Vim is crap. If a fucking text editor is hard to master, it’s just a bad text editor.
I respectfully disagree. Vim is an excellent editor and is the centerpiece of my dev tools. Counting out the newer features in Neovim like language server and treesitter support, traditional Vim is still a powerful modal text editor with robust features like text objects, macros, sed-like search and replace, rich syntax highlighting, code folding, online help, endless customizability through scripting, and multiple ways to exit. It is an acquired taste though, and I understand it’s not for everyone.
It may seem that way because it’s a complete paradigm shift of how you interact with an editor. Once you understand that, then it becomes a very valuable tool that will make you more efficient. It is a big time investment but the payoff is worth it.
I still need to use IDEs for software development at work but I have to have some sort of Vim emulation on top of them.
I am curious
How does it pay off?
Ive used vim to edit some git commits. Thats really it
But a colleague use it for coding
It helped me break the habit of needing to use arrow keys / mouse for navigating around text. Why is this important? The 1-2 seconds to reach over from home row add up. For example, instead of scrolling the mouse several turns to get to the top of a file, I can just type gg. All without needing to strain my wrist to reach over for the less efficient methods.
Once you master navigation with just keyboard (sans arrow keys) you really feel like a speed demon and the alternative begins to feel clunky. It may not seem like it at first because you have to retrain the way you interact with text files that goes against the habits you’re used too.
Apart from that, for any sort of Linux server management, vim or vi are usually installed so it’s a good skill to have if you quickly need to tweak a config for example. Nano works but is less efficient from an editing perspective.
I work in the terminal a lot and also use tmux with vim keybindings. I love being able to navigate entirely mouse free.
I use Vim emulation wherever possible. I enjoy using a web browser with vim keybindings to navigate around and reduce mouse usage. Vim is a paradigm that many tools incorporate or have plugins to do so because it is just that useful once you learn it.
Vim is not meant to be an IDE. Things like intellisense don’t work (as) well from my experience. But I just use vim plugins in my IDEs so I can get best of both.
Ah, “good” old non-funny “can’t exit Vim” “jokes” that never go out of style. Let’s just all agree you should go back to using browser to write your code up to limited size due to JS limitations and leave the rest of us to “suffer” with out archaic tool that does what it’s told without trying to be a smartass.
Closing nano is more complicated imo
Nano is overrated. I tell everyone who needs to edit from the terminal to use vimtutor. You’ll never go back to Nano.
Nano is the MS notepad of Linux. No more, no less. You don’t have the initial cost of learning vim with nano but in the end you’re working more. I really don’t understand how people can be productive without things like complex regexps, global commands, piping from the editor, etc.
Learning the basics of vim makes setting up a Linux system a lot easier. That’s all I’m saying. You don’t need to learn regexes or anything like that.
Vim has things like copy and paste, including being able to highlight text, search and replace, and I find its commands a lot less clunky than Nano’s. I am not a software developer or a sysadmin, just someone who uses Linux for fun. All of this stuff works without having X or Wayland running too.
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Teleportation: the cursor can be teleport to any line without pressing down key multiple times…
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Macro: for repeating a sequence of inputs multiple times…
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Tabs: nano can’t open multiple files at once i believe…
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Split screen(horizontal and vertical)
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Themes and plugins
These are a few that comes to mind…
No it isn’t, it respect’s ctrl+c, SIGINT and gives useful feedback for new users. Many shortcuts are immediately shown on screen.
If you open vim the first thing you will see it’s a text describing how to close it. Not saying other things are easier for a new user but closing is pretty simple. EDIT: if press ctrl - c vim will show you what you should press instead
And the whole time you have nano open it shows you all the shortcuts how to save and close at the bottom, so no, closing nano is not harder.
I actually learned how to use vi like 30 years ago and I had all the commands memorized. Then, nano came along. All the commands are at the bottom of the screen to remind you. It was just too tempting to pass up. However, I can’t help but suspect that somewhere out there I might have left a vi session open because maybe I mistyped. I might have accidentally typed ;q! instead of :q! or something.
All the commands are at the bottom of the screen to remind you. It was just too tempting to pass up.
But you already had the Vi commands memorized. Did you forget them in the meantime?
I get stressed out every time I need to jump into a server and check something and the only editor is vi. If I can I install nano straight away. Btw, :q! does nothing without pressing ESC first! Hehehe
I’m feeling old now… I’ve been using vi for 35y now and was happy when I got vi.exe on a dos box, as I hated edit. I still don’t like ‘simple’ editors like nano/joe.
I used kill to get out of emacs when trying it agter 7y of vi usage, so I get the need to get mideval on editors users aren’t used off. ;)
vi has always been my bane because I’m a sloppy typist. I can’t count the number of files i had to fix because they ended with :q i like nano because the commands are ctrl + whatever. i don’t make a mess.
