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Comment by markbao | Hacker News Reader

As a vim user, I feel as if the essence of vim is an extension of my mind. Much like riding a bicycle, I instinctively think "select this line and the four lines below it and copy it" as "V4jy" with little cognitive thought. Kind of cool from a cognitive science standpoint.

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Do you think it's possible some people just aren't wired like this? Or am I just not trying hard enough?

I've tried to pick up Vim several times and never made it very far. But at least I know "i" and ":wq" now :)

I was in your position for about a year until bit the bullet and uninstalled Sublime Text from my machine forced myself to use vim exclusively. It was an arduous and painful 2 weeks, but it got better and paid off in the long run.

Why do you need to uninstall? I use Sumblime text in Vintage (VIM) mode and it's amazing!

I agree. Vintage mode is among the best emulations/mappings of vim that I have used.

Same here. I'm using Sublime now for larger tasks, as I like the plugins and code completion, but for smaller, more isolated things and remote work vim is still, and will be, my choice.

> Do you think it's possible some people just aren't wired like this?

Absolutely. Well, maybe I wouldn't call it "wired", but no one tool is right for everyone, and no one should feel bad or wrong for using something different.

I am a Vim lover. You can pry Vim from my cold, dead fingers. But of course it's not for everyone, for the same reason that we don't all use just one programming language or one web framework.

Don't worry. I find vim completely dated, arcane, and esoteric. Sure, it can do almost 25% of the stuff sublime can do but every feature has it's own learning curve.

If I want to select four lines of text in any text editor that isn't vim, I just hold down the shift key and use any of the cursor navigation available to me. Not so in vim.

Upon leaving vim none of the key bindings are never used in any other program. That's antithetical to the manner in which I operate. Normally if a program doesn't support the odd keybinding or two I just use autohotkey or equivalent. But vim makes that impossible.

I can't comment on the 25% claim, but I've used both extensively and found them comparable.

I personally find the navigation of vim so convenient that I use vimperator for Firefox, as well as the built in vim mode of sublime text.

I totally get that vim is a completely unnatural fit for some people. I certainly don't hold that against them, and I hope they don't hold it against me or vim itself.

The other approach is to use autohotkey to make everything work like vim.

The 25% claim sounds a little weird - what are some features that sublime has that vim doesn't have?

I like the multicursor feature. Vim can't do that.

I haven't tried it, but it looks like there's a decent plugin for this for vim: https://github.com/terryma/vim-multiple-cursors

> Upon leaving vim none of the key bindings are never used in any other program.

That's actually not true at all. Lots of terminal programs have keybindings for stuff like hjkl. Even tig does. And if you're using git from the command line and haven't heard of tig, you need to look it up.

Even many roguelike games support vim keybindings for movement. Brogue is an example.

In fact, most shells (e.g. bash and zsh) have the option to switch from Emacs to vi mode.

`set -o vi` on bash command line to enter vim mode. life changing.

Also, this will turn on vi-style line editing in programs using GNU readline (things like mysql, psql, sqlite3):

    echo "set editing-mode vi" > ~/.inputrc

For programs linked against libedit instead (as on OS X):

    echo "bind -v" > ~/.editrc

It's just a steep learning curve. Spend a few years using nothing but vim and it becomes natural.

That just seems like a waste of time and energy to me. Text editing should not be getting in the way of your projects.

I say this as someone who uses vim very nearly exclusively.

As an avid vim user, I certainly think it might just be a difference in inclinations. Use what works for you. A text editor is not the objective here, building you project is.

If you are burning all your cycles trying to map the natural way your brain wants to operate to the way your text editor operates, what do you have left for the real work?

If you want to learn vim, by all means go ahead. But feel no shame if it just doesn't fit you.

Try this: http://yannesposito.com/Scratch/en/blog/Learn-Vim-Progressiv...

This is how I learned Vim, so as far as I know it's the best resource out there.

I've been in and out of vim, but never reached the 'extension' point. Probably due to lack of necessity, and Java work has pushed me further away :/ But mind if I ask why you select instead of e.g. "5yy"? Used to thinking visually, or does it do something different with buffers, or...?

My number one issue with VIM is the need to always count everything: number of lines, number of words, etc. That alone makes the short cuts take a lot longer because generally I'm thinking "I want to cut this function" or "I want to cut down to this line right here". I've never in my life instinctively thought, "I need to cut this line plus four more!".

I end up using visual mode a lot in VIM because it's often faster (or easier) than stopping to count how many times I need to repeat the operation.

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

Wish I could upvote this more. Thanks for sharing!

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