Vim for developers that use other software, too | Hacker News Reader

Vim for developers that use other software, too

cream.sourceforge.net

24 pointsmacco29 comments

A random sidenote (because I can't be bothered to write a blog post about it).

I wonder if I am the only person who feels 'vim shame' (and the closely related 'emacs shame').

'vim shame' - the feeling that you would be a better, more productive coder if only you could master this mysterious editor, but every time you try (about once every couple of years), somewhere between two days and two weeks you find you have drifted back to textmate / sublime editor / eclipse.

Use right tool. If you notice you slide into textmate/sublime/eclipse - then it means you use right tool.

For me VIM became main tool when I started to work in multi server environment where all access done through SSH. I could use my most favorite GUI editor Kate to edit files of SSH, but it was less effective due upload/download required.

Do not try to force some tool in your workflow. Instead try it for new tasks/projects and see if it fits naturally. I.e. you should be always aware of other existing technologies, but not forced to use these just because some think it is cool.

Yeah ditto on when I came to vim (also why I leave it almost completely unmodified on my own machines). If you do all your coding on one machine there isn't much difference between emacs/vim/textmate/jedit/sublime and if you do it in mostly one or two languages IDEs are fine.

Vim isn't compellingly more useful until its ubiquity becomes compellingly useful.

I tend to customize VIM with plugins and .vimrc file. But to keep environment the same everywhere - I am using git with github. Works pretty well.

I feel 'vim shame' too. But in some opposite way. I am ashamed of people discovering I use vim as primary editor and not some GUI-IDE. Therefore I mostly pretend like I am making quick fixes using vim when someone is hanging around.

Interesting, must be a culture thing. Here in academia (or to be exact, here in the computing department I am in), most people consider anything other than vim/emacs a 'toy' editor.

Yes. I realized recently that a big reason I'd end up eventually drifting away from vim was the inconsistent vim config/plugin options on different machines (work, home, etc). Or worse, starting on a fresh environment and having none of my config/plugins available.

Now I've started to keep my vim config / plugin files in a git repo and deploy them whenever I'm on a new machine. Also as I'm slowly adding new functionality it gets reflected across all environments. I'm hoping this helps this time around.

I was once a victim of emacs shame. A few months after first succumbing to the shame, I got ill for two days. I couldn't lie in bed all time, so I gave Emacs all I got. It took around 20 hours in total, then I never switched back.

Disclaimer: I am still conf:ing my .emacs file. :'D

You are one of the worst things for an emacs/vim-shame victim, the "Honest, if you keep trying, you'll get it and it will fix your life!"

Just to be clear, I'm happy you enjoy your text editor :)

Don't worry about it. Not everyone is a vim god from the start. Everyone felt this way at first. Just have to keep on pushing and get going. Those vim users who act like they're god? Who cares what they think.

Personally it doesn't matter if you use vim, emacs, Textmate, Sublime, or even Dreamweaver. Whatever you're comfortable with, is what you should use.

I have been a Dreamweaver user since Macromedia made version 4. I then left Windows and went to Ubuntu and started using Gedit... Now I switched to vim... I am by no means a vim god... But I know enough to do what I need to, the rest will come to me with time.

This shouldn't bother you. The big problem with vim and emacs is that their shortcuts are so different to everything else. Or in other words, they are not CUA (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_User_Access).

It's not the problem to learn vim, but to unlearn Gimp, Inkscape, etc.

Oh my goodness. So, I'm not alone. We should start a support group.

What I really want, and would pay for, is a TextMate or IDE-like interface wrapped around Vim. The current plugins - e.g. NERDTree - are appreciated, but they lack the features, ease-of-use, and consistency of a purpose-built IDE.

I've used various Vim emulators inside IDEs and they're just not the same as the real thing. If you know Vim well, you end up "typing on eggshells", where every keystroke might cause some unexpected chaos. So it needs to be the real thing.

I wanted something like the TextMate project drawer wrapped around VIM for a long time, until I started using Command-T + ctags. I can't think of the last time I've really wanted IDE features wrapped around VIM since then (except for special cases, like visually building Android UIs in Eclipse - but even then, I don't really want that to be part of VIM).

Check out Project.tar.gz That plugin alone has changed the game for me. What a marvelous little thing.

If you use Textmate and basically miss the project drawer in Vim, there is a version of MacVim which has that integrated ( see https://github.com/alloy/macvim/wiki/Screenshots ) .

There is also Vico ( http://www.vicoapp.com/ ) which is a new Mac text editor with vi bindings, and well worth taking a look at.

+1 for Vico. It's basically all I use at this point. It's still getting started, but I'm fully productive in it at this point, and have already written a couple of plugins for it.

Caveat emptor: it works with TM bundles, but cannot do vim plugins.

Is the example code on their homepage really using Perl to build a blogging engine that stores posts in LDAP?

This kind of thing really appeals to me, I'm very tempted to give it a try.

I have tried emacs and vim a few times, but the problem is that I don't want to use them for everything, and I have trouble getting my head around two totally different ways of working. I recently did a check of the programs I use in the average week. The current list is (in no particular order)

    * XCode, for Objective-C / iOS development
    * Eclipse, for C++ / Android
    * Apple Mail
    * Chrome
    * TeXShop, for Latex editing
    * Sublime text, for other bits of C/C++
    * Vienna, for RSS reading
    * Evernote, for document ordering
    * Wunderlist, for todo lists

And what is great is that all these apps share 90% of my frequently used key-presses. In particular, I'm never at a loss as to what quit/find/open/save are. Each of these tools I have found the best at what they do.

I think that choice of editor, where you might do 80+% of your real work, should not be dictated by similarity to other tools. I'm certainly not driven from web applications when they behave radically differently from desktop applications, which are equally different from command-line tools, not to mention curses programs.

Vim bindings are used in `less` and `more`. Emacs-style bindings are the default in bash and zsh.

You could use emacs for everything under Chrome. I don't use emacs, and probably won't because I don't feel like learning new keybindings for everything, but I hope to mess around with the org-mode clones for vim soon.

You might have something to gain by switching to Emacs. AFAIK of the 9 elements of your list at least 6 can be easily done inside emacs. I leave out web browsing (it can be done but yeah, leaves a lot to be desired imho), Android development (ADT is really really good) and maybe "document ordering", which, depending on what it exactly is, might be done with org-mode.

'document ordering' is mostly gathering and organising PDFs, web links, and snippets of text.

One of these days I might give emacs another go. Last time I had a look for 'quick start' emacs setups (about 3 months ago), the most recent ones I found seemed to be telling me to install the development version of emacs 24, which I couldn't even get to compile.

One of the really cool thing about emacs is that you can do so much in it. Everything from listening to music to browsing the web.

Unfortunately it lacks a decent text editor.

I've just been playing around with Evil-mode, an new Vim emulation mode (I've previously tried viper and vimpulse) and am finding it fairly enjoyable. I haven't pushed it really hard yet, and to be fair I could still see switching back to Vim for some things (like navigating code with ctags for example). But for things where I want to be in Emacs but hey it would be cool for this buffer to have vi key bindings, I think I like it quite well. (Enough so that I'm daydreaming about trying to contribute code to it once I understand it better).

I've been a longtime Eclipse / Vim (when I'm ssh'ing) user. However, my Vim usage was really press i and then use arrow keys all over the place. I was even that guy that pressed i, arrowed to the right to the end of the part that I wanted to delete, and then pressed the delete key on my shortened Mac keyboard (that really behaves like a backspace) roughly doubling the keystrokes every time. When I switched jobs a month or so ago, I made it my goal to learn to use Vim the right way. All I can say is that it took me a much shorter time than expected, and the gains are greater than I could have anticipated.

I don't find cream that useful. There's little interesting about vim other than the input method.

Right now I'm using Emacs (for the extensibility) with Evil mode (for vim key bindings). I've used vi(m) modes in other editors as well, and some are really good. That's the direction I find more interesting.

If you're just picking up Vim and using Chrome, I suggest installing Vimium to get some extra practice. Ignore recent blog posts, for the most part, that tell you to start from a vanilla config. Training wheels help.

On another note, what's the vim-org mode clones looking like lately?

CREAM is fantastic. I used it for years, before I switched to OSX. I really wish they'd port it over, for nostalgia's sake.

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