Show HN: Subvim – Vim customized to be like SublimeText | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Subvim – Vim customized to be like SublimeText

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90 pointsfarslan64 comments

The most awesome feature of SublimeText for me is multiple-cursor editing (Ctrl-D on a word). It only bothers me when I can't skip next occurrences easily (It's possible, but it's hard)

It surprises me how users of other major editors don't use multiple cursors in their day to day editing tasks. It'd be awesome if subvim included the best solution vim community has to offer in this regard.

No editor wars intended, but for someone interested: multiple cursors for Emacs: https://github.com/emacsmirror/multiple-cursors

Do watch the video linked to on this page!

Vim has block editing mode (ctrl v - select, shift i, write text, esc) and the ability to record macros. With those two features you can do everything multiple cursors does and more!

I love vim but I don't think that block editing mode does what they want to do quite as well. Do you have an example where they excluded a line or lines from block editing?

an example:

   class="item"
   class="item"
   class="item" 
   class="item"

st2 would be able to select the second and fourth line item and be able to change those to "item odd" without touching the first and the third ones. similarly they could do the same and add even to the other two.

   class="item"
   class="item odd"
   class="item" 
   class="item odd"

this blog post shows it in action:

http://www.sublimetext.com/blog/articles/sublime-text-2-0-re...

This would be easily done by recording a macro and replaying it numlines/2-1 times. Possibly if starting on the first line: q,a,j,$,i, odd,esc,j,q,4@a

    qa // start recording into 'a' register
    j // move down
    $ // move last char on line
    i // insert mode
     odd //
    esc // back to command mode
    j // move down
    4@a // replay macro 4 times (if there are 8 more lines)

Yep, using macros are the way to go for a task like this one. I'd use 'A' here to jump into the insert mode at the end of line though (commenting because '$i' part made me realize that I had probably never used '$' for movement at all).

That's a good point, '$i' starts inserting just before the last character, whereas with 'A' you'd save the '$i' but have to delete the quote. One cat with many ways to skin it!

I'm probably being very defensive but I use macros for this.

qa$i odd^[jjq

and then '4@a' to run it on all the lines. In a simple case like this is it a bit more complicated than something like multiword editing but I've used this technique in cases that are far more complex then what from my understanding, multiline editing can handle.

For example I turned a spreadsheet of data into a complicated dhcpd.conf file using a couple macros.

Oh I agree that macros are a daily use thing for me and I haven't used sublimetext more than a handful of times; I was merely playing devils advocate to see if vim had an interesting feature I was unaware of that I could use in my day to day editing.

For more complex tasks like data format conversion, It's probably easier to write some small script and refine a couple of times to resolve possible conversion errors.

I might not fully understand the use cases of multiple cursors, but if you were trying to accomplish the same thing (change every other occurrence of "item" to "item odd") in vim, you could do it with 'n' and '.'

    /item        (search for 'item')
    cwitem odd^C (replace with the new text)
    nn.nn.nn.    (next occurrence, next occurrence, repeat last command)

For the mentioned task, I prefer to hold control, double click on "item" on lines 1 and 3, press right, and type " odd". Then pressing up, left and type " even".

have a look at https://github.com/paradigm/vim-multicursor

I'm a Vim user and this is the only Sublime feature that I think I'd like to see in a future version of core Vim. Another comment called it "syntactic sugar for macros"[1] and that's true. Multicursor functionality allows you to avoid repetition in so many cases that it's worthy of inclusion as a feature in its own right.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5504507

I think what we already have in vim is even better: just use dot (.) to repeat the last action. So you make some edits in your first cursor position, move to the next cursor position and press dot to repeat the edit.

No offence, but that's the typical kind of comment coming from someone who's never actually tried multicursor functionality. The thing about multicursor is that it's seamlessly integrated not only with editor commands, but also with commands that create multicursors.

Examples:

- Cmd-Shift-L creates a cursor at the end of every line of the selected area.

- Find all, integrated with Regex, creates multicursors on every match.

- Once you get multicursors, you can still add some manually by holding down Cmd and double clicking at a cursor position.

After you get multicursors, you can then move them around using standard editor commands - that's the real power of this construct, since I'm able to match something much simpler than I actually want to edit (for example end/beginning of line), move to the meat, edit.

Pressing Ctrl-K,D to skip an entry is quite cumbersome, especially if you missed an entry and there is no way of undoing the last selection.

Ctrl/Cmd-U is a "soft undo" that undoes your last selection. I agree that Cmd-K,D isn't ideal, but that, combined with Cmd-U works perfectly.

Cloud9 have a nice solution for that, ctrl-alt-left/right to select next previous and same with shift to not keep last added selection. This way you can even skip some words in the middle. I've tried to make a plugin for this, but sublime doesn't keep the order in which ranges were added.

Just tried C-D on my rarely used Sublime Text, but I'm not sure if I'd personally prefer that over something like `:%s/one/two/gc`.

I rarely use global find and replace nowadays (just for complex regex replaces). I hold Ctrl-D until all occurrences are selected and type the replacement string (assuming occurrences are low in quantity, which they usually are in most cases).

You know crt + H (global find and replace) takes what's highlighted and uses the last thing you looked for it nothing is highlighted.

Ctrl+cmd+g is cmd+d for all occurrences on the page.

visual selection replacement is good too.

:'<,'>s/this/to that/g

I think vim does that automatically when you have a selection active and hit :

Note that this will replace over the entirely lines even if it's a blockwise selection.

So you might consider using :'<,'>s/\%Vthis/to that/g

It might be a setting or something but it definitely doesn't do that on my machine or the linux machine I have in the cloud.

this ipsum dolor sit amet

select the middle 3 lines and do what I said will give you:

this ipsum dolor sit amet

to that ipsum dolor sit amet

this ipsum dolor sit amet

That sounds like a lot more work...

No it's not! Plus, you'd get to see the replacement targets while you're holding the keys, so you'd be more confident about the final result.

Just give Ctrl-D a try for a couple of days.. It's a total different user experience compared to the traditional find/replace method.

Do you mean it's a lot of work to type in that prefix? Because vim automatically inserts it for you when you enter command mode while something is visually selected. A making a visual selection is very quick and easy.

I would not say it's essential, but multiple cursors is certainly one of the features I use quite frequently in Emacs. In many occasions, it is more useful than plain search and replace, though even that is kind of super charged in Emacs to bein with.

OP here. There are some plugins but I didn't research it. But here is one that I think do it (and if it's good I'll integrate it): https://github.com/paradigm/vim-multicursor

Command + K skips the most recently highlighted occurrence. Usually works for me.

Multiple-cursors are just a syntactic sugar for macros.

s/syntactic/visual/

Multiple cursors simulate not just macros, but also setting lots of marks and iterating the macros through them. It’s relatively easy to write an equivalent macro if you’re just placing a cursor every three lines or at every occurence of some string; you can have the macro move three lines down when it’s done, or search for the next occurence of some regex. But if you’re actually clicking on places in the code that only a human can identify need changing, then it’s much harder to write an equivalent macro.

Is awesome but it needs some work, it would be _really_ nice if it were syntax aware, so if you start Ctrl+D in a variable it should only select where is being used as a variable and not other things (regex, strings, etc) or at least a boolean option to enable this behavior.

slightly off topic, but I think a thing that is sorely needed is a kind of libvim that provides proper vim functionality, which can then be linke

A thousand times yes. I'm using Vim keybindings in most of my editors, and every time it is something somebody implemented anew which is kinda like vim, but not really like vim. It would be great to take the complete set of keybindings > actions out of vim, abstract it away, and put it into a library. I looked into the vim code a bit, and it seems that this is a lot of work.

GNU Readline already provides a lot of VI's (so almost VIM) functionality as a library. Maybe that could be used as a starting point? It probably still is a lot of work though.

I once started work on https://github.com/Julian/PyVi which was meant to be this, but other things caught my interest so I abandoned it for a bit. Every once in a while I do a bit more work on it though.

It's a decent idea. I'm sure there might be something else that's further along than I got.

Oh, it is so tempting to port this to Go.

Yes please, and it's a pain to use Vim on Windows.

yes agreed - JetBrains has IdeaVim, but it is so lame compared to the real thing.

How is the speed? Last time I tried it, about 6 months ago, there was a very noticeable lag when switching between modes. I ran into the maintainer of IdeaVim at PyCon and he said it should be better but my trial period expired and I never got a chance to try it again.

They just released an update a week ago that was supposed to have fixed the problem. It does seem better, but I haven't used it for long enough to properly verify that.

Hi, in case you're still interested I've had a chance to try it a bit more. Performance is much, much better, especially on a retina display. And they've even fixed the dot command with autocomplete.

It's still not the greatest vim emulator, but it's much more usable now IMO.

This is awesome. As a Sublime user I'm going to put this on my dev server for those times when I have to SSH in and make an emergency code change without my primary machine handy.

Did that too

Love this project. Sublime Text's awesomeness makes it hard to completely switch back to VIM, but this looks like a good approach to bring features we have grown to love back to VIM, without all the hazzle.

Wonder how this compares to SPF13, which I've been using lately. https://github.com/spf13/spf13-vim

OP here. SPF13 itself is really nice. But the main difference here is first I try to emulate ST2, second I'm really picky which plugins are integrated. I also don't use vundle (because It should always have the same feature regardless of the state of plugin), instead of I'm using pathogen (which I like more). With time I will update the plugins myself, but only if they have bugfixes or features that are necessary to be added.

Some of plugins (like ctrlp) is modified in order to use the ctags binary I'm bundling and installing. There is also pre-compiled version of YCM in subvim. Together it means autocompletion and goto features are really working. You really don't install anything.

The plugins settings are modified in order to emulate ST2 like behavior, like accepting autocomplete entry via enter, creating a newline after braces,quotes,etc.., opening a new tabs whenever you call cmd+p (but not if you call cmd+r for using goto), closing the application and starting again brings all you tabs/files again and so on..

They are many things I'm trying to improve, like adding snippet system, more improved installation procedure, multiplatform support (linux and windows). SPF13 is much better on these terms.

I hope with time it will get better :)

This seems rad, my only 2cents is that using modifier keys is not very vimmy. But altogether really cool. Nice work.

The whole point is for people who want to switch from ST to Vim or for people who used to use VIM, but loves ST. There are still cases that should be handled trough. But I will add an entry to the FAQ, that explains the target user. This is IMO not for everybody.

Vim reminds me of this white powder my mother used to use to clean drains or something. Weird.

Looks lovely!

Though I would appreciate non-Mac shortcuts too (I am guessing ctrl- can be used instead of cmd-)

Agreed. I got excited, because it looked like a way to get Sublime-friendly features in a remote terminal, but all the macvim-centric bindings look like a blocker. Still, it's a great reference for Vim plugins that can bring Vim closer to Sublime.

Seriously why do we need this?

Because we can do it.

I understand the saying "just because you can do something, doesn't mean you should", but really, we do anything because it can be done (or someone said it couldn't be and we had to prove them wrong). Within sane limits, it's amusing, without sane limits...

Meanwhile, I'm enjoying my life living away from a cave thanks to this same delightful aspect of human nature.

I have got to ask the obvious here, why not just switch?

Because i love Vim :) Then there was Sublime that really changed the way of editing in some way. I first tried vintage and make it vim-like. However it was slow and not much was I wanted. Thus finally creates this project. For Vim users who like Sublime.

ST3 will be released soon and is supposedly going go fully support all vim commands in vintage mode with better performance.

You mean the vintage mode that comes with ST?

Because I didn't see anything being announced regarding vintage mode. Some guys forked the ST vintage package but that's 3rd party.

Good work! Love the color scheme.

Thanks! I've made some hacks to the original molokai (like the background on the numbers).

too bad CtrlP is crap compared to sublime's fuzzy searching

I tweaked the settings. It's a little better than with the default settings. Just give try :)

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