Do you use vim as your default text editor? If you do not, have you ever been in a situation you could do nothing but use vim?
I use nano for quick edits and vim for longer stuff or things that need better find and replace.
Helix for really quick edits, emacs for pretty much anything else. I do use tridactyl in firefox though, does that count? 😁
No, but I’m interested in using something more advanced than nano but I have no real need to.
iyes :wq
Yes. I use vim as much as possible. When I don’t use vim, I use its keybindings in Firefox, IntelliJ, VSCode and even in eMacs (spacemacs with evil mode).
Yes in SSH terminal,
Yes in vscode,
Yes because I use TUIs that use all the same bindings and they’re great one you get the vocab.
Yes as Hyprland bindings, k9s, etc etc etc etc
I’ve been in a situation where I could do nothing but use vi until I installed vim. Then could only use vim or vi. I’ve also had to use GVimPortable on Windows because of shitty corporate computers don’t have bash or vim (or didn’t back in the day.)
It’s not hard. Just grab a cheat sheet. There is an Android app cheat sheet for Linux commands with Vim. You’ll be fine.
I use Neovim as much as possible but Jetbrains C# just has a really nice debugging experience (with Vim mode on, of course). I still use Neovim for reading C# and doing some small edits and it works really well when reading what the LLM wrote.
It’s hard to beat stepping through a method until you hit an exception, go into a catch block, ctrl+O until you hit the last line before the exception, breakpoint, skip to top of method and rerun.
For quick edits in the terminal? Sure.
As my main IDE? No way. I’m too used to GUI IDEs like VSCodium and PyCharm.
I just find it easier to navigate with a mouse. With just keyboard, I find I overshoot the block of code I’m looking for, whereas scroll wheel gives me more control.
} jump forward to next empty line is really quick for navigating, also if you know the identifier then /myVar<enter>nnnn is much faster than scrolling and gets you ready to edit. Otherwise 5j;;;; also works of course.
Yes, won’t quit, can’t quit, seriously, help.
Yes. But mostly IdeaVim in JetBrains IDEs though.
For those that haven’t yet learned vim: the real power is that the commands can be combined to form a mini-language. Commands can also be recorded in macros and replayed. This is what makes it so awesome. But to really make use of this you have to properly learn it, only knowing i and x isn’t enough.
Also note that modal editing isn’t for everyone. I’m happy to learn hotkeys, I even got far enough to build musclememory for vim’s normal mode. What never went away though was my confusion about what mode the editor is in. I would constantly input text in normal mode and input commands in insert mode, leading to costly mistakes that tore down any speed advantage vim would have given me. I really tried, but never built muscle memory for this kind of context switching[1], maybe it’s an ADHD thing.
These days I’m on Emacs with an always improving custom command scheme of non-modal but context sensitive commands that do similar things in all major and minor modes.
Same situation with tmux which is almost a requirement for the typical vim workflow, and adds another layer of mode switching on top. On Emacs window management is included and so are remote shells/editing, so no need for the tmux<->editor context switch. ↩︎
I still sometimes do it randomly because of editor lag in Jetbrains Ideavim, you can just hit u usually until you get back to where you were.
I’m a freelance linux it nerd. I figured I better get used to vim/nvim because every company I visited had different tooling available but their servers ALWAYS had vim.
Now I have a nice .vim setup I can easily copy/paste and work easily and fast. I’ve become quite adept in the years following that decision.
Plus, as a freelance dude using vim quickly and flying through code bases makes it really seem like I know what I’m doing / hacker type … I don’t. And I’m no hacker… But the customer is happy soooo :-)
P.s. I’m currently trying out the Zed editor with vim bindings. They are emaculate!
Vim is slop-coded now, unfortunately. I use evil Emacs.
I guess I should take another look at evil-mode.
No, I use Neovim. But this I use 100% of the time.
I’ve been using Vim for 20 years.
I only opened it once and I haven’t been able to close it yet
I’m not sure at what point in the last 20 years they put the instructions in the vim, but it gives you clear instructions on what to do if it thinks you’re trying to escape from vim jail.
It’s called a power button.
