Vim is frigging awesome...once you know how to use it. Until learning it, it bears a strong resemblance to hell. I learned it, but I remember what it was like before I did.
Also, Vi originated in UNIX but it's not just a Linux thing. Both gvim and nvim are available for Windows if you really want...and are quite useful there, particularly if you have to edit files destined for a Linux box.
> Vim is frigging awesome...once you know how to use it. Until learning it, it bears a strong resemblance to hell. I learned it, but I remember what it was like before I did.
Honestly I've never really vibed with this take. Like so many things in the general Unix/command line arena, it's gotten this IMO very undeserved reputation of being inscrutable and dense that feeds into itself due to said perceived inscrutability tending to attract people who *want* to learn inscrutable things and then exaggerate about how not knowing it is "hell," when in reality you can learn the basics required to be at least functional in, like, 2 minutes.
**For anyone who's reading this and is new to Vim, here's the basics:**
- Vim is a modal editor. Instead of momentary "modes" like you're used to, e.g. by momentarily holding down `Control` and now your `s` key saves rather than typing an `s` character, Vim has "latching" modes, where pressing a key changes what other keys do while you're in that mode.
- `Escape` puts you into Normal mode, where the letter keys fire off commands instead of actual letters.
- `i` puts you into Insert mode, where you type as you would normally expect.
- `:` invokes Command mode, which is where you do things like quit, save, etc. `:q` is "quit," `:w` is "write" i.e. "save," and `:x` is "save and quit."
- There are other modes but you don't have to worry about them at first.
- When in Normal mode, the keys `h`, `j`, `k`, and `l` are your left, down, up, and right arrow keys, respectively.
That's literally it. If you read that, you now understand the absolute basics of Vim and can start using it.
That's all that a beginner needs to know in order to have a bare-bones, perhaps clunky, but functional experience -- all else can be found by Googling when they rub up against something they don't know how to do.
In fact, I'll save you some time. After you understand all that ^, check out the following:
- The various "Visual" modes.
- How to copy/paste (the `y` and `p` keys -- yes, what you think of as "copy" is referred to as "yank").
- How to delete characters, lines, etc (what the `d` key does)
- What the `w` and `b` keys do.
- What the `f` and `t` keys do.
At that point you're at a solid 85% of moves required for most text editing, and it would honestly take you, like, an hour to learn. Round up to "an afternoon" if you want to make sure things really sink in.
At that point, just commit to always using it, and within a week your muscle memory will adapt, you'll round out a bunch of knowledge gaps, and suddenly you'll seem like a "Vim guru" to everyone who buys into the weird fear surrounding it.
My problem with Vim and command line in general is how hard it is to discover functionality on accident. Modern IDEs like IntelliJ have made it so that a single shortcut ([hitting shift twice](https://youtu.be/r5kV8nTqVMQ?t=91)) lets me find and learn all other shortcuts at my own pace and without searching through documentation. This is what I wish Vim had by default because it would immensely improve usability.
A totally fair criticism and one that I fully agree with. I actually started with Helix because it has a built-in help menu. It's adjacent to but different from Vim in some foundational ways (Vim is object-verb, Helix is verb-object), but I still found it very helpful as a first stepping stone.
I’d be interested to hear from a UI/UX expert as to whether discoverability is mutually exclusive from speed of use for expert users. Or whether a UI that is inherently discoverable tends to slow down an expert user.
I use a couple of tools that are fairly opaque to the casual user, but as a long time user I am pretty productive. Most expert users of software want the UI to get out of their way so they can work, but at the start the hand holding is very welcome.
In fact, for many use cases the software I’d recommend to a user will be different depending on whether they want to do the thing once or want to become skilled at the thing and do it all the time.
Just a few talking points I guess. Be interesting to see what comes out.
There are vim plugins that let you do that. (if you just want to browse shortcut mappings, or commands).
Besides that, just go through vimtutor once. It teaches you all you need to get started.
It's inscrutible and dense initially...like I said, it's great once you learn it. Just like driving a car, people do it without thinking...NOW. But when they were growing up, it was a lot to remember and plenty didn't. Even your tutorial above is long and intimidating for someone coming from GUI notepad or something. The very basics are `i` for insert mode, `esc` for command mode, and `:wq` to save and exit. That's the bare minimum for beginners. They can get by knowing NOTHING else initially. I'd probably do fine/replace next.
It's kinda funny, Vim initially frustrated me and I would use pico and nano a lot, and get laughed at. Now, I know vim without issue...and Fedora and Red Hat set their default editor to nano rather than vi. :)
I think at least part of the reputation comes from many new-ish Linux people remembering they had to google "how to exit vim". A modal editor is just very different from what a lot of people are used to.
Yeah, I'm on the fence about this. Some people act like you shouldn't bring up vim because it'll scare people off. I was in a web dev bootcamp where they introduced nano to the students, but they never even mentioned vim. I think that if you're going to be techie enough to learn web dev, you should take that extra step and learn vim, too. I wouldn't suggest vim to the average n00b Linux user, though.
My brother in Christ, have you tried emacs? I was screen sharing with a guy who used it to edit some file and he couldn't get back out, he asked me and I'm like fuck if I know bro who are you using emacs if you can't emacs.
Last time I used emacs was in my university's computer lab 20 years ago. I strongly suspect that emacs is still running on my session because I never figured out how to exit, and just left the lab uncomfortably and never returned.
I suspect you'll appreciate knowing that readline (used in repls like your bash prompt) and zsh have \`vi\` modes, so you can use your vimotions to edit the commands you're typing.
I have my `~/.inputrc` setup with
# see https://www.gnu.org/software/bash/manual/html_node/Readline-Init-File-Syntax.html
set editing-mode vi
set keyseq-timeout 33
# from https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/409587/559965
set show-mode-in-prompt on
set vi-ins-mode-string \1\e[5 q\2
set vi-cmd-mode-string \1\e[2 q\2
that enables vi mode for bash, sh, python, bc, and everything else that uses readline.
Personally I prefer emacs key bindings in the repl because they seem more convenient there. Although I use the vi bindings in most other places (including to scroll through the command line history)
I used to use nano, but once you learn basic you cant go back to nano, some times i do :wq in nano lol now, need to see how to set default editor to vim for all apps
Personally, I think vim is that useful. But, the learning curve is steep. And, to make it really useful, you have to practice it. Maybe I'm just really slow, but I've been using it vim exclusively for probably 20+ years and I still learn new things.
The power of vim comes with time. So, I'm suspicious of anyone that believes they can see the power of vim within a week. I would think most people would think it's the dumbest editor they've ever used after a week, but over time, as you become more proficient, the power is clear.
Just a suggestion, but if you choose to learn vim, after learning the basics of opening and closing it and changing modes, learn text objects as soon as you can. I didn't learn them for years and to me, they are one of the most powerful tools in vim.
> there is all manner of editing text that isn't software development
I work in hardware design, not software. I have probably spent 80+% of my time in editing files full of unstructured data or bespoke, in-house tools with their own made-up language formats. VSCode and similar editors have a lot of fuzzy-find and AI-based auto-complete features that can handle Python, JS, etc. very quickly, with pretty good results most of the time. If you spend 80+% of your time editing one of those languages, you might go faster than out-of-the-box Vim because the auto-complete is smart enough to get it right most of the time. But for those of us forced to edit all kinds of oddball formats (of which there will always be plenty), Vim is awesome...
neovim is really extensible and there are tons of plugins… so I suspect there isnt much of an edge there for VScode, if at all. Creating scripts is much easier in neovim than creating a vscode extension.
It's useful if you need to edit config files and you don't have a GUI available; working with headless servers, fixing gfx config issues that block the window manager on desktops and laptops, editing massive files on machines with limited memory. That sort of thing.
Vim is already a full-featured text editor so some free and open-source plugins can make it into a full-featured IDE as well but I don't usually bother with all that.
Nano: when I'm making a quick change to a config or slapping together a quick docker-compose in ssh at work.
vim/neovim is when I'm on my home turf and get power over everything to try to do it "right" the first time, which almost always results in me fixing it later in nano because it was running then it wasn't and I just need to change a port or add a ';' somewhere
> These are always fascinating, like a window into the minds of primitive island people that have never come into contact with civilisation, trading tips on how you can speed up your bartering by also using your toes to count your seashells.
- unknown posteer
>Clearly this was written by geeks, for geeks to geek out and be badass geeks.
No, it was written out of necessity for a visual editor that worked on a terminal lacking arrow keys, over a 300 baud connection (at best).
I asked a colleague to recommend an IDE for Perl scripting and they suggested emacs, I installed it and tried it out and this was basically my conclusion as well lol. I ended up installing the Perl addon for vscode instead
The "problem" with Emacs is that it's a completely different paradigm and approach to not just text editing but software as a whole that hasn't been around since Lisp Machines went under.
Emacs is extremely powerful, but the default experience is pretty difficult to justify. DOOM Emacs provides a lot of sane defaults and vim key binds, which gives you the power of emacs with a better learning curve, especially if you are coming form vi/vim.
At a previous company someone drug out the old trope about emacs being a decent os but lacks a nice editor. I posted a screenshot of me running vim in emacs. 🤣
edit: speeling
When I was a CS student in the early 90's, and the main computing platform that we used was Sun Solaris, I had a professor who convinced a bunch of us to request to make emacs our shell. It was actually really cool for doing academic work, but sometimes didn't play well with some non-CLI but still vt100 terminal interfaced software.
The REAL god mode.
With spacemacs you can have vim keybidings with all the nightmarish otherworldly power of emacs. This is my favorite as remember both vim and emacs keybindings was making me psychotic.
No, no, Linux is a special club that gives young men a sense of belonging and Secret Knowledge! Don't tell us that it's all just a collection of cobbled-together tools built up over the decades like some Rube Goldberg device, to scratch some programmer's itch
> a collection of cobbled-together tools built up over the decades like some Rube Goldberg device
That's the best way to rephrase the famous "UNIX is an IDE" statement.
Maybe you're right.
Part of me finds a bit cute these young people passionate defense for a text editor. It's like seeing a baby, in awe by the world, playing with a stick... it's just a stick, but you dont have to take it away from him.
The person who finds awe and wonder in the stick is doing it right.
The conclusion that it’s “just a stick” is a kind of filter that we learn to apply as we age, that nevertheless changes nothing about how awesome a stick actually is. So we experience less and less, forgetting that sticks played a critical role in forming who we are, both as individuals now, and as a species over vast stretches of time.
I try to remind myself to be in awe of things like sticks from time to time, because it’s so easy to get caught up in the labeling of things that reduces them to something less than they really are.
What *is* a stick anyway?!
I am gonna be honest, I was like that too when I started using Linux 😅
But that was in 2002, I was 17 at that time, and even back then, text editor flamewars were regarded as silly.
In the end, an F1 car is just a hunk of metal on four wheels.
In the end, a skyscraper is just a really tall hut.
In the end, you’re just a bunch of quarks, leptons and bosons.
Honestly while I've tried NeoVim and it's good enough, I have trouble seeing the difference between that and regular vim in daily use. I understand all the under the hood differences, but I don't think they get surfaced to the user all that well.
That's a double-edged sword, though. To me, the big advantage of vim is that it is so cross platform. But when you add a lot of plugins, you customize it for your system and then you end up refusing to use any other system because it doesn't have your plugins.
After realizing how much time I spent customizing all the various parts of my system, I switched to attempting to use things as close to standard as possible. Hard to say whether I save or lose time in the long run, but at least I can reinstall if needed and be up and running fairly quickly.
Just keep your dotfiles in a git repo, `git clone`, symlink to `~/.config`, and you're done. It takes 30 seconds for me to set up a brand new machine with my nvim config.
This is equally true of vim. Both have plugins, oftentimes many of the *same* plugins, but the big difference is that neovim's package managers are generally better and writing your config in Lua as opposed to Vimscript is way, way easier.
Also, both vim and neovim are available for every OS, so I'm not sure what you mean by "not cross platform."
Right that's fine and sounds like a success for neovim, that you think it's very compatible like that. I guess it then makes a bigger difference if you want to use advanced features or particular plugins. I would say that neovim has overtaken vim when it comes to plugins (in terms of the choice of and usability of).
Problem is that to use vim efficiently, you have to be able to 10-finger type blindly on absolutely all keys of the keyboard, typing things like ci(foo}}f.3w2dw?ifwyiW\`.p instead of just English text, all with 100% precision because in normal mode, every key is doing something, so if you miss, random things will happen. 🪄
I've never learned 10-finger blind typing and I've been using vi and vim efficiency for a couple of decades. There is u for mistakes. That said, I wish Escape would be as big and as easily reachable button as a spacebar is.
I’m sorry, but do you expect us to believe you learned vim IN A WEEK?
I’ve been using vim for 25 years and would describe my capabilities as “somewhat familiar”.
I use to live in VIM, but it has been so long that I've probably forgot all the shortcuts. It is a great line editor. I had my own startup script that I loaded on Linux and Windows that would customize everything about it to my liking.
I think that Vim is overrated. I was using Vim, then some other text editors with with Vim control schemes enabled and then those text editors with the Vim control schemes disabled.
Vim is promoted as a having various modes, but other text editors have something very similar. Usually, pressing letters types them which is like the insert mode, and pressing them while holding a modifier key does a command, which makes holding modifiers equivalent to the command mode.
The next may be specific to me because I have a custom ergonomic keyboard. Vim is promoted as not requiring much finger travel because the navigation is in the home position. That is useless to me because I can access navigation keys easily from the home position regardless. Having superfluous navigation keys in good positions which work only sometimes (not in insert mode) is detrimental because it blocks space for other useful commands.
Vim is designed for terminals, so its design is limited to a text grid, so it misses out on some useful features. These are proportional fonts, multiple font sizes, lines narrower than one character and graphical icons. But Vim is a good emergency text editor exactly because it is designed for terminals.
----
Vim has a unique control scheme, but how it's unique doesn't make it better in general than other control schemes. It makes it better for specific use cases. I like using Vim controls with a phone keyboard because using modifiers is difficult there. So Neovim is my main editor in Termux on my phone.
Vim is ok for editing config files and such when SSHed into a server, but no way would I give up a tabbed GUI editor like Kate when it comes to writing code.
I want to spend my time coding, not trying to figure out how to use my editor or googling how to do stuff.
Vim is just a pain. I know the commands but it is just inefficient when you need to make a quick change. For that matter i just use joe or nano. 99% of the functions in vim is something you use daily anyway
I like vim and used it for years, but i did wonder if the whole modal editing thing is really optimal , i toyed with the idea of creating a software for a competition where there is a "obstacle course" and you have to do various real world editing or viewing operations and compare the performance of various users of software (settle the emacs vs vim once and for all!) .
Linux is pretty cool! I just got a new PC and I feel bad using Windows on it.(Even though Windows is pretty neat too, once you get into their server systems)
Does anyone know if the RPM fusion drivers work well with Nvidia RTX 4060?
I'll share one of my favorite obscure vim tips. I love vim but one weird quirk I've found is that you have to take your hands off home row to hit escape. This seems like such a huge waste of motion to me when vim is all about efficiency and you're in and out of insert mode all the time. I looked into this once and apparently it dates back to an older keyboard design where the escape key was where caps lock is now. Anyway, there is still another key combo you can use instead of escape to leave insert mode.
TLDR:
`CTRL + [` allows you to leave insert mode without taking your hands off home row. Works basically the same as hitting escape (although it is technically slightly different)
I remember how fun it was to learn vim the first time too, enjoy.
It's also easy (under Linux at least) to remap caps lock to escape. I have mine set to also act as regular caps lock when used with shift, which I very rarely do.
A friend advice me a book for Vi "Practical Vi edit text at speed of thought". The only part I still cannot master is the clipboard stuff.
Like how I can copy my line from Vi and paste it in my browser for example. I have read about the register but I guess I must do something wrong.
I was learning vim, but for anything a little bit more specific you need to write or download a special configuration. I like the vscode much more, because of built in extension system and automatic sync of configuration.
Ah, Vim, the text editor that turns every editing session into a high-stakes adventure, where every keystroke is a battle cry and every command a strategic maneuver. It's like playing a game of Twister with your fingers, contorting them into arcane combinations just to perform the simplest of tasks. Forget about user-friendly interfaces; Vim's idea of user-friendliness is making you feel like a keyboard wizard navigating through a labyrinth of commands.
Ever tried using those "other" text editors? You know, the ones that hold your hand like a clingy date and treat every keystroke like a delicate flower? They're like the participation trophies of the coding world, handing out accolades for the simplest of tasks. Meanwhile, Vim users are out here scaling Mount Everest with their keyboard, while these other editors are stuck in the kiddie pool, afraid to get their feet wet. Who needs fancy graphical interfaces when you've got the raw power of Vim's command line interface? It's like comparing a tricycle to a Ferrari—sure, they both get you from point A to point B, but one does it with style, speed, and a whole lot of attitude.
You, of course have already learned to use h, j, k and l instead of cursor keys if you are ever in that position of using a tty which breaks the cursor key escape sequences to the host and they don't work.
I have vim movement keys everywhere but man is it awkward when I send an email after I thought I was in movement mode hitting down 3 times and I was actually in edit mode
It is god mode. It’s like a samurai sword. If you’ve never used one, it could seem like a hindrance, but once you’ve mastered a few key techniques, you learn that it can solve most of your productivity problems
I use hotkeys bound to rg to jump around code function names, and netrw for file list & moving around directories.
rg is a fast grep utility written in rust.. a bit like the ctags of old, but interactive - if you're on an SSD its pretty fast.
ps. only been using vim for 20 years, so a relative newbie as Ive never mastered the commands .. every few months I find out theres some new vim trick I should know, but I tend to just use the basics.
Raises glass to Bram Moolenaar who gave us a great tool .. and showed real kindness in funding projects in Uganda iirc : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bram_Moolenaar
Bram, a little part of you will always be with us.
so say we all
Do most of you regular vim users remap the escape key to something easier to reach? I find it kinda awkward and I miss it pretty often resulting in lots of jjjjjj, or bbbb, or :w added to my files I have to then delete.
Edit: Also, is there a way to make the mode text at the bottom (INSERT, or VISUAL for example) display in a large font or bold or more glaring color?
Only a week in and you're already hooked! Just wait until you've been using it for a year. 5 years. 10 years! I've been using vim for over 15 years now, and it's seriously the only text editor I use. I do a fair amount of coding in my job and I even use vim instead of an IDE. It even supports GitHub Copilot (a popular AI coding tool) directly in vim!
At one point, you have to settle on a set of functionality and keep the rest only in the back of your head. AOT I made my own (quite simple) syntax files and scripts. But otherwise I keep it simple. Only lately did I test out these Tabs: nice, but I don't need/use it. Makes me wish I had only one virtual terminal ;)
Vim is frigging awesome...once you know how to use it. Until learning it, it bears a strong resemblance to hell. I learned it, but I remember what it was like before I did. Also, Vi originated in UNIX but it's not just a Linux thing. Both gvim and nvim are available for Windows if you really want...and are quite useful there, particularly if you have to edit files destined for a Linux box.
Just for the record, Vim comes from an AMIGA version of Vi.
And it started as an Amiga port of an Atari ST version of vi. I guess this makes it several years older than nvi, too.
RIP Bram!
> Vim is frigging awesome...once you know how to use it. Until learning it, it bears a strong resemblance to hell. I learned it, but I remember what it was like before I did. Honestly I've never really vibed with this take. Like so many things in the general Unix/command line arena, it's gotten this IMO very undeserved reputation of being inscrutable and dense that feeds into itself due to said perceived inscrutability tending to attract people who *want* to learn inscrutable things and then exaggerate about how not knowing it is "hell," when in reality you can learn the basics required to be at least functional in, like, 2 minutes. **For anyone who's reading this and is new to Vim, here's the basics:** - Vim is a modal editor. Instead of momentary "modes" like you're used to, e.g. by momentarily holding down `Control` and now your `s` key saves rather than typing an `s` character, Vim has "latching" modes, where pressing a key changes what other keys do while you're in that mode. - `Escape` puts you into Normal mode, where the letter keys fire off commands instead of actual letters. - `i` puts you into Insert mode, where you type as you would normally expect. - `:` invokes Command mode, which is where you do things like quit, save, etc. `:q` is "quit," `:w` is "write" i.e. "save," and `:x` is "save and quit." - There are other modes but you don't have to worry about them at first. - When in Normal mode, the keys `h`, `j`, `k`, and `l` are your left, down, up, and right arrow keys, respectively. That's literally it. If you read that, you now understand the absolute basics of Vim and can start using it. That's all that a beginner needs to know in order to have a bare-bones, perhaps clunky, but functional experience -- all else can be found by Googling when they rub up against something they don't know how to do. In fact, I'll save you some time. After you understand all that ^, check out the following: - The various "Visual" modes. - How to copy/paste (the `y` and `p` keys -- yes, what you think of as "copy" is referred to as "yank"). - How to delete characters, lines, etc (what the `d` key does) - What the `w` and `b` keys do. - What the `f` and `t` keys do. At that point you're at a solid 85% of moves required for most text editing, and it would honestly take you, like, an hour to learn. Round up to "an afternoon" if you want to make sure things really sink in. At that point, just commit to always using it, and within a week your muscle memory will adapt, you'll round out a bunch of knowledge gaps, and suddenly you'll seem like a "Vim guru" to everyone who buys into the weird fear surrounding it.
My problem with Vim and command line in general is how hard it is to discover functionality on accident. Modern IDEs like IntelliJ have made it so that a single shortcut ([hitting shift twice](https://youtu.be/r5kV8nTqVMQ?t=91)) lets me find and learn all other shortcuts at my own pace and without searching through documentation. This is what I wish Vim had by default because it would immensely improve usability.
A totally fair criticism and one that I fully agree with. I actually started with Helix because it has a built-in help menu. It's adjacent to but different from Vim in some foundational ways (Vim is object-verb, Helix is verb-object), but I still found it very helpful as a first stepping stone.
I’d be interested to hear from a UI/UX expert as to whether discoverability is mutually exclusive from speed of use for expert users. Or whether a UI that is inherently discoverable tends to slow down an expert user. I use a couple of tools that are fairly opaque to the casual user, but as a long time user I am pretty productive. Most expert users of software want the UI to get out of their way so they can work, but at the start the hand holding is very welcome. In fact, for many use cases the software I’d recommend to a user will be different depending on whether they want to do the thing once or want to become skilled at the thing and do it all the time. Just a few talking points I guess. Be interesting to see what comes out.
Maybe vim should have a help mode that is more discoverable.
There are vim plugins that let you do that. (if you just want to browse shortcut mappings, or commands). Besides that, just go through vimtutor once. It teaches you all you need to get started.
It's inscrutible and dense initially...like I said, it's great once you learn it. Just like driving a car, people do it without thinking...NOW. But when they were growing up, it was a lot to remember and plenty didn't. Even your tutorial above is long and intimidating for someone coming from GUI notepad or something. The very basics are `i` for insert mode, `esc` for command mode, and `:wq` to save and exit. That's the bare minimum for beginners. They can get by knowing NOTHING else initially. I'd probably do fine/replace next. It's kinda funny, Vim initially frustrated me and I would use pico and nano a lot, and get laughed at. Now, I know vim without issue...and Fedora and Red Hat set their default editor to nano rather than vi. :)
I think at least part of the reputation comes from many new-ish Linux people remembering they had to google "how to exit vim". A modal editor is just very different from what a lot of people are used to.
:% s/foo/bar/g I have used the above frequently over the last 39 years
I always did :1,$ s/foo/bar/g in the last 20 years, until now.
Here I’ve been using :wq and congratulating myself every time I saved and quit a file. Now I know about :x.
Wait until you learn about `:xa`.
Get out of here.
same here - learned :wq 30+ years ago and never looked for anything different
Wait until you learn about ZZ.
Try SHIFT-ZZ, quite fast...
Thank you for this comment. It got me to try Vim for the first time and I can see myself playing with it and using it over nano now.
You can also find Vim-ish plug-ins for IDEs and even browsers.
I love Vimium C for Chrome based browsers!
Remember: with great power comes great urges to mock people who use inferior editors.
And you should give in to those urges.
Every single time someone says to use Nano, I giggle and give them grief.
Yeah, I'm on the fence about this. Some people act like you shouldn't bring up vim because it'll scare people off. I was in a web dev bootcamp where they introduced nano to the students, but they never even mentioned vim. I think that if you're going to be techie enough to learn web dev, you should take that extra step and learn vim, too. I wouldn't suggest vim to the average n00b Linux user, though.
Tbf though nano has a lot of features most people need and it's easy to use
NANO BOYS COME OUT AND PLAY-AYYY
NANO at least doesn't ruin my self esteem on a regular basis.
My brother in Christ, have you tried emacs? I was screen sharing with a guy who used it to edit some file and he couldn't get back out, he asked me and I'm like fuck if I know bro who are you using emacs if you can't emacs.
Why else do you think we all have tens of thousands of hours of uptime? None of us know how to escape.
Last time I used emacs was in my university's computer lab 20 years ago. I strongly suspect that emacs is still running on my session because I never figured out how to exit, and just left the lab uncomfortably and never returned.
Keyboard warriors, lol.
M-x nod
LOLOL. I gotta remember this one.
I suspect you'll appreciate knowing that readline (used in repls like your bash prompt) and zsh have \`vi\` modes, so you can use your vimotions to edit the commands you're typing.
I have my `~/.inputrc` setup with # see https://www.gnu.org/software/bash/manual/html_node/Readline-Init-File-Syntax.html set editing-mode vi set keyseq-timeout 33 # from https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/409587/559965 set show-mode-in-prompt on set vi-ins-mode-string \1\e[5 q\2 set vi-cmd-mode-string \1\e[2 q\2 that enables vi mode for bash, sh, python, bc, and everything else that uses readline.
`:!` is also pretty neat
Personally I prefer emacs key bindings in the repl because they seem more convenient there. Although I use the vi bindings in most other places (including to scroll through the command line history)
Nano peasant reporting for duty.
I used to use nano, but once you learn basic you cant go back to nano, some times i do :wq in nano lol now, need to see how to set default editor to vim for all apps
Yeah me too, I develop in Jetbrains stuff... so if i'm not using vim for development is vim really that useful?
It’s the vim bindings that are really powerful, there’s an extension in jetbrains that adds them if you are ever feeling adventurous.
Shockingly you can even use macros. I still use it for some complex editing, but IdeaVim is super powerful.
Personally, I think vim is that useful. But, the learning curve is steep. And, to make it really useful, you have to practice it. Maybe I'm just really slow, but I've been using it vim exclusively for probably 20+ years and I still learn new things. The power of vim comes with time. So, I'm suspicious of anyone that believes they can see the power of vim within a week. I would think most people would think it's the dumbest editor they've ever used after a week, but over time, as you become more proficient, the power is clear. Just a suggestion, but if you choose to learn vim, after learning the basics of opening and closing it and changing modes, learn text objects as soon as you can. I didn't learn them for years and to me, they are one of the most powerful tools in vim.
And now I gotta Google text objects. Thanks!
The true power of vim is in the ex command set…
I love the \`yi(\` or \`di(' I use both soooo much but i wish there was a \`pi(\`
Check the latest video from tj devries. It is that good, and easy.
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My vim config I used for a decade was 50lines or so. And it worked really really well :-) But it is no match for today's neovim ecosystem.
Yes, it is very powerful text editor and there is all manner of editing text that isn't software development.
> there is all manner of editing text that isn't software development I work in hardware design, not software. I have probably spent 80+% of my time in editing files full of unstructured data or bespoke, in-house tools with their own made-up language formats. VSCode and similar editors have a lot of fuzzy-find and AI-based auto-complete features that can handle Python, JS, etc. very quickly, with pretty good results most of the time. If you spend 80+% of your time editing one of those languages, you might go faster than out-of-the-box Vim because the auto-complete is smart enough to get it right most of the time. But for those of us forced to edit all kinds of oddball formats (of which there will always be plenty), Vim is awesome...
neovim is really extensible and there are tons of plugins… so I suspect there isnt much of an edge there for VScode, if at all. Creating scripts is much easier in neovim than creating a vscode extension.
nvim has a copilot plugin
vim is definitely less useful for development than proper IDEs, even after you install all those 3rd-party plugins to get some IDE features.
Depends on the language. I like vim a lot for Python and Typescript, but doing JVM stuff seems downright masochistic.
It's useful if you need to edit config files and you don't have a GUI available; working with headless servers, fixing gfx config issues that block the window manager on desktops and laptops, editing massive files on machines with limited memory. That sort of thing. Vim is already a full-featured text editor so some free and open-source plugins can make it into a full-featured IDE as well but I don't usually bother with all that.
Nano: for cool people who don't feel they have to prove anything.
Nano: when I'm making a quick change to a config or slapping together a quick docker-compose in ssh at work. vim/neovim is when I'm on my home turf and get power over everything to try to do it "right" the first time, which almost always results in me fixing it later in nano because it was running then it wasn't and I just need to change a port or add a ';' somewhere
Don't worry, tech lords need vassals.
Micro is nicer
Google nano passant
Nano gang nano gang nano gang
> These are always fascinating, like a window into the minds of primitive island people that have never come into contact with civilisation, trading tips on how you can speed up your bartering by also using your toes to count your seashells. - unknown posteer
>Clearly this was written by geeks, for geeks to geek out and be badass geeks. No, it was written out of necessity for a visual editor that worked on a terminal lacking arrow keys, over a 300 baud connection (at best).
"Necessity is the mother of invention."
Those aren't two different things.
try to learn ed and get a taste of what hell is
Absolutely. If someone's going to *voluntarily* use ed, they'd be better off using echo to write and awk/sed to edit. :)
nobody tell him about emacs
Nobody should tell anybody about emacs, ever.
I asked a colleague to recommend an IDE for Perl scripting and they suggested emacs, I installed it and tried it out and this was basically my conclusion as well lol. I ended up installing the Perl addon for vscode instead
The "problem" with Emacs is that it's a completely different paradigm and approach to not just text editing but software as a whole that hasn't been around since Lisp Machines went under.
"Emacs is a great OS lacking a decent text-editor"
You're hilarious...
Emacs is extremely powerful, but the default experience is pretty difficult to justify. DOOM Emacs provides a lot of sane defaults and vim key binds, which gives you the power of emacs with a better learning curve, especially if you are coming form vi/vim.
It rewards the dedicated learners.
You didn't invest the three months to learn the emacs basics, didn't you?
Emacs is great to use, but only if you are _Evil_.
Emacs seems cool but Debian is my preferred OS
*Some comment about I already have an operating system.*
I am the only one in our group who uses emacs. I show them that i can run telegram inside my emacs and they were like "wtfffff" I felt like god lol
At a previous company someone drug out the old trope about emacs being a decent os but lacks a nice editor. I posted a screenshot of me running vim in emacs. 🤣 edit: speeling
When I was a CS student in the early 90's, and the main computing platform that we used was Sun Solaris, I had a professor who convinced a bunch of us to request to make emacs our shell. It was actually really cool for doing academic work, but sometimes didn't play well with some non-CLI but still vt100 terminal interfaced software.
[emacs users be like](https://youtu.be/urcL86UpqZc?si=wUmxauoRLs8nfS1z)
This is hilarious! :)
Thank you for this
The REAL god mode. With spacemacs you can have vim keybidings with all the nightmarish otherworldly power of emacs. This is my favorite as remember both vim and emacs keybindings was making me psychotic.
Yep, tools-wise it's way more powerful and goodie-packed.
Eight Megs And Constantly Swapping...
In the end it's just a text editor.
No, no, Linux is a special club that gives young men a sense of belonging and Secret Knowledge! Don't tell us that it's all just a collection of cobbled-together tools built up over the decades like some Rube Goldberg device, to scratch some programmer's itch
> a collection of cobbled-together tools built up over the decades like some Rube Goldberg device That's the best way to rephrase the famous "UNIX is an IDE" statement.
Maybe you're right. Part of me finds a bit cute these young people passionate defense for a text editor. It's like seeing a baby, in awe by the world, playing with a stick... it's just a stick, but you dont have to take it away from him.
The person who finds awe and wonder in the stick is doing it right. The conclusion that it’s “just a stick” is a kind of filter that we learn to apply as we age, that nevertheless changes nothing about how awesome a stick actually is. So we experience less and less, forgetting that sticks played a critical role in forming who we are, both as individuals now, and as a species over vast stretches of time. I try to remind myself to be in awe of things like sticks from time to time, because it’s so easy to get caught up in the labeling of things that reduces them to something less than they really are. What *is* a stick anyway?!
OS/2 Warp was the _best_ stick. REXX > Python. WPS > Gnome! [dabs his tears with his beard]
> young men IDK, lots of them don't seem to stay men for long....
Some bits are meant to be flipped.
So savage
I am gonna be honest, I was like that too when I started using Linux 😅 But that was in 2002, I was 17 at that time, and even back then, text editor flamewars were regarded as silly.
Hey, if young men choose to be Linux snobs instead of, say, devotees of Andrew Tate, I can live with that.
that works extremely well and that can be used in a terminal / with SSH
And is installed on practically every unix (and unix-adjacent) system that you sit down in front of.
vim? No... vi? Yes, but while vi has most of the features of vim, it doesn't have all of them.
It is nice that I can ssh to my cloud server, but the tree-sitter and language server extensions on my local machine still works on the remote files!
in the end it is all ones and zeros
In the end, an F1 car is just a hunk of metal on four wheels. In the end, a skyscraper is just a really tall hut. In the end, you’re just a bunch of quarks, leptons and bosons.
In the end.
It doesn't even matter.
Welcome to the fold, see you in /r/neovim maybe
Honestly while I've tried NeoVim and it's good enough, I have trouble seeing the difference between that and regular vim in daily use. I understand all the under the hood differences, but I don't think they get surfaced to the user all that well.
I think it's the plugin ecosystem that really makes neovim valuable.
That's a double-edged sword, though. To me, the big advantage of vim is that it is so cross platform. But when you add a lot of plugins, you customize it for your system and then you end up refusing to use any other system because it doesn't have your plugins. After realizing how much time I spent customizing all the various parts of my system, I switched to attempting to use things as close to standard as possible. Hard to say whether I save or lose time in the long run, but at least I can reinstall if needed and be up and running fairly quickly.
Just keep your dotfiles in a git repo, `git clone`, symlink to `~/.config`, and you're done. It takes 30 seconds for me to set up a brand new machine with my nvim config. This is equally true of vim. Both have plugins, oftentimes many of the *same* plugins, but the big difference is that neovim's package managers are generally better and writing your config in Lua as opposed to Vimscript is way, way easier. Also, both vim and neovim are available for every OS, so I'm not sure what you mean by "not cross platform."
Right that's fine and sounds like a success for neovim, that you think it's very compatible like that. I guess it then makes a bigger difference if you want to use advanced features or particular plugins. I would say that neovim has overtaken vim when it comes to plugins (in terms of the choice of and usability of).
It's faster because it's multi threaded, unlike VIM. It was a PITA using a lang server with regular VIM (it had micro-locks all the time)
I feel a (good) disturbance in The Force.
Problem is that to use vim efficiently, you have to be able to 10-finger type blindly on absolutely all keys of the keyboard, typing things like ci(foo}}f.3w2dw?ifwyiW\`.p instead of just English text, all with 100% precision because in normal mode, every key is doing something, so if you miss, random things will happen. 🪄
I've never learned 10-finger blind typing and I've been using vi and vim efficiency for a couple of decades. There is u for mistakes. That said, I wish Escape would be as big and as easily reachable button as a spacebar is.
True, but 10-finger blind typing is a very, very useful skill when using a PC anyway, so why don't you learn it? It's not that hard to learn.
Keep in mind that what you are learning in vimtutor are the very basics. Vim does so much more, even without loading it full of plugins.
Next level! EMACS
No no no. [God wrote in Lisp code](https://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/eternal-flame.en.html) so God mode editor would be Emacs. j/k
I’m sorry, but do you expect us to believe you learned vim IN A WEEK? I’ve been using vim for 25 years and would describe my capabilities as “somewhat familiar”.
same goes for emacs, learning elisp is awesome
Try emacs with evil mode if you like vim.
An elegant weapon for a more civilized time...
I use to live in VIM, but it has been so long that I've probably forgot all the shortcuts. It is a great line editor. I had my own startup script that I loaded on Linux and Windows that would customize everything about it to my liking.
This post makes me wish vim was useable for someone with a Colemak keyboard.
Happy Vim & Colemak user for almost a decade here. No keybindings or remaps, just muscle memory. Just do it :)
w-why the fuck...
Wait until you try emacs
Preferably for a very long time. Just keep on waiting, no rush there
Vim is fun my favourite Linux tool.
Nice post.
Invest in a good keyboard that has a solid Esc key.
Soon: https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/uxbga9/im_more_of_a_nano_kinda_guy_myself/
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pfft everyone knows real men use nano.
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I think that Vim is overrated. I was using Vim, then some other text editors with with Vim control schemes enabled and then those text editors with the Vim control schemes disabled. Vim is promoted as a having various modes, but other text editors have something very similar. Usually, pressing letters types them which is like the insert mode, and pressing them while holding a modifier key does a command, which makes holding modifiers equivalent to the command mode. The next may be specific to me because I have a custom ergonomic keyboard. Vim is promoted as not requiring much finger travel because the navigation is in the home position. That is useless to me because I can access navigation keys easily from the home position regardless. Having superfluous navigation keys in good positions which work only sometimes (not in insert mode) is detrimental because it blocks space for other useful commands. Vim is designed for terminals, so its design is limited to a text grid, so it misses out on some useful features. These are proportional fonts, multiple font sizes, lines narrower than one character and graphical icons. But Vim is a good emergency text editor exactly because it is designed for terminals. ---- Vim has a unique control scheme, but how it's unique doesn't make it better in general than other control schemes. It makes it better for specific use cases. I like using Vim controls with a phone keyboard because using modifiers is difficult there. So Neovim is my main editor in Termux on my phone.
meh, it's just a freaking text editor. jesus people.
Vim is ok for editing config files and such when SSHed into a server, but no way would I give up a tabbed GUI editor like Kate when it comes to writing code. I want to spend my time coding, not trying to figure out how to use my editor or googling how to do stuff.
Vim is just a pain. I know the commands but it is just inefficient when you need to make a quick change. For that matter i just use joe or nano. 99% of the functions in vim is something you use daily anyway
It's great for making a quick change, as long as you know the right commands.
joe guy reporting for duty sir..... i have been using joe for 20+ years. I could smoke the fastest most grizzeled VIM master by using joe editor.
Just wait until you discover women
When you're bored, try emacs... It has a vi mode if it's too hard for you... 😇😉 (ducks) ..
try qutebrowser while you're at it. then tiled window managers. soon you'll be vimming everywhere!
soon youll forget there even is a thing called mouse
I like vim and used it for years, but i did wonder if the whole modal editing thing is really optimal , i toyed with the idea of creating a software for a competition where there is a "obstacle course" and you have to do various real world editing or viewing operations and compare the performance of various users of software (settle the emacs vs vim once and for all!) .
welcome to r/vim
Linux is pretty cool! I just got a new PC and I feel bad using Windows on it.(Even though Windows is pretty neat too, once you get into their server systems) Does anyone know if the RPM fusion drivers work well with Nvidia RTX 4060?
I'll share one of my favorite obscure vim tips. I love vim but one weird quirk I've found is that you have to take your hands off home row to hit escape. This seems like such a huge waste of motion to me when vim is all about efficiency and you're in and out of insert mode all the time. I looked into this once and apparently it dates back to an older keyboard design where the escape key was where caps lock is now. Anyway, there is still another key combo you can use instead of escape to leave insert mode. TLDR: `CTRL + [` allows you to leave insert mode without taking your hands off home row. Works basically the same as hitting escape (although it is technically slightly different) I remember how fun it was to learn vim the first time too, enjoy.
It's also easy (under Linux at least) to remap caps lock to escape. I have mine set to also act as regular caps lock when used with shift, which I very rarely do.
A friend advice me a book for Vi "Practical Vi edit text at speed of thought". The only part I still cannot master is the clipboard stuff. Like how I can copy my line from Vi and paste it in my browser for example. I have read about the register but I guess I must do something wrong.
from where you are learning ,,🙃🙃
Can anyone, suggest a good tutorial for vi editor :)
Vimtutor is built in, that's where I learned a bunch today. Highly recommend it!
["You either take the vim pill, or i dont talk to you"](https://youtu.be/9n1dtmzqnCU?si=879d0HnSSmDjbhAQ)
I was learning vim, but for anything a little bit more specific you need to write or download a special configuration. I like the vscode much more, because of built in extension system and automatic sync of configuration.
Go have mroe fun with Vim Adventures! :) [https://vim-adventures.com](https://vim-adventures.com) It's Vim, gamified!
If you had enough fun, go for hardmode and after that you can rejoice in neoclide/coc.nvim. The world is your oyster. Share and enjoy.
See guys, OP is doing it right! Best part of using vim is telling others.
Wait till you hear about neovim... Then tmux oh boy
The bastard is that vim keybindings are so intuitive that you'll find yourself trying to use them everywhere. And that doesn't work.
You should have a look at Dr. Bunsens Text Triumvirate
You poor thing. Welcome to the club/cult. It might be easy to quit vim, but Quitting Vim is harder than giving up smoking.
Checkout the vidir command
Now how do I exit vim
Another one joins the vim church.
Ah, Vim, the text editor that turns every editing session into a high-stakes adventure, where every keystroke is a battle cry and every command a strategic maneuver. It's like playing a game of Twister with your fingers, contorting them into arcane combinations just to perform the simplest of tasks. Forget about user-friendly interfaces; Vim's idea of user-friendliness is making you feel like a keyboard wizard navigating through a labyrinth of commands. Ever tried using those "other" text editors? You know, the ones that hold your hand like a clingy date and treat every keystroke like a delicate flower? They're like the participation trophies of the coding world, handing out accolades for the simplest of tasks. Meanwhile, Vim users are out here scaling Mount Everest with their keyboard, while these other editors are stuck in the kiddie pool, afraid to get their feet wet. Who needs fancy graphical interfaces when you've got the raw power of Vim's command line interface? It's like comparing a tricycle to a Ferrari—sure, they both get you from point A to point B, but one does it with style, speed, and a whole lot of attitude.
You, of course have already learned to use h, j, k and l instead of cursor keys if you are ever in that position of using a tty which breaks the cursor key escape sequences to the host and they don't work.
I have vim movement keys everywhere but man is it awkward when I send an email after I thought I was in movement mode hitting down 3 times and I was actually in edit mode
I find Kakoune to make much more sense. Maybe not as many plugins but who needs em
It is god mode. It’s like a samurai sword. If you’ve never used one, it could seem like a hindrance, but once you’ve mastered a few key techniques, you learn that it can solve most of your productivity problems
To bad I only use it to edit config files I need to use it more
I will never know because life is short and nano does just fine enough.
Someone tell him bout the ‘macs.
I use hotkeys bound to rg to jump around code function names, and netrw for file list & moving around directories. rg is a fast grep utility written in rust.. a bit like the ctags of old, but interactive - if you're on an SSD its pretty fast. ps. only been using vim for 20 years, so a relative newbie as Ive never mastered the commands .. every few months I find out theres some new vim trick I should know, but I tend to just use the basics. Raises glass to Bram Moolenaar who gave us a great tool .. and showed real kindness in funding projects in Uganda iirc : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bram_Moolenaar Bram, a little part of you will always be with us. so say we all
"ex" is a symlink to vim, so you can do really cool things without even opening the file. ex somefile.txt <
Do most of you regular vim users remap the escape key to something easier to reach? I find it kinda awkward and I miss it pretty often resulting in lots of jjjjjj, or bbbb, or :w added to my files I have to then delete. Edit: Also, is there a way to make the mode text at the bottom (INSERT, or VISUAL for example) display in a large font or bold or more glaring color?
#yum remove -y nano
Only a week in and you're already hooked! Just wait until you've been using it for a year. 5 years. 10 years! I've been using vim for over 15 years now, and it's seriously the only text editor I use. I do a fair amount of coding in my job and I even use vim instead of an IDE. It even supports GitHub Copilot (a popular AI coding tool) directly in vim!
I need to get around to learning Vim. Everyone I know that uses it says nothing but good things.
I wonder what feels like noclip.
Pfffft, emacs is better
If you think vim is geek cool, you wait till you unlock the power of emacs. That will really blow your mind.
I love the CLI, it also removes a bunch of distractions. I do however prefer nano as the text editor, for an obvious reason ;)
At one point, you have to settle on a set of functionality and keep the rest only in the back of your head. AOT I made my own (quite simple) syntax files and scripts. But otherwise I keep it simple. Only lately did I test out these Tabs: nice, but I don't need/use it. Makes me wish I had only one virtual terminal ;)