Giving vim a go

[chimak111]

For the last few weeks I've been trying out vim with the aim of using it exclusively. I was surprised to learn just how "vast" a subject vim is!

I quickly found out that the vim installed with sudo apt install vim is compiled without X11 clipboard support making copying from vim to another application a bit complicated. Installing gvim brings in the required functionality.

And vim allows making time-stamped backups as jlittle pointed out here: https://www.kubuntuforums.net/showth...l=1#post424783.

I'm trying to use as few plugins as possible. The one I will keep is vimwiki. I installed lightline for a while to spice up the statusline but then found guidance on customizing the statusline directly, at least quite a bit, and so don't need the lightline plugin anymore.

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From: https://github.com/romainl/Apprentice

Vimgor, in #vim: “A colorscheme as subtle, gentle and pleasant as its creator isn't.”

[mr_raider]

This week, I will be churning my own butter.

[chimak111]

This week, I will be churning my own butter.

Better than doomscrolling!

A while ago, I installed Arch (in a VM). Took two tries.

[whatthefunk]

I really like vim. Its not my regular editor, but it is my default terminal editor. You can do pretty much anything with it, it just takes time to set it up to meet your needs.

[oshunluvr]

This week, I will be churning my own butter.

ROFL

My first thought when I read the original post was "For goodness sake, WHY?"

It's like learning a dead language, or at least dying in this case. It's a purely intellectual pursuit with no real use. But hey, have fun!

[whatthefunk]

ROFL

My first thought when I read the original post was "For goodness sake, WHY?"

It's like learning a dead language, or at least dying in this case. It's a purely intellectual pursuit with no real use. But hey, have fun!

I dont know if it has no real use. I set up my daily use editor to have similar key bindings to vim and my productivity went through the roof. Using the keyboard for everything is usually much faster than having to click around with a mouse.

[oshunluvr]

You use a mouse with Nano?

VIM is a such a dark snare of obscure command codes to do anything with that I have never had the time, need, or interest to learn. I had assumed it's users were only those who grew up with it as the only real text editor out there - which is no longer the case - because no one in their right mind would want to spend the time learning something designed before desktops had been invented. It was literally released 29 years ago as VI I know of no other software that is still around after that long virtually unchanged, and one might say the same for most of it's users. The few I know of are my age (nearing 60) and I had no idea anyone younger than my generation even knew it existed. Who knew the next old-school, left-behind, thing resurrected by the hipsters would be VIM?

Regardless, I was just trying to be humorous. Not everything is ad hominem attack, sometimes, it's sarcasm.

[whatthefunk]

You use a mouse with Nano?

VIM is a such a dark snare of obscure command codes to do anything with that I have never had the time, need, or interest to learn. I had assumed it's users were only those who grew up with it as the only real text editor out there - which is no longer the case - because no one in their right mind would want to spend the time learning something designed before desktops had been invented. It was literally released 29 years ago as VI I know of no other software that is still around after that long virtually unchanged, and one might say the same for most of it's users. The few I know of are my age (nearing 60) and I had no idea anyone younger than my generation even knew it existed. Who knew the next old-school, left-behind, thing resurrected by the hipsters would be VIM?

Regardless, I was just trying to be humorous. Not everything is ad hominem attack, sometimes, it's sarcasm.

I didnt feel attacked at all and Im sorry if I portrayed it that way. Just having a conversation about a text editor, thats all.

There are a huge number of people who use vim, and none that I know are over 50. In Sublime there is a vintage mode package that is very good (https://github.com/sublimehq/Vintage). VSCode has an actively developed vim plugin (https://github.com/VSCodeVim/Vim). Looks like netbeans and a lot of the Jet Brains products also have them. It was released 29 years ago, but age doenst matter that much. Amazon is what, 26 years old or something? It seems to be doing alright. I dont know about Vi, but Vim is still actively developed: https://github.com/vim/vim.

Nano is fine for simple stuff, but doing large edits in Nano kind of sucks. Vim has most of the perks of normal editors: auto completion, mass-substitution, splits etc. And it has macros. Macros can be really powerful. Some of the modern editors dont even have that.

[oshunluvr]

Roger that. I can see how, if one really needed to be productively creating code something more featured than nano would be required. However, I work with a small team of developers and even the oldest guy (my age) doesn't use VIM anymore. They all seem to use tools related to the languages they program in.

All I work with code wise is postgresql and guided tools help me tremendously - like finding typos or code breaks and highlighting them, but then I'm not a coder by training.

Anyway, I'm somewhat surprised to learn that VIM is still widely used.

[jlittle]

You use a mouse with Nano?

nano has mouse support; handy using gpm in a Linux console using gpm. But it has to be turned on.

... no one in their right mind would want to spend the time learning something ...

In the context of a career, the time learning is insignificant. In that context, the time saved is enormous.

It was literally released 29 years ago as VI

vi was released with BSD in 1978. It's vim that was first released in 1991, and in active development since then.

I don't accept the argument about modern desktops, because for far too long they were dominated by the dumbed-down paradigm of the Mac. IMO it's only with KDE and maybe VSCode that there's signs of a modern approach.

[jlittle]

Some of the modern editors dont even have that.

The lack of scripting in Kate is baffling. Somebody somewhere can write plugins for Kate, but there's no documentation for users like me.

[whatthefunk]

The lack of scripting in Kate is baffling. Somebody somewhere can write plugins for Kate, but there's no documentation for users like me.

Ive never looked into it much, but there are some docs for scripting: https://docs.kde.org/stable5/en/appl...scripting.html

Kate as a base editor is alright, but it lacks the plugins and extensions that almost every other major editor has.

[verndog]

I use vi(vim) all the time. I'm use to it. Ever since the Unix days back in 1980's.