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Comment by stevebmark | Hacker News Reader

Bash is so painful to use without vi mode (set -o vi).

I've actively used bash and vi every day for decades now, but somehow never tried this mode.

It's fascinating. I wonder if it will be worth it for the change of command-line editing habits. It certainly feels faster for most command-line edits.

It changed my life. It's like your prompt becomes a mini editor now and you can copy/paste arguments around in your command. I love it.

I am a vi user and tried vi mode in zsh but never liked it. For some reason the modal aspect doesn’t fit for me in the context of the shell. I’ve learned enough emacs bindings to work the shell.

Heavy shell and vim user here, but I simply cannot imagine how this might be convenient. A bunch of readline-style shortcuts will do the job just fine. And they are everywhere. SSH, database prompts, even login screens support them.

Programs that use readline can be configured to use vi mode via inputrc. For the few that aren't you can always use rlwrap. Overall there's no downside.

I hadn't heard of these options before, thanks for highlighting them.

Preemptively justifying something more efficient that you haven't used, because what you have is "fine," is a behavior I see from heavy Vim users when they justify not using IDEs, which are much more efficient than Vim for writing code. (I'm also a heavy Vim user, and IDEs are so much nicer for coding, especially efficiency). So, I'd say your story checks out.

I did try this mode some time ago and found it really inconvenient. Also I'm not a person to dismiss IDEs, and I never recommend Vim to anyone I know as a better way of coding.

No hard feelings, I see how you might have read that from my comment.

I've never heard of bash vi mode before. Thanks for this.

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