tyrmored

> ... without requiring you to understand how vim works ...

That's the kicker. If you don't actually learn how Vim works, you're missing out on most of its power.

You don't need Janus, you need Vimcasts: http://vimcasts.org/

Article author here. I generally recommend against Janus because I think there's much more value in learning Vim's core behaviour thoroughly, which is best done by starting with a relatively minimal or even empty .vimrc file [1] and no plugins.

When a new user has a better command of vi basics and gets a better grasp on the actual limits of Vim's built-in behaviour, and has invested some time in crafting a configuration that suits them, personally, very well for their work and workflow they have, then they're in a much better position to select plugins judiciously and don't have to use a configuration they don't actually understand.

So far, everyone who's recommended Janus to me or asked me to write about it turned out to have a pretty poor understanding of vi-like editors in general.

For perspective, I see the oh-my-zsh [2] project much the same way. I firmly believe that it really is better to start from scratch so that you force yourself to develop an understanding of the applications you use.

Learning vanilla vi has a slightly less obvious side benefit, too -- it works everywhere. You can log into pretty much any Unix-like system and type vi, and something understandable will happen. POSIX [3] is intended to ensure that.

[1]: http://vimuniversity.com/samples/your-first-vimrc-should-be-...

[2]: https://github.com/robbyrussell/oh-my-zsh

[3]: http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/utilities/vi...

Yeah, it nailed all the Perl I tried, even rather niche stuff.

I gave it this and it thought it was Vala:

    #include <stdio.h>
    
    int main(int argc, char* argv[]) {
        return 0;
    }

Haskell is a very weird guess for yours.

Vim?

Your college does not dictate your eventual status as a "square" or counterculture icon. Timothy Leary, whom Nixon described as the most dangerous man in America due to his immense countercultural influence, was a Harvard lecturer. Ted Kaczynski (better known as the Unabomber) was accepted there at age 16 for his undergraduate degree, later became an assistant professor at Berkeley, and has inspired a whole generation of ecoterrorists and neo-luddites. And what about all the free software/open source advocates that came out of buttoned-down tech schools like MIT, including Richard Stallman?

I don't hate Microsoft Word, but that's probably because I stopped thinking of it as an application for composing or editing text more than ten years ago. Instead I wrote in something like Notepad, and after having converted to the UNIX-like world, I now write pretty much everything in Vim.

Word and its imitations, therefore, simply became a go-to typesetter and printer driver for simple tasks that didn't require LaTeX's precision, and a read-only viewer for documents people emailed to me.

This actually occurred to me as I was writing it; I tried to decide whether it was better to call it more accurately what it was, or refer to it as something with which people were more familiar and hence have a concept to which to relate it. So for reference I actually agree with your comment.

Op here. That part is mostly to use a familiar tool first and then talk people into trying Ack out. I don't use grep anymore for code work either.

You can prepend a count to that too, to increment/decrement by a fixed amount.

This gets scary useful when you use tpope's speeddating plugin.

Thank you! I had no idea this existed.

New PHP developer here. Just some perspective from an "industry" guy rather than a super-smart startup guy. I can clearly remember my first foray into Rails, and it'll be a while before I try it again unless I need it for a job. I just don't like it, and here's why.

For people like me, Rails is at least at first glance very unsettling. I followed the tutorial on their site about making a guestbook, on which they proudly boast how fast you'll have it up and running. So I punched in the code they suggested and bang, guestbook. They certainly weren't lying (maybe exaggerating a tad) about the speed, but ...

Wait. What the fuck? You've made a lot of assumptions about how I wanted this to work. What say I didn't want the form to look like that? Why are you writing CSS for me? That's my job! Going further into it made me feel even more uncomfortable, and after seeing the ORM database abstraction and taking my beloved SQL away from me, I left Rails behind.

It's one thing to provide a clever wrapper method to efficiently sort integers in PHP or Ruby without having to import or implement quicksort or whatever. That's abstraction me and my self-taught ilk are comfortable with. But the way Rails assumes what you meant from your code is just distressing. You don't feel like you wrote it, and this code is running and producing a finished webpage without you needing to understand how it works. You could reasonably respond that this is just another layer of abstraction, but producing an entire webpage for you based on some very cursory instruction does not have the same "pure" feel that a sort() implementation does.

My friends think it's great. I think it's scary. And reading some other elated posts from Rails nuts around the web about the whole "just works" thing and the magic going on really is unsettling. You're not building from the bottom up -- schema -> logic -> markup -> style -> scripts. It's all coming together in one big vaguely uncomfortable clump, and you didn't write it. Anything more than a vim macro/TextMate snippet or two that generates code for me -- even if I can edit it afterwards -- gives me a cold shiver, and makes me feel like I'm using Dreamweaver again.

You could read the code to see what it's doing and tweak accordingly, but then, why not write the code yourself in the first place?

I can see this is sort of tongue-in-cheek, but I really have to agree. I find there's just no better way to do it.

That said, for slightly esoteric techniques like Suckerfish menus, http://htmldog.com/ helps a lot.

I bought Ferriss' book on a whim at an airport. I have no qualms in saying I think it's perhaps the worst waste of $20 in my life. The guy's a charlatan.

Exactly. Good thing it's a plugin. I've always loved how the vim core stays so pared down into not-much-more than vi, which is 99% of the time all I need.

I have difficulty understanding why a text editor needs to be anything but a text editor.

This is what I don't quite get; why make the distinction between "real speed" and "perceived speed"? Really, as far as the vast majority of your users are concerned, the speed of the page is from when they click you in a Google result to when Internet Explorer's status bar says "Done". How long your queries take relative to the page's rendering speed is irrelevant.

My main point is that the database and queries to it usually has much lower-hanging fruit for speed hacks.

My point is more that I've known more than a couple of frontend developers who leap on nifty frontend profiling tools like these before they've even tried a couple of well-placed table indices, or asking the database developer or systems guy about them. In my experience it's a lot easier to wrest 500ms from a bad query than 5ms from some bad JavaScript.

It is a little bit of a stretch. I'd guess that proper use of variable declaration, which JSLint enforces, could make more efficient use of memory. It also doesn't tolerate idiosyncrasies like missed semicolons which might amount to a touch less stress on processing.

I've found trying to make your websites faster is kind of a drug. They can just never be fast enough. You start with Google Page Speed, and before you know it you're profiling your CSS for slow rules in Safari ...

For most database-driven applications though the real latency is almost always in the database. You really need something like memcached to totally remove the bottleneck. I think oftentimes frontend speed demons are trying to answer the wrong question.

Ten bucks says they store the passwords in cleartext too.

Hell, if you can get enough like-minded friends into it, just make up your own holiday.

Among PHP developers, the idea that "PHP is already a templating language" became pretty much memetic. I use an older version of this engine in my work and never really bought into actively hating Smarty, although I stopped using it for my own projects.

One of the core arguments against it, I think, was PHP developers suddenly remembering short tags and alternative syntaxes for control structures (if, foreach) that made working with templates in straight PHP just as easy, much more flexible, and shaving a few milliseconds off load times -- it's a sizeable library to load.

Does anyone else find it just a little bit chilling that the idea of a group of people educating themselves independently is seen by modern society as weird?

Having used both in admittedly elementary contexts this is the #1 reason, easily

I switched to Debian from Ubuntu (where I got my start in Linux) because I no longer felt like I needed the UI or install to hold my hand and wanted to be able to build up my own system from a minimal install. I chose Debian simply because my Ubuntu experience had made me very familiar with aptitude, and I wanted to stick with something popular so my chances of successfully Googling for help were higher.

My work's servers use Debian, and my home ISP runs an unmetered repository for it too.

I've tried Fedora in the past when I was still very much a newbie and found it intimidating. Given I know next to nothing about Red Hat derivatives of Linux it would probably pay to get familiar with them sometime over the next few months.

That's a pretty curious and probably flawed metric to choose. Surely it would be better to find the actual "is no longer in a relationship" updates?

Sample size sucks too. Of only 10,000 status updates, how many would actually include those two phrases? I call bullshit.

Winner!

Shreddix?

Sort of unrelated, but looks like you just gave me a nice big list of Linux audio programs to check out :)