• interdimensionalmeme@lemmy.ml
    17·
    7 days 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 …

  • regeya@lemmy.world
    13·
    7 days ago

    I’m gonna laugh my ass off if someone finds out there was some obscure Emacs fork or clone designed to run Clojure or something, and it’s named Again

    • LordKitsuna@lemmy.world
      10·
      7 days ago

      It’s a common problem but the correct solution to closing vim is quite easy, press and hold control alt and F5 to drop to a new terminal. From there you can do “killall vim” to properly close vim, then just drop back to your main session

      • houseofleft@slrpnk.netEnglish
        11·
        7 days ago

        I wish I’d read this years ago! I’ve nearly bankrupted myself buying a new machine each time, thanks!

    • kattfisk@lemmy.dbzer0.com
      5·
      6 days ago

      Just type :!bash (or whatever heathenous shell you prefer) and you never have to leave the warm embrace of vim ever again

  • Naich@lemmings.world
    137·
    8 days 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
      32·
      8 days 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
        16·
        8 days 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

          • Thwompthwomp@lemmy.world
            2·
            7 days 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
      6·
      7 days 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.eeEnglish
    69·
    8 days 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?

    • kattfisk@lemmy.dbzer0.com
      18·
      7 days ago

      tl;dr: Run vimtutor, learn vim, enjoy life

      It’s extremely powerful, for mostly the same reason that it’s incomprehensible to newbies. It’s focused not on directly inputting characters from your keyboard, but on issuing commands to the editor on how to modify the text.

      These commands are simple but combine to let you do exactly what you want with just a few keypresses.

      For example:

      w is a movement command that moves one word forward.

      You can put a number in front of any command to repeat it that many times, so 3w moves three words forward.

      d is the delete command. You combine it with a movement command that tells it what to delete. So dw deletes one word and d3w deletes the next three words.

      f is the find movement command. You press it and then a character to move to the first instance of that character. So f. will move to the end of the current sentence, where the period is.

      Now, knowing only this, if you wanted to delete the next two sentences, you could do that by pressing d2f.

      Hopefully I gave a taste of how incredibly powerful, flexible, yet simple this system is. You only need to know a handful of commands to use vim more effectively than you ever could most other editors. And there are enough clever features that any time you think “I wish there was a better way to do this” there most certainly is (as well as a nice description of how).

      It also comes with a guide to help you get over the initial learning curve, run vimtutor in a console near you to get started on the path to salvation efficient editing.

      • interdimensionalmeme@lemmy.ml
        2·
        7 days ago

        I’m not against that,

        But if ctrl+f doesn’t let me type a search term then I’m going to scream

        The war could have been avoided if user had the option to easily rebind any key/action

        • MajorHavoc@programming.dev
          10·
          7 days ago

          But if ctrl+f doesn’t let me type a search term then I’m going to scream

          It’s been awhile since I’ve bothered to remap a key in Vim, but adding this to .vimrc should do it for you:

          nnoremap <C-f> /

          I started with a bunch of these to let me keep using existing muscle memory while training new.

            • MajorHavoc@programming.dev
              7·
              7 days ago

              Is there a .vimrc that already maps all the standard notepad++ keybindings in one go ?

              You may find someone who has one, but I just did the ones I found myself missing as I encountered them.

              I tried someone’s all-in-one .vimrc, but it broke too many community recipes while rebinding a bunch of shortcuts that weren’t in my muscle memory anyway.

              I kept adjusting my .vimrc as my muscle memory transitioned. So having less to fiddle also made it easier for me to keep my .vimrc tuned to my muscle memory.

              For example, I was using / instead of Ctrl+F because I liked it better within a month or two.

            • rezifon@lemmy.worldEnglish
              5·
              7 days ago

              There are better editors to learn if your goal is to not learn vi.

              In vi, search is not only used for searching, but also for navigation. Demoting search from an easy-to-reach single key to a difficult-to-press chorded key combination breaks one of vi’s core philosophies, natural editing flow, and will significantly reduce your enjoyment and efficiency using the editor.

    • MajorHavoc@programming.dev
      57·
      7 days 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.eeEnglish
        15·
        7 days 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
          8·
          7 days 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
        11·
        7 days ago

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

    • Classy@sh.itjust.works
      11·
      7 days 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
        12·
        7 days 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
          5·
          7 days 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
          5·
          7 days 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?

          • kattfisk@lemmy.dbzer0.com
            4·
            7 days ago

            For just regular text to be consumed by humans, it’s not that great, you probably want a word processor.

            It shines when you do a lot of more structural editing, stuff like “change all quotation marks on this line to be single tick”, “copy everything inside these parentheses and paste it after the equals sign”, “make the first word on the next five lines uppercase”, these are the type of things vim make easy that are not easy in other editors.

            So it’s great for code and config files. Markdown is borderline. You can have a setup that lets you live view how the markdown renders while editing in vim, so it can be pretty good, but the advantage might be a bit dubious.

          • ZorathTheDestroyer@lemmynsfw.com
            6·
            7 days 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
      5·
      7 days 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.