I’m trying out Obsidian for taking notes, and this made me laugh.
Oh man, that’s awesome. Aren’t there a couple ways to do that though?
they accept :q! but I haven’t checked anything else yet
According to Stack Overflow, there is also:
- :cq (quit without writing and return non-zero exit code)
- ZQ (quit without writing from normal mode)
I actually knew about ZQ :)
but in what case would you ever need :cq ? I’m curious what’s the idea behind that
Edit: I checked, neither work for obsidian verification, including :cq!
disappointing :c
It’s useful when vim is being run from a different program or script.
For example, if I run
p4 changeto create a new Perforce changelist it will open up my editor (which I have set to vim) so that I can enter the CL description and other fields. If I realize I don’t actually actually want to create the CL yet I can use :cq to quit with an error so thatp4knows to abort.I also have a script I use for diffing a list of file pairs. It runs vimdiff on the first pair of files then if I exit with :qa it will move on to the next pair of files. But if I exit with :cq it will just abort and skip all of the remaining file pairs.
nano crew where you at
I like nano because it has worked any time I needed it. I don’t dislike nano because I’m not good enough at Linux to have ever run into its limitations
nano gang checking in.
However, I’ve been forced over time to remember “:wq” to get unstuck should vim randomly appear.
:up|cqto save a write cycle and signal an error to whatever opened Vim.How do u learn this voodoo
20 years of software engineering and you too will have a 10-20% chance of knowing how to exit vim.
I’ve done 35 years, but the first 25 years on the dark side M$.
Alternatively, you can save a key and use
:x(And:q!to quit without saving)Yeah, that’s such a Vim user thing to say :P
% of the time I’m using nano to edit something in the terminal, and it’s usually something really minor. I’m using GUIs for the majority of my computing anyway, so if I need some robust text editing, I’ve got a bunch of easier-to-learn, easier-to-use options available, and that’s totally ignoring things like awk, grep, sed, etc.My god, what is this 100 image…
hopefully switching to micro
I made that switch a few months ago just so I could cut, copy and paste without having to lookup how to do it. it’s been great.
Pico gang reporting in.
i’ve only ever used nano in the early stages of a gentoo install, when it’s too early to install vim and import my dot files 😈
I personally like nano but it’s what I used first. So I learned the commands. Vim I still forget Everytime.
Proudly, first thing I install on Termux.
It’s hard to hate
nano, but IMHO there also isn’t anything to like in particular either. It’s basically a TUI notepad. It’s there, it lets people edit files… and that’s pretty much all there is to it.You can use nano without having to read anything about nano. That might be the only thing that is better about it than vim, but it’s a damn important thing.
I have zero patience when trying to make small adjustments to files, which is what my command line text editor should be for. Nano just has everything at the bottom in case you forget (I do, frequently) so the workflow is ridiculously streamlined for me
Absolutely. It also has whole-line cut/uncut which is a godsend when working with config files
Ironically, that’s like the one thing I’ve learned to do in Vim.
Because it’s easy, dd to delete a line and p to paste it somewhere else.
Personally I’d be somewhat nervous using
ddto edit parts of a text file, but you do you :)yy to copy, dd to cut, p to paste. Need to move 5 lines at once? No problem, move to the first line and use d5d, and p to paste it. Vim gets a bad rap for being confusing, but it’s so fast to move text around once you get the hang of it.
nano is just… There when you need a text editor for something. Simple and purposeful
That’s it’s job
What else is there for it to do?
I mean, why compare it with vim at all then. Apples and oranges…
Yeah it literally follows the UNIX philosophy
Forget KISS, amirite.
It has syntax highlighting and mouse support.
it’s basically a TUI notepad. It’s there, it does one job and that’s all there is to it
That’s what the people who like it like about it.
I never get the need to use vim and nano exists.
Vim really is an IDE, not a text editor. It’s usable as an editor but overkill.
Nano serves a difference purpose. It’s like telling someone on a bike that a mustang is better.
Vim is absolutely not an IDE. It has no integrations with any language. It’s just a powerful text editor. You can add language plugins and configure it to be an IDE.
Yea, vim really isn’t anything near how useful emacs is.
Emacs really is powerful, all it needs now is a decent text editor.
It has one. It’s called evil-mode.
Not at all what I meant. It’s just, out of the box, a powerful text editor that can be configured and built on if desired. If you want it to be more than a text editor, you can easily make it so.
emacs is solely for watching the text version of Star Wars and you know it
Eh. Both are good choices. I prefer vim for my workflows - I like the terminal.
ETA: Will have to give Emacs another go though at some point.
Like I said, Vim can be made into an IDE by adding and configuring plugins. Basic barebones vim is designed to be a powerful, extensible text editor, not an IDE.
It’s designed to be an extended vi clone above anything else.
It literally has a built in scripting language.
So it’s an IDE for vimscript…? No.
You’re not a normal text editor if you have a built in scripting language.
I’m not a text editor. But anyway, would you call a shell script that invokes
python.exe $1a Python IDE? Why would you? Vim isn’t designed to facilitate the use of vimscript, vimscript is just an extensibility feature of Vim.
That’s what most IDEs are. VS Code doesn’t have any native integrations. Everything is provided by plugins. The default plugins that ship with VS Code can be disabled, and you’ll have just a powerful text editor.
(To do this, go to Extensions tab, click the filter icon, select “Built-in”, and go down the list to disable all of them. Or just build a version with no built-in plugins.)
Sure, and VSCode without any plugins is a text editor, not an IDE.
In that case every IDE is “just a text editor” because basically every IDE is built around modularity in this same way. This is just nitpicking over what is preinstalled.
Eclipse, visual studio, pycharm, idea… Those are full blown IDEs. They come with all the extras. All the text editors that can become IDEs have extensions or plugins that enable what these other actual IDE do natively.
Nowadays using vscode to debug a running program is common, but that was something only restricted to full blown IDEs some years ago, I’d say that vscode is lightweight IDE that can be expanded, but vim is a text editor first and foremost. You can’t really debug code in vim AFAIK, the most you get is syntax highlighting, linting, automatic whitespace removal and auto formatting? Not sure about the last one.
IDEs are designed to support a software development workload. A text editor is designed to edit text files.
Ah, so Code is the same as Vim if… I go out of my way to either disable things on one or install things on the other.
Or… Or… Code is an IDE (that you can strip down) and Vim is a text editor (that you can strip up).
We don’t stop calling a computer one just because it can still boot without most of its modules. The default presentation matters.
No offense intended here - But why is this being upvoted?
vim absolutely is an IDE if that is how you want to use it. Syntax highlighting, linter, language specific autocomplete, integrated sed/regex. And much, much more.
Syntax highlighting, linting, and language specific autocomplete are features supported by plugins and scripts. Plain, simple vim is a powerful extensible text editor. The extensibility makes it easy to turn into an IDE.
There’s syntax highlighting by default in vim though.
Yeah, there is a generic syntax highlighting scheme. I had forgotten because it’s not very good for some languages, I’d replaced it with a LSP-based implementation years ago.
You can’t run and debug things in vim, can you?
The things you’re describing are still just text editor features. An IDE generally has specific functionality for building, testing, packaging, debugging etc. for one or more programming languages/environments.
(Which vim can do if configured, I don’t really have an opinion about that tbh)
my car is absolutely a boat if you put a boat motor on the back of it and waterproof it
I don’t know that’s a fair anology. Vim does what a IDE can do without almost any setup with LazyVim and Lunar Vim and a bunch other prebaked setups. Instead of writing your vscode config in JSON or using a GUI, you can use lua. It’s more like turning car into a track car or something where you’re already a mechanic
“You see here my car has positions for all the parts of a boat so it’s easily made into a boat and it’s already waterproof but it’s just a normal car”
ladies please, you’re all beautiful
Nano is for those that occasionally edit text files from a terminal.
Vim is for those who make a living out of it.
There’s a guy on Youtube who does programming language tutorials/demonstrations. Like he starts out with C++ and in one hour you’re at object inheritance, crash courses I guess is the term for them.
He did one video that was as much a Vim tutorial as a tutorial for this language. “Press 3k, then enter, then i, and type “std::out(“whatever C syntax is”)” and then hit escape and…”
For teaching something like a little bit of Python or a little bit of Bash or whatever, I’d rather use Nano, because you can learn how to use it in seconds. Vim is an amazing tool but lord don’t try to cram a Vim tutorial into another already technical tutorial.
For the pedants, I hope y’all can at least agree that lunarvim is an IDE:
(Note, a comment saying it’s a “bad IDE” doesn’t make it not an IDE)
If you edit files a lot vim is worth its weight in gold. Nano makes me want to kill myself as everything takes so much longer.
Nano is perfectly sufficient for a very rare edit.
Vim absolutely chews through anything you throw at it. Lots of times we need data formated or lots of SQL queries and I’m the go to guy because I understand vim macros.
Especially if you have any form of RSI.
I wonder if it would be possible to make a user accessable way to expose similar power to the common user.
In case of a house fire, I’d only escape with two things: my cat and my .vimrc
Why do you nor have a backup of that .vimrc?
I guess it depends on if you’re the type of person who sees VSCode as an IDE or just a text editor.
Vim is effectively the same way.
So like Word vs Notepad?
More like Visual Studio Vs Notepad
Not really, or that doesn’t feel right to my. Word and notepad basically still do the same thing except for that word lets you add style.
Like a manual vs an automatic car, maybe?
Word is a WYSIWYG editor. We don’t talk about it much these days because it’s just how things are done, but it took a long time for the industry to come up with a way to display text on screen with rich formatting and have it come out the same way in print. There was a lot of buzz around it in the late 80s and early 90s.
Word solves a completely different problem than an IDE. Notepad is a raw, minimal tool that could be built on for either WYSIWYG or an IDE.
I never get the need to use a mechanical pencil and graphite pencils exists
I’m struggling to see the connection here. I guess I don’t need to fiddle with the mechanical pencil, it breaks very quickly? I don’t want to go through changing those little sticks? Graphite pencil only needs to be sharpened? So, you’re supporting using Nano? I’m a little confused
Yet many people prefer mechanical pencils. Are you against choice? What is there to get or “need”?
Nah, this is not relative at all. Still, I know my kid hates mechanical pencils. I hate them, too.
“Relative”? 🤨
Relevant. RELEVANT!!! Damn it. Ok you got me 😂 English is my second language (still not an excuse)
I’ll level with you: I’m kind of a moron.
If my command line text editor has its own bespoke integrated command line, then science has gone too far and we need to stop lmao
😂
It’s cool. We’ll just write a lua plugin to extend science so that we can go too far enough.
It just makes a lot of stuff way easier once you know how to use it. Switching out a word for another: two button-presses, duplicating a line: three presses, deleting 500 consecutive lines: five presses
What if I want to undo my life’s mistakes.
Church of Emacs is always there ;)
How do we work this? Do we alternate between trying to ruin people’s lives with elisp and chasing the perfect .vimrc or lua - config? Maybe grab some bytes from /dev/urandom and send them to the editor whose first letter comes up first? What about holidays?
I’m gonna go with yes 😁
But you can do all that with nano and it is straight forward and you don’t need to memorize any key combinations. I mean, I get it and no judgement here. I just use nano because it’s easy and quick.
deleted by creator
I write my code in an actual IDE. And I use nano for only, like you said, config files and those little things. And I have never used emacs and I don’t even know how it looks like. I’m dead serious, I don’t even know what emacs is or what it does. lmao
Emacs is basically a lisp interpreter packaged with a suite of “example” utilities, like a text editor. It’s one of the two historical editors used as terminal IDEs, along with vim. Emacs tends to take a more batteries, kitchen sink, web browser, games, IRC client, etc-included approach. It can seriously be closer to an OS in functionality.
You can also copy paste by manually copying text by hand, would call that a valid alternative to Ctrl-C/V?
I don’t understand the need for Ctrl-C/V, when manually copying the text exists. I know it’s snarky, but that’s the level of difference we’re talking about here. Or imagine, to delete a line, someone Right Arrows 50 times, then backspaces 50 times, instead of using the shortcut.
Here!
I hate terminal-based text editors
Nano seems quite user/idiot friendly
If you want to learn vim, try the command vimtutor in a terminal
That’s pretty wizard!
Oh wow, that’s an easy way to not implement a feature ;)
I think this is the most upvotes I’ve seen on a Lemmy post….
Lemmy seems to be the old nerdy internet of the 90s, prior to the enshittification
That’s why I like it. No BS, no ads, no commercials, no show-offs, etc. Just some people with a bit of free time share their knowledge and stories.
I do wish we have more vibrant non-tech communities, though.
I’d say more like the early days of reddit, the hardcore enshittification started around 2012-2015 IMO. The old-school nerds are still at it on IRC, Newsgroups and so on.
Don’t forget mailing lists! LKML FTW
I love obsidian, you’ll love it
I switched recently from Trillium.
After installing two dozens plugins, it may just replace my KB site, note apps, task manager and PRM all at once.
That is just hilarious but also…
I just remembered that Bram Moolenaar, the author of vim has recently died…
He was a real good person. Back when he released his first vim for Amiga Computers I exchanged some emails with him and he handled even my less smart suggestions very professional.
I just take the chance to remind everyone to spend some money for his Uganda Charity.
Great idea for when you start in IT! Always had trouble first year in my apprenticeship when i had accidentally opened vim. Ask for first time and after 2 months not used.
Did someone already open a pull request?
Tricky question, but I think I have a solution:
:!readlink /proc/$PPID/fd/* | grep “$(dirname %)/.$(basename).sw” | xargs -I{} rm “{}” ; kill -9 $PPID
Technically correct
You don’t change Vim, Vim changes you. https://youtu.be/9n1dtmzqnCU
*edit: shortened and thanks! Did not know and gross…
I noticed this, and was wondering what the hell was going on.
Good human?
But seriously that’s helpful info.
A lot of my personal dislike for VIM would be done away with if it just had a helpful common keys cheat sheet (basic cursor navigation, edit mode, exit with and without saving, etc) at the bottom of the editor window like Nano does.
Really, I’d just recommend using nano then. It’s installed basically anywhere you can find vim and works perfectly fine as a text editor! To use vim effectively it has a learning curve no matter what, so it’s not necessarily meant for everyone.
I understand where you’re coming from, but as a frequent user of vim I’d much rather have the additional line of text.
That makes sense, I mean your monitor can only fit like six lines of text.
It should be default on, with a setting to turn it off for power users
They could even have one of the commands on the cheatsheet be to hide it, so anyone who doesn’t want it will immediately see how to turn it off.
This is the only reason I have any idea how to navigate nano.
one of my favorite things about helix is how easily you can check the keybinds for certain actions - just space-? and then you can see a list of every command available (by description) and their keybinds, if they have one
Not to forget the buit in popup showing the shortcuts, similar to which-key, but built in
Having the commands listed at the bottom by default is one thing i personally dislike about nano, because they take up space while being useless to someone knowing the commands (or at least knowing how to open the help in, which is what you can do in vim to achieve the cheat sheet). The alternative that vim uses, is to show the commands when starting the editor without opening a file.
is there not an option to turn them off??
Try nvim
Why would I want to exit vim?
It is much easier not to
I tmux my vim session so I never have to exit it, I just end the session and NOTHING OF NOTE HAPPENS
Just all those left over swap files I forget about because they are in every one of my dot ignore files.
set swapfile set dir=~/.cacheNo, i just googled it.
yes | rm -r ./.*
RIP my .git folders
But importantly the swp files in my home directory are gone, along with all my rc files but who needs them
Aka “vim turds”
killall vim
What if SIGTERM not enough? Kill nine times. Like this:
killall -9 vim. Congratulations, comrade, you have passed KGB exam.Hmm never thought of it like that. Unix programs are actually cats, and sometimes you have to kill all nine of their lives to really end them.
Yes, one of them literally have name cat, so you can kill all the cats with
killall -9 cat
You monster, I prefer denial
Easy, just turn off computer.
I mean, it’s true.
I’ve been using linux pretty exclusively at home for almost 25 years now. Program. Script. Work in the shell a lot, and the other day I had to use vim and it took me a while to remember the basic commands. I’m a nano guy :\
I’m with you on that. VIM is a good example of a tool that the deepness of the tool makes it aggravating to use for the 90% of simple use cases.
Unless you use VIM enough for the shortcuts to be second nature it is faster to install Nano, make the changes, and remove Nano than it is to use VIM.
I also started off using nano. Have you tried Micro? It’s like nano on steroids and with good keybindings
At some point Nano added Ctrl+S for save. That’s all I needed. Its syntax highlighting is decent too.
ctrl w/o for save/save as are pretty easy to get used to tho
Nano, Pico and Micro? is this editor trying to !compensate for something?
+1 for micro. I install it on every server I administer, and alias it to nano. If you’re a nano user and haven’t tried micro, I highly recommend it. It’s like nano, but built this century, it feels fast and modern.
If you feel like it definitely give it another go. Vim (or neovim) is just insanely good once you’ve developed the muscle memory for the keybinds.
It takes a bit of time and practice but it’s actually fairly user friendly once you understand how it works. (c for change, y for yank, p for paste, e for end, b for beginning etc.)I was a nano person for the longest time, was planning to try out vim but never did, until i saw a coworker using it and he explained a little about the vim “language” actually worked and how much you could do with it
With some encouragement from him and a week or two of reduced productivity i was able to do everything just as fast in vim as in nano, and it only got better from there, now i find any other editor slow and tiresome in comparison
If you want something that is quite a nice editor too but doesn’t require hundreds of lines of configuration, try helix. It also has nice help menus so it’s fast to learn. I’ve used vim since the 90’s and Emacs for many years, but nowadays I kinda just like hx how it just works with zero configuration for any programming language I need to work with.
Honestly, if you work in a shell a lot, learning vim is a great investment. You’re gonna fly through files editing them faster than with any IDE.
