look and let me know your feedback - http://www.swaroopch.com/notes/Vim_en:Scripting

Separate to Vim, this concept should become more popular. Real world conferences have their place, for sure, but some topics are avoided as they probably wouldn't break even, and seeing more things like this would be great.

Totally agree Peter! Having given a couple webinars over the past few weeks, I think there is still a lot of room to grow for these types of online events! I'm hoping this sparks interest in other online conferences in those smaller niche subjects that historically may not have drawn a crowd to a physical location.

In fact, that's one of the reasons I'm working on building CastingCode.tv (http://castingcode.tv) as a platform to serve both ad-hoc and organized live coding events to the web. :)

This is a cool idea. After watching notch I'd love to be able to watch how other developers work.

I'm looking forward to this as well. You did a great job on the Backbone.js screencast

Are you the same creator as vimconf? The sites look alike and so did the emails (subject atleast, did not open). Are you the submitter of this? Why two different usernames if so. And why promote them both??

I am indeed the same person behind both CastingCode.tv and VimConf. However, I did not submit this VimConf article to HN. That was done by somebody else and I had no idea it was being submitted, so it took me by surprise.

Nice one, Joey. We'll have to discuss this at Ruby DCamp!

Absolutely! Looks like I'm going to need all the help I can get! :D

Relevant: http://pair.io

Couple that with a mailing list and a mumble server and you'd be set, I think.

Anyone know some Vim luminaries who'd be good "keynote" speakers/demo-ers? I'd vote for Drew Neil - http://vimcasts.org/about

Tim Pope.

I'd love Tim Pope to do a presentation about creating Vim plugins.

Derek Wyatt

Damian Conway. He did a great series on Vim at IBM Developerworks. The first one is at:

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/l-vim-script...

Gary Bernhardt, just a taste: http://blog.extracheese.org/2010/11/screencast-custom-vim-re...

for the full monty: http://vimeo.com/7642937

bill joy?

When I saw the URL my first thought was that it's a collaborative repo of vim's conf files, snippets, etc...

That's what dotshare.it (no affiliation whatsoever) is for. The whole idea sounds nice though.

And http://dotfiles.org/ (though I haven't looked there in years).

I am so excited about this! Watching other people use vim has been the most valuable part of my vim education. I think this is going to be a great venue for it.

Edit: I'm also clueless when it comes to vimscript. It would be nice to see some stuff on that.

This event looks promising. Interacting with other Vim users really helped me get over the initial Vim learning curve. For any devs that use OSX and want to test the Vim waters, checkout Vico (http://www.vicoapp.com). It is a Textmate-esque editor with Vim bindings.

Signed up. Id like to use vim since i like the concept but it seems so damn hard to get into. The post yesterday "learn vim progressively" was interesting though.

Not sure i know what it is though. I really like VS debugger and programming in C#, C++ (both with VS). So, what exactly will i give up if i switch to vim?

I recently took the plunge. I had been using e-TextEditor for everything but .NET, and VS for .NET. Now I'm using gVim for the majority of my editing for all languages I am working in. However, I still use Visual Studio with ReSharper for certain things: debugging, intellisense (only when I'm stuck; I'm trying not to rely on it much. you can also use vim plugins or create your own to let you quickly jump to MSDN and find something), and editing project/solution configuration.

Alternatively, you could use ViEmu (emulator plugin for VS, amongst other MS things), but I like the split buffers so I haven't gone down that path.

In summary, I don't think it's an all or nothing deal. You should use the best tools for the job. I think using Vim will make you more productive for plenty, but not all tasks.

I might be wrong here as I'm relatively new to vim and haven't used VS, but I'm pretty sure omnicompletion is the equivalent of intellisense in vim, http://vnfiles.ign.com/ects/css-tricks/VideoCast-101.mov

IntelliSense knows the library, omnicompletion just autocompletes similar words in the current file.

Ah ok, thanks for the correction.

omnicompletion, by default, completes against words in any file currently open in any buffer. But it's also now pretty programmable, though I don't I currently use any of the languages that have good support built out for them.

Grandparent was correct. Vim's basic completion is "similar words in the current file" (plus some other things), but omnicomplete is an arbitrary algorithm that can get pretty fancy. For example, in Ruby, omnicomplete on 3.14.tr will include truncate, while omnicomplete on [[1, 2]].tr will include transpose.

I'd second ViEmu. The price is a little steep (or was three or four years ago), but I used it through the trial and it was pretty comfortable.

These days I do a lot of my C# coding in Visual Studio, but have a shortcut key to open the current file in GVim to do heavy lifting. For what it's worth, to do that, I added gvim as an external tool with the arguments:

--servername "$(SolutionFileName)" --remote-silent +$(CurLine) "$(ItemPath)"

Which keeps all the files you open from a given solution in the same GVim instance (nice if you edit multiple solutions at once).

I was in your position a month or so ago, I've been working through Derek Wyatt's videos and have found them very helpful: http://www.derekwyatt.org/vim/vim-tutorial-videos/vim-novice...

I tried using pure vim. It's too cumbersome (Microsoft does pretty good job at "locking in" developers, e.g. - manual editing of solution files ain't what I'm lookin for).

But there is awesome middle road. Try visual studio vim emulation layer called VsVim - http://bit.ly/e3GsMf

It's far from being perfect, but it has most of the stuff.

I know this is off topic but would you mind sharing how you created a special link that can be passed to earn credit?

Are there plugins/gems for something like this or was this made from scratch?

Vimconf is currently running on www.kickofflabs.com (I am a co-founder). The link sharing is a recent feature addition.

I've never understood people's obsession with vim. I used it for a few months, then timed myself doing the same tasks with vim and gedit. Gedit was faster by a significant margin.

Do you mind telling what was faster? I'm really curious.

The vim tutorial.

Click-and-type is really quite fast once you try to master it. Double-click to select a token, triple-click to select a line, etc. On a laptop (or on a Kinesis Advantage (awesome ergonomic keyboard) with a center-mounted touchpad) the mouse isn't much of a context switch.

When you actually master Vim and all its motions it's astoundingly fast.

I mastered most of the more commonly known motions, including most of the ones on this page (http://yannesposito.com/Scratch/en/blog/Learn-Vim-Progressiv...) and some that aren't on it. It didn't seem to be delivering the promised efficiency improvements, so now I only use it for git commit messages, line editing in zsh, and file processing with macros (which are pretty nice--best way I know of to reformat data; much easier than writing a script). I don't think it was worth it--should have shipped product instead and used nano for my command line editing needs.

Try incrementing a number on 500 lines of text. Or stripping trailing whitespace on save. Or fixing the indentation of a large file. Vim is really powerful when it comes to text manipulation.

Cool idea. Signed up. I've been using vim just for editing config files remotely and now I'd like to start exploring it a bit more.

Cool idea, as a 10a+ user of VIM, I wanted to sign up. Unfortunately my 'email does not seem to be valid'.

Yes, sorry about that preek. I am currently working with my provider to get the email issue resolved. Keep an eye on @vimconf and I will update everyone once it gets fixed. Thanks!

I'm an Emacs user but I'm really curious about modal editing and composability of Vim commands. Signed up!

Signed up and I spread the word :) Great initiative!

Does it strike anyone else as a bit funny that a promoter of vim would send HTML e-mail?

I write HTML in vim all the time. :-)

550 lines of css! I hope he has ctags :)

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