Comment by MantisShrimp90 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by MantisShrimp90 | Hacker News Reader

I think it's funny how much emotional energy gets invested into any (neo)vim posts. But the energy is mostly people that never learned vim and feel super insecure about it.

I'm not going to make the same mistake of judging this. If you are someone who has always hated vim and never want to touch it, go for it, this might make your day easier on some machine if you can load this repo really quick (although as others have noted you would need to ftp the repo onto a machine over ssh to make this work).

As someone who is a neovim enjoyer, you are allowed to not like (neo)vim, I don't want to hear you bitch about the editor you don't want to use. If you're a vim user who has this bad habit of shaming people for their editor choice, STOP! It gives us all a bad name whenever you judge people just because they don't enjoy the vim life, just like emacs it's closer to a lifestyle than a tool and if people don't want to invest the time they have the right to make that choice.

The world is no longer dominated by vim and it really has become an optional skill for new programmers.

Agreed. I prefer vim as my $EDITOR, but I don't use it for programming. There I prefer JetBrains IDEs mostly. When I'm editing something in a POSIX terminal, vi is guaranteed to be available and is powerful. Knowing how to use vi is useful because it's required by POSIX and thus available on any system you SSH into. That means default settings & no plugins, and maybe not even vim.

>learn vim

After starting the (neo)vim tutorial, all I could think about was if people who "learned" vim never learned how to edit text in a normal text/code editor.

And I don't mean this in an inflammatory way. I mean:

hjkl = Arrow keys

b = Ctrl + Left

w = Ctrl + Right

df<space> = Ctrl + Delete

$d = Shift + End, Delete

dd = Home, Shift + End, Delete

2 = just press the keyboard command twice??

ddp = Alt + Down

ddkP = Alt + Up

The more I read the tutorial the more I felt like... do you not have arrow keys? I mean this literally. Is your keyboard just esc to f12 and there are no arrows or the numpad and it just ends there?

I do understand some good points of vim, like how explicit it is. There are many code editors/IDEs out there and sometimes how they treat Ctrl+Left/Right has subtle differences, e.g. ending the "word" in "-" or "_" or stopping before or after spaces. But most of this stuff is (or at least should be) configurable. But that's about it.

I mean how do you even use the numbers? Who looks at code and says "no, this should be exactly 8 lines below this one." I just Alt + Down until it's right. I'd spend more time trying to write the command right than I'd spend just pressing the keys multiple times.

>I mean how do you even use the numbers? Who looks at code and says "no, this should be exactly 8 lines below this one." I just Alt + Down until it's right. I'd spend more time trying to write the command right than I'd spend just pressing the keys multiple times.

With relative line numbers it's really easy actually. Typing dd7jp takes less effort than pressing alt + down multiple times and I have hard time believing you'd be make this argument if you were comfortable with modal editing.

In fact, none of the alternatives you listed seem attractive if you're accustomed to modal editing. How is Home, Shift + End, Delete a good alternative to dd? So much movement to do a simple operation.

I would highly recommend you giving it an honest try and if it doesn't work, you can always go back to editing the traditional way but once it clicks, "the old" way feels super awkward.

The bindings you mention are useful but unfortunately there are no CUA bindings for things like

  dt/   Delete text to the next slash.
  di(   Delete text inside parentheses.
  vi{y  Select and copy code inside braces.
  ]]    Jump to the next function.
  ))    Jump to the next sentence.

These are some of the things that make Vim/Evil stick for many folks once they begin using it in earnest.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com