Easy start for new vim user. Full vim's power available. | Hacker News Reader

Easy start for new vim user. Full vim's power available.

cream.sourceforge.net

16 pointsstakent17 comments

Kind of a neat site design; large clickable quadrants to move between sections, that resize. I've never seen anything quite like it.

However, as for the editor itself, I prefer a "raw" vim. :)

No offense but the first thing I thought was: what a terrible site design; large clickable quadrants to move between sections, that resize. I've never seen anything quite like it. :)

I'm not sure I would emulate it, I just said it was neat. :) However, it does use a very nice principle: that large spaces are easy to click, so it's very easy to move between sections using the mouse.

Hmm, "Easy Start For New Vim Users"???

As someone who has generally thought of Vim as the most pathological creation of computer-land ever, there isn't anything in this site that seems aimed to change that impression or even communicate what vi/vim is.

Moreover, I suspect the majority of computer users feel a similar an antagonism to vi/vim and so anyone who's talking about an introduction to vim ought to, uh, explain it.

Moreover, I am a full-time Linux user and I have actually used vi to accomplish small tasks. I can't imagine someone in the know getting anything from this site.

Well, its not an informational site. Cream is an integrated set of macros which makes starting of vim use less painfull. It works under Linux and Windows.

I use vim on remote hosts.

I'm curious which distribution contains vi?

Well, Arch Linux for one. At least until you upgrade it yourself.

I can't imagine that Arch is the only one either. Xubuntu, anyone? Ubuntu comes default with some strange flavor of vim that I can't stand, so I always install vim-nox ASAP on new machines.

Xubuntu has vim 7.1.138 by default. That's not so out of date.

NetBSD comes with nvi, which is a clone of the original vi: http://www.bostic.com/vi/

AIX comes with vi by default.

Is there a significant advantage to using this over regular vim? This looks like just a gui on top of it, which defeats a lot of the "Don't use the mouse" functionality of vim. It seems to be shooting itself in the foot, why would you give the ability to click to options rather than making it easier to get help via keyboard?

(This is as a new person to vim, who still has to look at a cheat sheet regularly to do basic things)

Maybe the idea is to get users hooked on the powerful features first, so they will then decide to tackle the command interface to increase speed.

Its exactly my way.

I felt that way, too. One could argue that many modern GUI features are more of an excuse to use the mouse, as opposed to actually taking advantage of anything that a mouse is good at.

Even text selection, which ought to be fast with a mouse, is slow; it's hard to precisely click the end points, and the target may require scrolling in order to make it clickable. When you can do something like "3dw<return>P" (move 3 words to beginning of next line) instantly, the mouse is almost never more efficient.

For me the main point is to make the learning curve less steep. One can use The Editor without cheat sheet or studying manual.

Selecting text using keyboard: while moving cursor use the Shift key Luke. And maybe a little Control key.

Using mouse? You can, but don't have to.

Yeah, but I can almost guarantee that anyone using Cream will think "How is this any better than <GUI editor of choice>?"

In my opinion, the only way anyone new to vi is gonna be sold is by struggling through the learning curve. They'll have an "ah-ha" moment soon enough.

Vim's power comes from the fact that it's interface is more or less a command language.

Remove that (or hide it) and you've more or less gotten rid of the major advantage of vim. You'd be better off using eclipse/geany/... over cream.

First paragraph: true. But have you tried exit from vim without looking at the manual? It reminded my Borland's Ctrl-k ctrl-d days.

I've used vim/cream on 256MB P3 1GHz laptop to edit files of size in range many hundreds MB. It worked well. If I remember correctly eclipse didn't even start on it.

I've used vim from Linux distribution written on one (but little nonstandard) 3.5" diskette to repair not booting system.

In short: YMMV

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