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Comment by zaptheimpaler | Hacker News Reader

Wow, the bit about seeing vim commands as sentences composed of nouns, verbs and adjectives blew my mind. I thought about learning vim, but I didn't know about this, so vim commands seemed like some arcane language that I would have to gradually get proficient at over months.. this might make the transition a lot easier.

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Learning to see the commands as a language is helpful; but, it doesn't really reach its full power until you start to see files in terms of the various groupings that Vim affords you (either the out of box things or custom text objects). If you stick with Vim, you'll start seeing things like whether or not you want a word or a WORD, or around (a) or inside (i) an object. Moreover, start to pick up on when you're hitting the same key multiple times or repeating a command. There's almost always a faster way to do something than repeating a command N times.

I'll be totally honest, it takes time and a real commitment to using Vim as your only editor. But, over time, you'll start to think in this text objects and, combined with the "commands as a language" concept--that's when Vim will really start to show it's power.

I agree on everything.

You didn't mention the fact that all of this becomes addicting rather quickly: going to a more "normal" editor or textarea can be extremelly frustrating some times.

Incredibly frustrating. I have trouble when I have to use other PCs or devices. I can no longer use the "arrow keys" and get momentarily confused when hjkl are showing up in the textarea instead of giving me movement. And I can't tell you how many times I hit escape in LibreOffice/Calc/etc.

This is one reason why I don't use online editors like Google Docs. They don't have great vim keybindings. Even extensions like Vrome and Vimperator fall just a little short. And for apps that do have a subset of the bindings--they are almost worse than having no bindings at all; evince has hjkl, but no gg/G, etc. It drives me mad.

I've configured AwesomeWM to be vim-like, but how I wish there was window toolkit-level support for vim bindings! In fact, I wish I could run everything from vim.

I've IM'd :wq to my wife more times than I can count.

try ZQ :)

That's great! Such a simple anecdote, but it made me smile.

:x is virtually the same as :wq, except vim won't write the file if you haven't changed it.

Hopefully more than you've typed ":q!" :-)

If you make a habit of typing :q!, you're going to have a bad time.

QuickCursor on OSX does basically that in just about everything... (like this post) It's not free (bummer) but it lets you take just about any text input area and by some clipboard trickery fire it up in your favorite editor (macvim being one of the defaults, but not limited to that) then writing back to that field when you exit/save.

So you can quite literally edit in your editor of choice, 100% in the environment you want.... pretty much what you just asked for right?

(Basically it's just cutting/pasting and opening applications in an automated way rather than have you do it - but bind it to a friendly key and you're good to go.)

Vimperator/Pentadactyl are not really editors, but they are awesome if nothing because of Ctrl+I : it opens the current textarea in GVim, and then you just need to save & exit and the contents are automatically loaded back.

This is why I don't use vim.

As nice as it may be, there are just too many other text editing tasks I have to do outside an editor I can control and none of them grok modal editing.

True... I see myself as just an average vim user but already - can't remember last time I had to manually bash keyboard repeatedly. Recently - got quite blown away with simple macro that picked up some keywords, automatically downloaded list of WSDL`s through curl, tidied up a bit and saved in according files. Watching it spin feels like magic.

Yep, that's the zen moment right there with Vim. Once you understand this, you will be able to 'speak' to your editor and bend it at your will.

E.g. 't' is a motion command which takes you 'till' a particular character. The same command even works with 'Visual Block Selection'. Most of the other editors have a different work flow for 'Block selection' and they are not friendly at all.

And if you are starting out, I would HIGHLY recommend the book 'Practical Vim' http://pragprog.com/book/dnvim/practical-vim . The book teaches the 'The Vim Way' and to be a good Vim user, you have to understand the 'The Vim Way', there is no way around it. Good luck!

More on vi as a "language:" http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1218390/what-is-your-most...

These articles are also helpful:

http://blog.carbonfive.com/2011/10/17/vim-text-objects-the-d...

http://yanpritzker.com/2011/12/16/learn-to-speak-vim-verbs-n...

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