Mastering Vim Grammar | Hacker News Reader

Mastering Vim Grammar

irian.to

60 pointsbo0tzz10 comments

> your first exposure with Vim is when you accidentally opened it and couldn't get out

The correct learning from this should've been "vim has awful defaults, never use them" instead of "here is a guide on how to remember them"

That's a horrible take. This isn't a guide to remember, but a guide to learn.

You shouldn't dismiss something as "terrible defaults" just because it has a user interface different from what you're used to.

Sure thing, don't dismiss it because of your made up reason "because it's different", use a real one: they make the most basic operations hard/er to perform, to learn, to remember, to master; and exiting is just one illustrative example, the base motions are just as unergonomically bad.

Because it’s a power tool, not a beginner tool. The beginner tool is notepad and nano, where instructions are spelled out or follow some conventions.

Expert tools are for the problems you face even after learning the in and outs of the beginner tools. Vim solve them by smashing convention in order to build a system of composable elements. Emacs solve it by building a vm and a user interface where everything in between is customizable.

Here is an article by Bram Moolenar that explore the problem space of a good text editor.

https://www.moolenaar.net/habits.html

This explains nothing since it's applicable for any set of keybinds, so if you had to type "word back" in normal mode to move by word or "PRETTY PLEASE LET ME OUT" to exit, you could still say the irrelevant "but it's a power tool smashing convention!"

Yep, but vim’s keybinds are composable and with less cognitive load than the conventional way. That’s the selling point. Not knowing how to use it isn’t a good argument for not using it. Riding a motorcycle isn’t natural, but the speed improvement is real.

Cognitive load is somewhat subjective. The composability advantage is what's hard to wrap your head around if you've never developed the skill. Vim / Helix / Kakoune are fundamentally more powerful keybinding systems due to their composability ("grammar"). Learning Vim early on in my career is easily one of the greatest skill investments I've ever made. Every minute saved doing small edits adds up over years, and I've pulled off many large-scale refactors in literally 1% of the time it takes other people with non-composable keybindings.

I imaging a lot of people will increasingly lean on AI to handle most editing tasks, but until people literally stop using keyboards, Vim will still be worth learning.

There are other grammatical keybindings out there. Some can be considered better. But none are as ubiquitous as Vim.

There's `vim` the program, and there's Vim the language. You can use Vim the language anywhere. It's pretty rare for me to interact with any text box without Vim keybindings these days, many of which are in GUI apps with toolbars. This article is about the language.

Awesome writeup. I've been using Vim for a while, but this really connected some of the concepts in my mind. Thanks dude!

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