JackCh

I'll never buy a car that doesn't allow me to turn on the air conditioning without taking my eyes off the road. In other words, physical buttons and dials that are always in the same place. Something I can feel with my fingers and always rely on being there.

Touchscreen controls sure are flashy, but as far as I'm concerned when employed in a multi-ton piece of machinery traveling at 60+mph they're borderline homicidal. I know I'm not the only one who thinks this way.

I'm open to voice controls. I don't like speaking to machines, but having machines speak to me is something I appreciate (for instance I always have my GPS talk to me, I never look at the screen) and I could see myself coming around on talking to machines. But a big old glorified ipad stuck in the dash? No way.

Many of them fail to implement macros in my experience. Though I've heard VSCode got this part right.

The most productive vim keybinding I ever came across was:

    noremap <Space> @q

Since the key to start a macro is q, you can quickly tap qq to record a macro to the q register (end it by pressing q again.) Then by whacking the space bar you can execute the q macro as many times as you'd like. Once you get into the rhythm of using it often even for small tasks, it can become a great optimization. Sometimes I use it with five or more different macros in a single minute. If you ever look forward in time and see that you're about to perform the same edit two or three times, pressing the q key three times total and the space bar once per execution (or only once with a count) will often be fewer keystrokes than had you performed the edit manually each time. Not to mention triumphantly smacking the space bar to repeat an edit is a great feeling.

(Simple edits can be repeated using . which is another indispensable vim feature that sometimes gets missed by vi-plugins in other editors.)

:grep is what I used originally and found it unsatisfactory; eventually I switched to my own keybinding for !ack <cword>, then some time after that switched to Ack.vim with ag.

Neovim promises to close the loop and finally bring balance to the world, but whether or not those lofty goals are realized in practice remains to be seen.

https://neovim.io/doc/user/msgpack_rpc.html

> "Same. I had quite a lot some time in the past, but also made the "using vim on some foreign machine and being confused as hell" experience by trying to use hotkeys or commands that didn't exist."

I've found that setting a custom colorscheme in vim averts this problem completely. If I see my colorscheme, my muscle memory is primed for my config. If I see the default vim colorscheme, my muscle memory reverts to default vim.

If somebody gave me a copy of otherwise vanilla vim to use that had my colorscheme, that would certainly throw me for a loop. But so far nobody has been that diabolical.

> "or you could just hit ^z and use the unparalleled power of the Unix shell."

Or I could use both, when the need arises, which frankly it never has for me. Ack.vim does not preclude using ^z when you have a special need, it optimizes the common case. And Ack.vim is much nicer than !ack <cword>

> "install ack.vim, slow down vim's startup and bloat your installation"

Well I don't run vim on a z80, so the difference would be pretty hard to measure ;). The way modern well-coded vim plugins like Ack.vim work involves lazyloading using 'autoload' (which is poorly named.) Ack.vim includes plugin/ack.vim (p/av) and autoload/ack.vim (a/av). p/av loads when you start vim, but is a light-weight file that only contains keybindings and settings variables. The actual code of Ack.vim, the function definitions, exists in a/av which is loaded lazily, when one of those functions is called by a keybinding created in p/av.

The result is a truly negligible startup impact.

https://github.com/mileszs/ack.vim/blob/master/plugin/ack.vi...

https://github.com/mileszs/ack.vim/blob/master/autoload/ack....

Not formally in the Emacs sense, but you can of course have configuration only load depending on the filetype so you end up with different keybindings (or other settings) depending on what sort of file you're in.

Nearly all vim plugins worth a damn come with documentation that integrates smoothly into vim's help system. That vim plugin developers care enough to write such documentation is a credit to vim's plugin culture.

I don't see why being effective in vim means you ^z out of vim to run `ack` or `grep`, instead of pressing ^f (for example) to run Ack.vim on the <cword> and have the results displayed next to your code in a window that, when you select the item you want, opens that corresponding file in a buffer with your cursor already on the line in question. Certainly you don't need ack.vim, you could just ^z and do it the old fashioned way, but where is the utility in that?

As for the unix philosophy, it's all about programs doing one thing and doing it well... but isn't it also about composing those programs to do the job you need done? If you're just ^z'ing out of vim to run `grep` or `ack`, how do you get those results back into vim? copy/paste it through your terminal emulator, using tmux in the best case scenario? How is that more in line with the unix philosophy than simply having vim shell out to those utilities for you?

^z to run unix utilities is like coping the output of one command into a file on disk before sending it to another, instead of simply piping the output of one into the input of another using the functionality of your shell. If vim filling in for a shell violates the philosophy, then damn the philosophy. I'd rather have "the traditional shell+domain specific shells(vim, ranger, etc)" than turn the traditional shell into a one-size-fits-poorly shell.

https://github.com/mileszs/ack.vim (Because ack.vim and plugins like it are actually in keeping with the so-called unix philosophy for reasons I outlined above, you don't actually have to use `ack` with ack.vim. I use it with `ag` (the silver searcher) instead.)

I've never liked nerdtree, everybody seems to suggest it but I never saw any utility in what it does. Why would I want a filebrowser taking up an entire window in vim when I have wildmenu command line completion for :e and, for deeper directory trees, fzf (although I only started using that recently, nerdtree never made sense to be before then either)?

I do wonder what your gripe with the autocomplete dropdown is though, vim's built in TUI completion dropdown (this isn't something plugins invented, it's in Vim by default) seems to work just fine for me. The only completion plugin I use is supertab, which I understand to be dated and out of vogue these days, but it gives me continuity with command line completion being triggered by my tab key. The dropdown works exactly like I'd expect it to; tab and shift-tab to cycle up and down, and enter to select a completion. If I continue typing with it open, it refines the suggestions on the fly. I'm not sure what else I should ask for.

I don't think that describing a system which deliberately suppresses the legibility of posts you've already scrolled to see as 'soft censorship' is an unreasonable "redefinition" of censorship. If you disagree, I suppose I consider you unreasonable.

Maybe it's indicative of which sort of conversations I choose to participate in, but I rarely see comment sections go beyond the page fold.

Supposing we take your argument seriously though, comments past the page fold which also have their contrast lowered to the point of illegibility are certainly censored even moreso.

> "I'm not criticizing other cultures"

Maybe that wasn't your intent, but that's certainly what you did. You basically said that all they have to contribute is knowledge of herbs.

A world in which culture is discarded in a pursuit of optimizing for 'economic worth' is not a world I want to live in. Nor I think is it a world you would want to live in, if you really gave it some careful consideration.

Upvotes do not suppress the readability of comments. That workarounds exist is beyond the point.

In and of themselves, no. However, I think an argument could be made for the visual suppression of posts, which occurs after too many downvotes have been given, being a form of soft censorship. The information is still broadcast but it's made impossible to read unless I copy/paste it or tilt my screen to an extreme angle.

I think you misread that post. He was quoting HN's forced cooldown that's imposed if the system thinks you're in some sort of heated flamewar. I assume he means to suggest this is a form of soft censorship tied into the internet points system (which is to say, it seems like he's agreeing with you.)

Maybe you take internet points entirely too seriously. If you find that getting downvoted has emotionally wounded you, I recommend abandoning all your accounts and creating new ones with zero karma (presumably much less than your old ones.) This will teach you to disassociate internet points from your sense of self-worth.

Has the BBC ever reported on it happening, as more than just a potential?

Only on Hacker News would I expect to see somebody celebrating the demise of a language in the name of social progress.

Etiquette from a bank is like water from a stone. Consider moving your accounts to a credit union.

Has there ever actually been a confirmed case of a nuclear warhead being sold by an arms dealer?

It still flashes a white screen at you when it's loading a tab that had been unloaded (this happens when you have a restored session and you click on a restored tab for the first time.)

Disable animation effects to improve TST performance.

Probably calibrated for smaller framed people, to error on the side of safety/legality.

> "But among friends who do, they absolutely feel pressure to tip,"

I'm pretty damn skeptical of that, since in America the vast majority of customers do not put anything in counter tip jars. Maybe you've got some sort of strange selection bias going on...

Tips to wait staff are voluntary but have significant social pressure behind them. Tip jars at counters have no social pressure behind them. That's not reductive, that's just the practical reality of tipping culture in America. If you refuse to tip a waitress a very significant portion of the American population will consider you tantamount to a thief, a morally bankrupt person. Refusing to put your change in the tip jar doesn't even cause people to bat an eye. The social dynamics between these two scenarios are worlds apart. Ignoring these disparate social dynamics is reductive.

If you're going to be outraged that Starbucks offers you the opportunity to tip people at the counter, perhaps I should feign outrage that you spend your money on starbucks instead of making your own coffee and giving the difference to the homeless. Starbucks has a significant profit margin after all; that is money you could be donating!

Tipping a garbage collector is bizarre from an American perspective too.

> "Want one once of 16 different beers? No problem."

If I want one pint of 16 different beers, will it comply or will it cut me off for being visibly intoxicated?

Starbucks isn't taking anything; they are receiving from people who give willingly. If you choose to give them your money, you've got nobody but yourself to blame. In the case of tip jars at counters you can't even blame social pressure, participating in such a scheme is completely voluntary and most people do not.