Vimcasts – Free screencasts about the text editor Vim | Hacker News Reader

Vimcasts – Free screencasts about the text editor Vim

vimcasts.org

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This site is absolutely wonderful, and amazing to anyone that is learning Vim

I would recommend Drew Neil’s books on the subject. They are stellar

https://pragprog.com/titles/dnvim2/practical-vim-second-edit... https://pragprog.com/titles/modvim/modern-vim/

Thanks for mentioning those books because I didn’t know he had written a second one!

Those books are a gold mine too.

See also "Vim As Your Editor" by ThePrimeagen: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLm323Lc7iSW_wuxqmKx_x...

I made a concerted effort to learn Vim maybe a year or two (the last 3 years scarily blend together for me) ago and, while I enjoyed it, I moved to Windows and instead of trying to carve out a vim workflow, I just resorted to using VSCode. I used mostly freecodecamp tutorials to learn about setting up Vim back then.

I haven't been doing much coding (and I don't think theres much support for Angular and C sharp/dotnet, which is where I left off), but getting fluent in the Vim workflow is on my bucket list.

I never see it ever spoken about from this perspective but its sort of like learning how to drive stick, where you're able to drive anything: if you learn vim, you can code on any computer made in the last 15-20 years, potentially preventing old machines from ending up in a landfill, or allowing you to viably code on the tiniest singleboard pcs without having to worry about whether you're gonna hit the ram limit.

>I never see it ever spoken about from this perspective but its sort of like learning how to drive stick, where you're able to drive anything: if you learn vim, you can code on any computer made in the last 15-20 years

True. That's roughly what it says (in other words) in the blurb for this vi quickstart tutorial, and why it is quite applicable for the purposes you said:

https://vasudevram.gumroad.com/l/vi_quick

It's about working on a remote server. Use whatever GUI editor you wish for local use.

VScode can also work on remote files but not as flexibly as running vim on the server side.

How is vim working for you for long term usage? Is it ok or did you move to something else?

I used vim as my main editor in the past 10 years and went through vimcasts near the beginning of my professional career. In January this year I switched to an IDE and I'm surprisingly ok with that. I did that because I moved to a different programming language and wanted better discoverability as well as an environment that "just works".

Curious to hear from others.

The only case where I don't use vim is jvm based languages, so many of which coevolved with ides I think they're pretty painful to use without.

IdeaVim plugin is awesome in Jetbrains IDEs. You just get the best of both worlds.

Same vim simulation plugins (albeit far less powerful) exist in most common IDEs.

I like jetbrains IDEs and pay for a personal subscription, but after switching to a highly configured neovim it’s hard to use the IDE for primary development.

I still go back to it for major refactors and gnarly merges, because the LSPs from jetbrains are unparalleled. But as a result of their features it is incredibly laggy and slow compared to neovim, not to mention so RAM-heavy.

After adjusting to such high quality and fast nvim plugins like telescope, it makes the jetbrains editor feel like I’m moving through molasses to do a project-wide search, for example. And the vim simulation doesn’t (can’t?) support some of the more advanced features, or some really great plugins.

The biggest difference is in individual key latency though, I notice regular stutters while typing in the jetbrains IDEs that just don’t exist in nvim. It just throws me off if I’m in the flow typing and the input just freezes for a couple hundred ms..

The plugins fzf.vim and telescope.nvim made vim/nvim ridiculously more useful. Taking the time to set these up to your liking really pays off.

I love the nvim project especially for how it has rejuvenated the vim landscape and creating a cutting edge plugin ecosystem due to lua plugins.

For rust development, rust-tools.nvim and rust-analyzer have fared really well compared to VSCodium.

I’ve also used Vim as my main editor for 10+ years. After that, I spent a year or so with Emacs, and then a couple of years with Sublime Text 4 once I got tired of configuration. I never fully gave up on Vim though, I use it if I work remotely or have to do data transformation via macros.

I’m currently testing Helix [1], which is a terminal editor with Vim-like keybindings — but which requires no configuration or plugins (LSP works out of the box, sensible leader keybindings by default, multiple cursors is built in). It lacks some features like snippets and folding though. Vim -> Helix reminds me of when I switched Zsh -> Fish: I lost some power, but it did 80% of what I wanted from a custom config without any work. Remains to see whether I’ll stick with it long-term though.

[1]: https://helix-editor.com/

Used vim as main IDE back in ~2014-2015, it was too cumbersome and I switched to Spacemacs which also became cumbersome eventually and I switched to IDEs like CLion (for Rust). However now I've tried out neovim (lazyvim and everything around that) and am pleasantly surprised at latency and stability (plus, lua and not vimscript); modern LSs are miles ahead of what it used to be like back in the day, too. Will probably be switching back to neovim now unless there's unforeseen stoppers.

Vim is awesome. Not just for programming but I use it pretty much everywhere I can configure Vim (Vimium is my favorite non-terminal plugin I use frequently).

Also for those interested, there is a really good talk given by Theena Kumaragurunathan (novelist from Sri Lanka) in VimConf 2021 where he goes about explaining how Vim changed his life (from a non-programmer perspective). Very inspirational. Must watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ORWaIqyj7k

This site was so helpful when I was new to Vim and even now, I sometimes review certain things.

Same here, I go back from time to time.

I wish the author did some more, these are so high quality.

I discovered it back when they were still doing screencasts (and when I was using vim) and learned some pretty cool stuff, like the m and t movements, and through it I learned about the then new kid in the neighbourhood, neovim. The author knew how to approach things and give useful examples and make everything easy to learn.

It's a bit sad to learn they haven't uploaded new content ever since.

I already was a long time vim user when I did Drew's paid course a couple of years ago it was worth every penny. [I don't know Drew personally or gain anything from saying this. I just think he did a wonderful job.]

This made me instantly think of https://asciinema.org. There are so.e amazing resources on that site.

neovim users: Apart from the terminal section I think everything else should apply directly to neovim.

Absolutely love vim

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