Comment by RetroTechie | Hacker News Reader

Comment by RetroTechie | Hacker News Reader

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Thought a linked article:

https://j11g.com/2023/08/07/the-legacy-of-bram-moolenaar/

By Jan van den Berg, was a better read. One quote:

"Vim is a masterpiece, the gleaming precise machining tool from which so much of modernity was crafted".

And then this link:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=eX9m3g5J-XA

"7 Habits for Effective Text Editing 2.0"

1h20m - If anyone has a transcript or summary: plz. But this was funny - first comment:

"I let auto play go on while I was sleeping for 7 hours and went from Billie Eilish to this"

Life is weird but I love it :-)

Disclaimer: I'm not even user of either (Neo)vim or Emacs. As soon as I read "programmable", I'm off. I just prefer fixed-function editor that suits my taste , a few minutes of configuration & go. But that's just me, what do I know?

That said: good tools serve a purpose. Our world is a better place with good tools in it - and the ppl who made those tools. And sometimes their legacy, their philosophy, their way of doing things, lives on in the code (or the community!) they left behind. So kudoz to Bram!

I don't know if it's necessary to be competitive about eulogies, but the one you posted was also touching. Thank you for posting it. The picture of Bram's GitHub contribution graph is haunting.

> Disclaimer: I'm not even user of either of (Neo)vim or Emacs. As soon as I read "programmable", I'm off. I just prefer fixed-function editor that suits my taste , a few minutes of configuration & go. But that's just me, what do I know?

Then Helix may be for you! It uses the Kakoune keybinds, which make SO MUCH SENSE compared to Vim or Emacs. And it's already pre configured and includes a lot of useful features. I have been daily driving it and it's pretty fast and good. Since it automatically uses LSPs if they are in the PATH, it requires very minimal configuration, my configuration only includes theme and some stylistic changes, you can take a look at it if you'd like: https://github.com/RGBCube/NixOSConfiguration/blob/master/ma...

I've been a happy vimmer for 15 years. I've been dabbling in helix for a month and liking it a lot. The ast-aware selection capabilities--while not habit yet--feel like a fledgling superpower.

Neovim has a plugin for that too.[1] Is Helix different in how you can navigate the syntax tree?

[1] https://github.com/nvim-treesitter/nvim-treesitter-textobjec...

Seems similar. I haven't used the text objects stuff enough to be sure--I'm just excited to do so.

There's something to be said for having it baked in though. I've been nix-ifying my configs and not having to think about any plugins was a welcome change.

(Unless you count language servers as plugins, which you maybe should.)

> As soon as I read "programmable", I'm off. I just prefer fixed-function editor that suits my taste

I never have to "program" Vim apart from set nocompatible, set ruler, backspace, indentation and maybe pick another colorscheme from the defaults (usually torte).

On neovim I installed lightline and pathogen, monokai colorscheme and something else I forgot about, maybe syntax highlighting for some more exotic language.

The point is Vim is a fixed function editor until you start loading it up like a xmas tree.

> The point is Vim is a fixed function editor until you start loading it up like a xmas tree.

Exactly, just because you can doesn't mean you need to, or should.

My .vimrc:

  set nocompatible
  set backspace=2
  set noexpandtab copyindent preserveindent softtabstop=0 tabstop=4 shiftwidth=4
  set ruler
  colorscheme torte

Vim is what I mainly use out of habbit. It only requires typing vim as opposed to nvim.

Neovim's init file has this plus more stuff to turn off features like showmode, keybinding for nohlsearch, SQL autocomplete and space indentation for python. Maybe some of those annoying defaults are set up by one of the plugins. It's loaded with up with three plugins: lightline, vim-polyglot and vim-visual-multi which I forgot how to use and wonder why it was loaded in the first place. Polyglot is loaded because I needed syntax highlighting for some more exotic language like Crystal, D, Dart or TOML. Apart from that it uses the monokai-tasty colorscheme. So basically this is my setup. If I open anything in vim that doesn't have syntax highlighting and I find it annoying, I would just close the file and open it in nvim instead. I think Polyglot also helps with Racket.

I've also tried helix and kakoune but find the popup menus quite annoying. Also not being able to set the indent width in helix except on a language basis is a total turn off.

While we're at sharing neat vim configs, here's the one I was quite happy with at the time: I got tired of indent style arguments. I don't care. So I wrote a little heuristic to detect indent style, then configured vim with my preferences, and added this to .vimrc:

> map <F5> <Esc> :perl use Text::FindIndent;VIM::DoCommand($_) for Text::FindIndent->to_vim_commands(join "\n", $curbuf->Get(1..$curbuf->Count()));<CR>

Text::FindIndent is the aforementioned heuristic as a Perl module. Sorry for the mangled quote, original at https://metacpan.org/pod/Text::FindIndent

When I work on existing code, I hit F5 and work within the author's preferences.

>Vim is what I mainly use out of habbit. It only requires typing vim as opposed to nvim.

I got used to typing vi instead. It's shorter

    alias vi=vim

becomes

    alias vi=nvim

On a Debian(-based) system, you can play with update-alternatives

https://manpages.debian.org/bookworm/dpkg/update-alternative...

I just want vim to be aliased to it though, since if I type vi I want something very light and quick (my nvim is bloated ;)

It also works on fresh linux installs without the "damn I forgot to install vim" moment.

My .exrc file is < 10 lines and that + ctags is enough for me to use vim for daily development across multiple languages.

>"7 Habits for Effective Text Editing 2.0"

>1h20m - If anyone has a transcript or summary: plz. But this was funny - first comment:

Here you go: https://moolenaar.net/habits_2007.pdf

Courtesy of tlamponi [1]:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37013315

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