• Naich@lemmings.world
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    1 month ago

    Once you try Vim you will never use another text editor. Or any other program for that matter because you won’t be able to exit.

    • davidgro@lemmy.world
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      1 month ago

      I also had that experience with emacs, which has a built in help system. I couldn’t find a topic on ‘exit’ or ‘quit’ and refused to just search online.

      Took me half an hour.

      • m4m4m4m4@lemmy.world
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        1 month ago

        and refused to just search online

        Unless you were f*cked by your ISP as I am right now, that’s having some balls. Or being masochist. But nothing in between

        • YTG123@sopuli.xyz
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          1 month ago

          Yes. Though I believe it only kills the current frame if there are multiple

          • Thwompthwomp@lemmy.world
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            1 month ago

            No, I think that exits. C-c k kills the buffer, C-x 0 (zero) will kill the frame. But I may have changed my binds and can never remember which is window and which is frame in emacs terms.

            However, it’s somewhat moot as just about everywhere you run emacs, it’ll open up in gui mode and you can use the file menu. (Or use F10 to bring up the menus in terminal, but I have no idea where on the manual it would say that)

    • kevincox@lemmy.ml
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      1 month ago

      What are you running MS-DOS? laughs in multi-tasking.

      I just drag my vi terminals to another workspace and launch a new editor.

  • Cyrus Draegur@lemm.ee
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    1 month ago

    If I wanted to hear about what’s good about Vim, should I:

    a) ask what’s good about vim

    -OR-

    b) assert blindly that there is nothing good about vim so fanboys will come crawling out of the walls tripping over each other to tell me how I’m wrong?

    • MajorHavoc@programming.dev
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      1 month ago

      Doesn’t matter we will tell you either way.

      • Instead of simply shortcuts, vim uses “chords”. Every new shortcut I learn can be combined intuitively* with all the other shortcuts I know.
      • Because of this there’s no faster way to edit files than Vim in the hands of an experienced user.
      • this let’s me spend almost no time editing code, freeing up the rest of my time for swearing at piss poor documentation.

      * I use “intuitively” here in a way that not merely stretches, but outright abuses the definition of the word.

      • Cyrus Draegur@lemm.ee
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        1 month ago

        Thank you for telling me all this neat stuff! :D

        I think I get what you are intending to imply by the word “intuitively”; it’s that it eventually becomes as reflexive and fluid as touch-typing itself.

        Gosh you make it sound almost like you play Vim like an instrument more than use it…!

        Honestly that sounds cool _

        • MajorHavoc@programming.dev
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          1 month ago

          I think I get what you are intending to imply by the word “intuitively”; it’s that it eventually becomes as reflexive and fluid as touch-typing itself.

          Exactly like that!

          It’s also another source of the many “I can’t exit Vim” jokes, because it is now genuinely disorienting for me to try to edit text without Vim key bindings.

          Gosh you make it sound almost like you play Vim like an instrument more than use it…!

          That’s a great analogy. It does very much feel that way.

          Honestly that sounds cool _

          It is pretty cool.

          Wether it’s really worth the learning curve is probably unique to each person that tries it. But for folks who need to edit a lot of text a lot of the time, it’s pretty great.

      • pmk@lemmy.sdf.org
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        1 month ago

        It’s intuitive if your previous editor was ed(1) and you’re using an ADM-3A-like keyboard.

    • babybus@sh.itjust.works
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      1 month ago

      You shouldn’t talk about vim at all! Just write that vscode is the most flexible code editor.

      • Buddahriffic@lemmy.world
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        1 month ago

        I’ve seen vscode fill up home directories unnecessarily when run on the machine directly as well as remotely!

        IMO vscode is a perfect example of recent software that looks great from a features pov but horrible from an efficient implementation pov. I loved it until I hated it.

    • Classy@sh.itjust.works
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      1 month ago

      To add to your line of query, what if I don’t give a shit about writing code and I just use Linux as a casual laptop user? I’ve never looked at vim or emacs, I use Kate and OnlyOffice

      • ZorathTheDestroyer@lemmynsfw.com
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        1 month ago

        Depends on how much you write. At some point the efficiency gain is probably worth learning vim anyway, but Kate is a nice editor and does the job.

        I just like vim, it feels nice.

        • nul9o9@lemmy.world
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          1 month ago

          Using Neovim with qmv had been amazing for when I needed to standardize seasion and episode numbers/titles for my jellyfin library.

        • Classy@sh.itjust.works
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          1 month ago

          What kind of things would we be gaining efficency for? Markdown? It seems graphically to be a very spartan program. If I’m only writing text, what value would I gain from learning vim versus a graphical text editor that incorporates markdown and page design?

          • ZorathTheDestroyer@lemmynsfw.com
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            1 month ago

            If you want to do document editing, then neither vim nor Kate are editors that do that. They are for editing text. You can write markdown, if you like, and then use pandoc or other tools to convert that to a printable document. I always use LaTeX if I need a pretty output, but that also has somewhat of a steep learning curve.

            What you gain is the ability to manipulate text very efficiently. It’s hard to describe, but it kind of feels like a lower overhead protocol of communicating to the computer what i want it to do to the text compared to “normal” editors. Again, if you only rarely write stuff, it might not be worth it, but it feels great

    • Buddahriffic@lemmy.world
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      1 month ago

      Vim has been around long enough that I’ve found anything I want to figure out how to do has been discussed many times on various places around the internet and have yet to fail to find what I’m looking for with a search.

    • serenissi@lemmy.world
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      1 month ago

      Yeah hx. It was hx that finally made me use vi style navigation and now I choose vim over nano almost always.

      • itslilith@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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        1 month ago

        I’m halfway between hx and vim, I vastly prefer the helix/kakoune philosophy of selection, then action over vim, but I’m dearly missing plug-in support for Helix

        • Lupec@lemm.ee
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          1 month ago

          I was going to point to visual.nvim as a possible middle ground, but it’s now archived :(

          Disclaimer: I haven’t actually tested it myself

          • itslilith@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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            1 month ago

            I’m just gonna be patient. Vanilla Helix is very much usable for everything I need it for at the moment, with built in LSP support, and plug-in support is on the horizon. Not sure when exactly, but it’s gonna happen eventually

            • Lupec@lemm.ee
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              1 month ago

              Yeah I’m with you there, vanilla helix meets basically 90% of my needs so I’m not in any real rush to change

  • ludicolo@lemmy.ml
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    1 month ago

    Anytime I open Vim I ask the same question.

    “how the fuck do I use you?”

    then go back to nano

    repeat.

      • woelkchen@lemmy.world
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        1 month ago

        Have you tried GUI text editors? They’re like the CLI ones, just from this millennium. We’re no longer etching runes into rocks any more either.

          • woelkchen@lemmy.world
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            1 month ago

            Hopefully tongue-in-cheek.

            No.

            Because sure. Microsoft Word is the best IDE.

            Learn the difference between a word processor and a text editor.

            • caseyweederman@lemmy.ca
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              1 month ago

              Guess you’re not up on your memes. Frightfully sorry for responding to what I assumed was a meme answer with a meme answer.

            • Revan343@lemmy.ca
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              29 days ago

              That’s “graphical oowey”, right? /s

              I generally just say the letters; the amount of shit I get for saying gee en you…is not actually that much because I usually don’t interact with coding nerds via voice, only text, but if I did they would be livid

              Edit: For some reason I try to pronounce Xfce as a word instead of an initialism though, ‘ecks-fiss’. Maybe I’m just broken.

      • caseyweederman@lemmy.ca
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        1 month ago

        Accurate. The keyboard shortcuts just make sense and it’s full of features from this millennia. Like control click for multi cursor, automatic syntax highlighting, and automatic lint indicators.

    • Semi-Hemi-Lemmygod@lemmy.world
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      1 month ago

      I tend to work on customer systems where I’m not allowed to install anything. I’ve yet to encounter one that doesn’t have vi installed, but I’ve seen a few without nano.

    • smooth_tea@lemmy.world
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      1 month ago

      I’m sure someone already made a graph plotting the hours wasted learning vs the seconds gained not moving your mouse.

        • MajorHavoc@programming.dev
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          1 month ago

          Nice.

          I’ve been using Vim daily for about 20 years, it saves me 30 minutes at a time regularly.

          I’m approaching break-even on the learning curve!

          I’m kidding…mostly.

      • BCsven@lemmy.ca
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        1 month ago

        This. If it was your sole tool for daily tasks it makes sense, once a month to edit a config file…not so much.

        When I started working we had HP Unix Silicon Graphics systems, VI was our only text editor…so I have some commands as muscle memory. The rest of commands I open my tractor feed help printout from 30 years ago

  • dezmd@lemmy.world
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    1 month ago

    The only Dad advice you nerds need:

    mcedit from the Midnight Commander (mc) tool is the superior text editor.

    I don’t even run arch, btw.

    • regeya@lemmy.world
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      1 month ago

      I remember when the GNOME file manager was this kind of interesting hybrid that used MC for the backend. The one thing I liked about it was that it could be docked in Window Maker. Yep I was using a Dock in GNOME waaaaaaaaaaaaaay before most GNOME users.

      Nowadays it’s still possible to replicate my old Window Maker desktop in XFCE.

    • interdimensionalmeme@lemmy.ml
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      1 month ago

      Ok, let’s try that

      FIrst

      Ok, that is already more storage space than openwrt needs to run a full linux distro

      root@proxmox:~# mc mytestfile.txt

      Esscuse me, the fuck is this !?

      • dezmd@lemmy.world
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        1 month ago

        You’re looking at the full mc package rather than just mcedit. Even then, Midnight Commander is absolutely worth that whopping 7.9MB of space it takes for all the functionality it provides.

        Openwrt is not an example to use to compate against a package size, as it’s target built to fit into small firmware storage spaces on all sorts of random hardware. That’s comparing existential philosophy with oranges.

        Would you download a car?

  • interdimensionalmeme@lemmy.ml
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    1 month ago

    How did these people have “text editor wars” and yet failed to deliver a text editor half as good as microsoft’s edit.com ?

    I’m sorry nano, you’re think you’re hot ?

    But you put search on CTRL+W !!!

    Do you know how stupid that is ?

    Just go and try that in your browser …