• Cyrus Draegur@lemm.ee
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    2 months 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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      2 months 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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        2 months 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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          2 months 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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        2 months 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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      2 months 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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        2 months 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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      2 months 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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        2 months 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.

        • Classy@sh.itjust.works
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          2 months 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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            2 months 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

        • nul9o9@lemmy.world
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          2 months ago

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

    • Buddahriffic@lemmy.world
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      2 months 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.