Learn Vimscript the Hard Way | Hacker News Reader

Learn Vimscript the Hard Way

learnvimscriptthehardway.stevelosh.com

67 pointscabacon16 comments

I think my biggest gripe with vim is vimscript... and next is that other languages are optionally compiled in.

VIM with only lua, or, since regexps are weird in lua, guile, or heck, even a fast ECMAscript but garrenteed to be the same on all platforms would be great...

I've pondered the idea of a "VIM redux" project, not being backwards compatible, but throwing out old cruft, such as vimscript, "embed all the languages but unequally so you can never tell what plugins a system will support!", vi-compatible default mode, and put on some different defaults like syntax highlighting, etc.

I don't think I'll ever like vimscript... so maybe I should buy the book. :-)

yes vimscript is awful, and I wanted to share a way of dealing with it. Evil is an emacs package that "implements vim on top of emacs". By using that you basically exchange vimscript for elisp (At least I, just started 'using vim' and didn't have any problems). I'm not saying it will fit everybody, just that I didn't actually knew that the possibility existed - so I'm mentioning it.

I've been entertaining the idea of vim with Guile for a few weeks now, but I figure I need to compile it since I couldn't find any distribution for that.

I've found that Python is quite often available in Vims out there.

I used his drafts extensively while he was writing it, and had built and epub from the files for my own use. The day I could throw some money at him, I did. If you've been using vim, have the modes and chords down, but would like to eek out some more power and customization, buy this book. It explains vimscript much better than any other resource I've read to date.

Part of the problem is vimscript itself. There is not too much external documentation about it.

btw i disagree with you a bit. The best resource to learn vimscript is the sources of popular vimscript plugins.

The next best thing is steve's book, which is brilliant.

The title implies there's an easy way

My thoughts exactly.

Where is the "learn vim the hard way" guide (which this cleary states it is not)? Doing a bazillion examples with random code manipulations might actually allow me to get over the learning hump and remember something of vim...

vimtutor is pretty good, actually.

Outside of that, http://yanpritzker.com/2011/12/16/learn-to-speak-vim-verbs-n... has a nice explanation of the editing worldview, which ties in with Steve's quote in http://learnvimscriptthehardway.stevelosh.com/chapters/16.ht..., "The idea of operators and movements is one of the most important concepts in Vim, and it's one of the biggest reasons Vim is so efficient. We're going to practice defining new motions a bit more, because extending this powerful idea makes Vim even more powerful."

Check out http://www.moolenaar.net/habits.html, http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1218390/what-is-your-most..., and maybe http://vimcasts.org/episodes/archive?

I've been using it for about a decade, so I think I've lost the beginner's mind to evaluate whether these are really the right entry points. Lots of people are passionate about vim, though; some googling should find you the exercises that will help you the most.

To seed a comment, here are some VIM links I have enjoyed recently: https://github.com/carlhuda/janus is an easy way to pick up some nice plugins. I found it overwhelming the first time I played with it, but I am back around to trying it again and liking it better this time.

A set of crazy tips that made me learn to love the g commands: http://www.rayninfo.co.uk/vimtips.html

I believe I went to that from http://vim.wikia.com/wiki/Vim_Tips_Wiki, which isn't as fun to navigate as I would like it to be.

As tempting it is to not avoid janus, newcomers to vim should just stick with vanilla vim. If you just decide to install janus, you won't learn anything, you will have bunch of things installed that you will never use and it just is the wrong way of learning vim

If you want to actually learn vim, ditch janus and all the plugins when you start. Start by going to a shell and typing 'vimtutor'. That will get you started. Then build your own ~/.vimrc by scratch by adding some useful options such as:

set number

syntax on

filetype plugin indent on

For other options, you can search around the internet, particularily other people's dotfiles and see what they put in their own vimrc and you can freely take if you like what you see.

and then you can experiment with plugins. You will gain a much better understanding of how they work, what they do and you will be proud of yourself because it's your own personal vimrc and you know every single line that is in it.

This seems to be the perpetual back-and-forth that shows up; I searched "site:ycombinator.com janus" before I posted the link, and you'll find this exact same line in history.

For myself, I knew core-vim pretty well, and was coming back to it after taking textmate and sublime text for a spin. Janus was a fast way to bolt on the IDE-alikes I liked from ST2. It was, indeed, too much on a first go, and I uninstalled it. I am back to it, though, and appreciate that it brought together the "big guns" like fugitive, nerdtree, syntastic, &c. as well as things I'm not sure I would have found, like Tim Pope's excellent unimpaired plugin.

Doing things like vimtutor is great for a newbie, but I don't think I care as much whether they have Janus installed or not while they do it.

Yes, this back-and-forth is perpetual because there's always someone who advertises Janus and there's always a need for someone else to actually say that Janus (like SPF13 and friends) is a piece of crap and that new users should never install it if they are serious about learning Vim.

If you're going to take that point of view, I guess I'd like to hear more about why you think Janus is a piece of crap. I understand the POV of people who say that learning fundamentals is the place to start, rather than starting with the extensions, okay. But for someone who knows the editor but isn't that plugged in to the vimscript ecosystem, what's wrong with aggregating a number of useful and interesting plugins? I don't understand the vitriol.

I don't think I would have been as interested in reading this (interesting!) book if I hadn't seen the power of things like NERDTree and TagBar, and I wouldn't have seen those if I hadn't poked through Janus.

Janus and all the other distributions share the same issues so Janus is only one of many, and the most famous.

All those distributions started life as personal configurations. I honestly have no idea what happened that made their authors entertain the idea of turning them into so-called distributions but personal configs are what they are. Those configs are someone else's config: whatever is there may or may not fit your workflow or needs or cognitive capabilities or even physical ones. The plugins featured in those configs are chosen by complete strangers according to unknown criterias. The same goes with options and mappings.

When you use Janus, you basically are walking with someone else's shoes. You'll get used to it after a while but they will never be your shoes.

Do you really need Gundo? Gist? NrrwRgn? Do you really need to interact with Git from your text editor? Are you sure that SnipMate is the best choice for a snippet engine? Are you sure that SuperTab is the best choice for completion? Are you sure that you need NERDTree when you have netrw built-in? Are you absolutely certain that you need an Ack plugin? What do you think of a distribution that comes with two plugins with overlapping features and even provides custom mappings that overlap with both?

Another problem with distributions is that, due to their very nature, they have a crazy architecture with many .before and .after scripts and weird directory structures that make the whole thing hard to debug or customize. Not only you are walking with someone else's shoes but that someone is the only person able to fix them or tie your laces.

New users should steer away from Janus and friends because:

* those distributions actively hide many default features/options

* they teach you how to use CtrlP and not default commands

* they hook you to plugins

* they hook you to options you don't know shit about

* they force someone's preferences on your

* they actively prevent you from learning Vim

Experienced users should avoid them because:

* well, they already have their own config tailored to their needs so why bother using someone else's?

* they already know how to find plugins (vim.org)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com