I feel like I’m the only person using KDevelop
“But guys, gtfomp” - emacs
My professor was always trying to get us to use vim or eMacs over an IDE to write our C programs. I’m sorry, I like using a mouse. I know, I know, blasphemy. I’m taking a shortcut. I’m a noob.
When I absolutely have to, I go for vim, mostly because I know a few of the key bindings for it, but otherwise avoid it.
I’m taking a shortcut
more like a longcut. I save so much time and effort not having to switch my right hand between the mouse and keyboard constantly
I keep my hands on my laptop and use my thumb on the track pad. My hands don’t leave the keyboard. I actually never use extra mice or extra keyboards.
track pad
it’s okay, we’re gonna make a plan and get you to safety. Pretend you’re ordering a pizza. How many people are currently holding you captive?
Go away
Competent terminal editors offer optional mouse support…
The comparison is bad. It’s more like comparing a kind of crappy car to a nice unicycle once you factor in UX. Not everyone likes to punch in key combinations so complicated it’s making game cheats look simple in comparison.
laughs in Emacs
If by any chance here’s someone else using vis, I salute you!
vis is such a neat idea, i followed it years ago. any good plugins yet? i really love the structural regex workflow but since kakoune/helix hijacked my muscle memory i would need more support for external tools to go full vis…
The thing about good plugins is relative - I just have vis-pairs, but I am not a seasoned developer (I’m not even a formal developer/CS person, just a graphic designer doing frontend and a tiny bit of backend!) so I don’t really miss anything else. vis’ phylosophy relies on the unix-as-ide concept, though. Still I do know that there is stuff like a LSP plugin.
What I really miss from vim is buffers. vis still does not have a client/server feature so you still have to rely in its allegedly temporary split panes kinda solution. It seems vis’ main developer got some personal issues going on so volunteers are doing some little changes here and there but with so few manpower it doesn’t seem like those needed big changes are happening anytime soon. Hence why I’m trying to spread its gospel in hopes to get people interested in contributing to it.
i thought vis specifically wanted to remain single-file?
No, for example I can open two or more splits (horizontal or vertical) - the catch there is that I can’t open an horizontal split AND a vertical split. If I have two horizontal splits and want a vertical one, the previous two would go vertical (?). I read somewhere on the issues list that this was rather a temporary solution to be able to “see”/“edit” more than one file at the same time.
Not to mention there aren’t things like tabs or windows. They want to let that be managed by a window manager, which sounds like the sane thing to do, but as I was telling before - not enough people with enough time to pull that off. The discussion about the RPC interface goes from a while back: https://github.com/martanne/vis/issues/59
I use vim btw
I use vim, aliased to vi, on Arch btw.
I use neovim btw
That can’t be right, the red car has a service manual and too many functioning assemblies for it to be VS.
The amount of time my classmates have spent dealing with vscode crashing, freezing, breaking, etc is way beyond negligible. And yet, I’m the weird guy apparently for preferring vim and GCC.
Me with zed
It always surprises me how complicated some of the editor tooling sounds in threads like this. Obviously once you learn how to use these things they are powerful, but how do people have the patience to deal with all of that in the beginning? This is coming from a guy who writes scripts constantly to avoid doing tedious, error-prone things.
Also I keep seeing people say vscode is slow. One of the reasons I switched to it is that it’s insanely fast compared to other editors I used (even those with far-inferior featuresets) 🤷♂️
but how do people have the patience to deal with all of that in the beginning?
Whenever I was frustrated with a stupid undecipherable error message, I would just tweak my
vimconfig a bit.Within a few minutes, my rage at the error would be completely replaced with rage toward
vimscript.Then I would revert my
vimconfig change, and return to the undecipherable error message with a fresh perspective. mainly relief that at least it’s notvimscript.Joking aside, I really did learn
vimmostly during coffee breaks or while waiting on some long running build process.
I feel like I need to learn VIM at some point because various system tools have a habit of using it. (rpmrebuild and the man pages come to mind) It just comes up here and there even if you don’t care for it.
I would argue that vim is fantastic for a lot of editing and coding tasks, just not all of them.
Where it utterly fails is with deep trees of files in codebases, like you see in Java or some Javascript/Typescript apps. Even with a robust suite of add-ons, you wind up backing into full-bore IDE territory to manage that much filesystem complexity. Only difference is that navigating and managing a large file tree w/o a mouse is kind of torture.
File-based navigation is often inefficient anyway (symbolic navigation is much better when you can), but if you do need it, that’s what fuzzy finders are for. Blows any mouse-based navigation out of the water.
The only time a visual structure is useful is when you are actually just interested in learning how things are structured for whatever reason, but for that task,
treeworks just fine anyway.Fuzzy finding really shine for this use case, no need for a mouse.
Once I got used to single-directory filetree browsing plus fuzzy finding, I have never been able to comfortably use a traditional filetree anymore. most of them are not designed for efficient keyboard use (vscode and intellij at least) and don’t really help understanding the structure of the project imo (unless there arent that many files). For massive projects I find it easier to spend the initial effort of learning a few directory names and the vague structure using oil.nvim, and then eventually I can just find what I need almost instantly by fuzzy finding.
If Vim is so good, then why can’t you browse Lemmy from it?
This meme was made by the Emacs gang.
Because unlike emacs gang, we don’t need to build an OS to browse Lemmy.
How bout you go back and let your friends know that if they’re in need of a good editor, try Vim ;)
How bout you go back and let your friends know that if they’re in need of a good editor, try Vim ;)
If my friends wanted a good editor, then I wouldn’t recommend a Vimitor, I’d recommend ed, the standard text EDitor :p
Haha, y’all are welcome to try that ;)
Vim needs are met by using Evil-Mode. You don’t have to leave Emacs for this.
*stealthily closes nano window and closes laptop lid…
As a poke at Emacs’ creeping featurism, vi advocates have been known to describe Emacs as “a great operating system, lacking only a decent editor”.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Editor_war
:P
Have been a professional software engineer for 8 years now. Have yet to find a reason to use vim for anything (other than availability of course, but if nano isn’t installed for some godforsaken reason I have other problems lol).
I’ve been in various forms of coding and administration for around fifteen years now. Despite trying lots of editors, I have yet to find a reason to use anything but vim.
I do like obsidian for note taking.
edit: Removed typo.
Professional software engineer here, using vim as my primary editor.
Fair. But to a sysadmin or devops engineer availability is pretty important.
I used to think this way. Until I found that with emacs you can edit any file on an SSH enabled computer remotely. Meaning that not only are you no longer constrained by what the computer has installed. But you can use your personality configured editor while editing that file. It’s called tramp.
BTW, with Emacs you can use vim key bindings evil-mode, so don’t stress about that.
You can do that with vscode too. And probably many IDEs.
The only real reason for which you would need to use vim in such cases is if the target computer can’t run the vscode server, which I’ve never encountered yet.
I’m talking about not needing anything installed on the server though. Like you don’t need sudo. If the server has ssh then you can use Emacs to edit a file on it
Don’t need sudo or anything pre installed for vscode either. It will send the server to the machine via SSH and then run it automagically.
Tramp is more featured, but if all one cares about is being able to edit remote files using a local editor, vim can edit remote files with scp too: scp://user@server[:port]//remote/file.txt
I tried tramp-mode at some point, but I seem to remember some gotchas with LSP and pretty bleh latency, which didn’t make it all that useful to me… But I admittedly didn’t spend much time in emacs land.
I’ve also used sshfs to mount a remote directory and edit using my local editor/env.
Vim is a way more competent editor than nano. If you spend a lot of time editing files via ssh, vim is amazing. And when you get bitten by it, you’re infected. ;-)
