Hacking Vim 7.2 246
briancarper writes "Vim is an open-source text editor with a power and flexibility matched only by the steepness of its learning curve. As the author of this book states, 'Vim Can Do Everything' but configuring it to do so is sometimes daunting. Hacking Vim 7.2 aims to help the average Vimmer get the most out of customizing Vim, for fun and productivity." Read on for the rest of briancarper's review.
Vim has an overwhelming number of features. Its built-in help system and documentation are comprehensive and easy to navigate once you know what you're looking for, but knowing where to start is sometimes very difficult. The best you can hope for in a book is a broad outline to point the way toward features that you didn't know much about. Hacking Vim 7.2 achieves this goal.Hacking Vim 7.2 | |
author | Kim Schulz |
pages | 244 |
publisher | Packt Publishing |
rating | 8 |
reviewer | briancarper |
ISBN | 1849510504 |
summary | Customizing and scripting Vim 7.2 |
No topic is covered in nearly the depth you'll find in the official documentation (or even on the Vim Wiki), but every topic is covered in enough detail to let you know that a feature exists and to point you in the right direction to begin using it. Most helpfully, throughout the book are references to things to look up in Vim's help system, as well as links to various relevant scripts.
This is not a book for an absolute Vim beginner; some familiarity with Vim is assumed. And for a Vim fanatic, much of the material may be common knowledge for you already. But any seasoned Vimmer will tell you that there are always things to learn about this editor, and I think nearly everyone will learn something from this book. For someone who uses Vim and is looking to master it, this book is a great starting point, though you'll still need to dive into the official reference material to really cement your knowledge.
The book starts on an odd note. Chapter 1 is a history of vi and the various vi clones released over the past couple decades. This information is interesting trivia and serves to give credit to programmers who paved the road to Vim, but it doesn't really help anyone "hack Vim" in any way. The book probably could've done without this chapter.
Chapter 2 deals with customizing the overall look and feel of Vim. How and where to edit vimrc is covered, with brief attention given to cross-platform issues. It covers the basics (changing font faces and colors, customizing menus and toolbars), as well as pointing out some more obscure settings, like highlighting the cursor row and column (creating a kind of "cursor crosshair"), and using the match feature to highlight multiple search terms at once. This chapter is a good foundation for later chapters and a good introduction for anyone who has never edited their own vimrc.
Chapter 3 is about text navigation. Sadly, the book doesn't go into as much detail on movement commands as I would've liked. The ability to move around and manipulate text quickly in Normal Mode by combining counts and motions/operators is one of Vim's most unique and powerful features, but it only gets a few paragraphs here.
There are some interesting key mappings provided, for example how to move up and down between "virtual" lines when lines are soft-wrapped. Search is covered briefly, both plain text search and multi-file search via vimgrep, but there's little information about Vim's powerful regular expressions, which I thought was a shame. Marks are discussed, both normal "hidden" marks as well as visible "signs", the latter being a feature I've never used.
Chapter 4 is about "production boosters" and covers a wide variety of topics. Much of the chapter is devoted to "templates" and "snippets", which allow you to build skeletons of commonly-used source code (with fill-in-the-blanks markers) that can be re-used when editing new files. A system for using these templates is built from scratch using Vim script, providing a clever and useful example of scripting in action.
Auto-completion is covered in a lot of detail. Some custom key mappings are provided to help make "omni-completion" in Vim a bit easier to invoke. This chapter also very thoroughly covers Vim's multiple copy/paste registers and how they work. Recording and using macros, pointed out as one of Vim's more overlooked features, gets a good, lengthy example.
"Undo branching" in Vim is wonderful, but difficult to understand. Chapter 4 gives a simple, step-by-step example of why it's useful and how it works. This chapter also briefly discusses folding, vimdiff, netrw (editing files remotely via SSH and other protocols), and ctags. There's lots of good stuff in this chapter and you're almost certain to learn something useful.
Chapter 5 covers text formatting, both using built-in Vim commands and by piping text through external tools like par and tidy. A lot of space is devoted to using Vim to prettify plaintext, for example by centering titles on a line, adding ASCII-art dashes for headers and making bulleted lists. If you edit plaintext in Vim often, this is probably a great chapter, but I didn't find much use for most of it.
For programmers, the book discusses the different indentation styles available in Vim and very briefly shows how to write your own indentation functions, and how to indent and reformat blocks or whole files of code all at once. "Paste mode" also gets a passing mention. Personally I think a programmer reading this book would've benefited from much more detail about Vim's myriad indentation and text-wrapping options and how they work together, as this can be one of the most frustrating parts of Vim to configure correctly.
I had high hopes for Chapter 6 and 7, which deal with Vim scripting, but I was largely disappointed. Chapter 6 deals with scripting basics, and is essentially a beginner's language tutorial. It explains which variable types exist in Vim script, how if/then/else works, how for- and while-loops work, how function parameters operate, and so on, but anyone who knows a modern scripting language will learn these things quickly without much effort. There's also some basic information about how to write a syntax-highlighting script from scratch, but there's not really enough information to allow you write one for a real programming language.
Chapter 7 is supposed to be about "extended scripting" topics, but serves largely as a style guide. It details how to structure a script to check for compiled-in features and Vim version number. This chapter touches briefly on using SID and PLUG to namespace functions, but the explanation and example left me puzzled. How to use the debugger and how to make Vimballs are both explored, and the book points out that you can use Perl, Python and Ruby to script Vim without going into much detail or giving solid examples.
If you're looking for any advancing information on writing your own functions in Vim script, you're mostly out of luck here. Previous chapters in the book do include some useful and practical functions, but those functions are never really taken apart or explained in detail.
Finally there are two appendices, one of which lists a bunch of games you can play in Vim (again this could've been left out of the book and I wouldn't have missed it), as well as examples of using Vim as a mail, chat, and Twitter client. There's also a feature-by-feature comparison of Vim to MS Visual Studio, showing that many of Visual Studio's abilities can be provided in Vim given the proper scripts. I thought it was an interesting demonstration that Vim really can do everything, just in case the reader had any doubts at this point. The last appendix is a style guide for keeping your vimrc clean, mostly via common sense and splitting your configuration into multiple files.
Overall, stylistically the book is a bit dry and humorless, but it's easy enough to read and it gets its information across clearly. There were a few typos and editing errors, including a few rather glaring typos in some code examples, but overall the author seems extremely knowledgeable about Vim. The best parts of the book are where the author says "this was useful to me personally, so here's how I do X". This book is clearly written by someone who uses Vim all the time, and most of the information provided is practical and immediately usable.
I do feel the book should've gone into more detail in many areas. At 244 pages, the book is short and gives a rather shallow view of many of Vim's features. But the book hits all the right notes and leaves few features entirely unexplored.
I'd recommend this book to any person who uses Vim and wants to explore features they may have been missing. There's nothing in this book you won't find in Vim's built-in documentation, but this book lays everything out in an easy-to-read format, and should serve as a good starting point to customizing and mastering Vim.
You can purchase Hacking Vim 7.2 from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
Short version (Score:5, Funny)
Use EMACS
Re:Short version (Score:5, Funny)
I'm trying! It's been loading since 2005, so give me some more time dude.
Re:Short version (Score:5, Funny)
I'm trying! It's been loading since 2005, so give me some more time dude.
See, there's your problem... Rather than wait five years for it to load, you should have waited a year or two, upgraded your machine, and tried again. :)
Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping (Score:2)
Obviously your problem is that your machine has more than 8 MB of RAM in it; otherwise it'd be running fine just like its name says.
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Re:Short version (Score:5, Funny)
Use EMACS
But I already have an OS, why would I want to install another one just to edit text?
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I tried Emacs a while ago. While I found it to be a superb operating system, I couldn't find a good text editor for it.
You can open the text editor in Emacs by typing "M-x viper-mode". HTH.
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Real men use ed.
That word... he doesn't seem to know what it means (Score:5, Interesting)
Customizing something is not “hacking” it. Hacking something is taking it and using it to do something that it wasn’t originally designed for in a creative way that most people would never think of.
This is the only part of the book that is illustrative of “hacking” Vim:
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That was directed at the author of the book, by the way, not the reviewer or Slashdot editor who posted the story.
Additionally, I think she’s a woman, although the extra letter in “she” wouldn’t have fit in the size limit for the subject of my post. (“Kim” could be either male or female but I looked on Google and it seems her full name is Kimberly.)
Re:That word... he doesn't seem to know what it me (Score:4, Funny)
for fun and productivity
That's two counts of *hacking* right there. As vim wasn't originally designed for either use.
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I’ll see your Jargon File link and raise you three more.
http://catb.org/jargon/html/N/neat-hack.html [catb.org], sense 1
http://catb.org/jargon/html/H/hacker.html [catb.org], senses 1 & 7
and http://catb.org/jargon/html/meaning-of-hack.html [catb.org].
Wow (Score:2, Insightful)
Vim has an overwhelming number of features. Its built-in help system and documentation are comprehensive and easy to navigate once you know what you're looking for, but knowing where to start is sometimes very difficult.
It's really intuitive, once you get to know how to use it.
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Vim has an overwhelming number of features. Its built-in help system and documentation are comprehensive and easy to navigate once you know what you're looking for, but knowing where to start is sometimes very difficult.
It's really intuitive, once you get to know how to use it.
I hate to ruin a perfectly good joke by being all serious, but, actually, that would be true of a lot of applications. (Or, perhaps, it's not accurate to call them intuitive at all - rather, they just offer enough support via documentation, etc. to help you muddle through) Anything that's hard to get started with, but offers a lot of assistance once you're up and running. I'd say Emacs fits this description to some extent - cryptic keyboard shortcuts (which are quite handy once you learn 'em) - and then t
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Very true.
Sounds bit stupid, but in VIM one has to learn even how to type text.
When I started with Linux 10+ years ago, I have dedicated two weeks to each: Emacs and VIM. Everybody had recommended Emacs, but after spending two weeks with it, reading mail lists and talking to devels I still couldn't configure it to work as I wanted it to. Next came VIM and it really took me two days to learn the basics and how configure it to my liking - and start working efficiently without further digging.
Otherwi
Yes, but... (Score:2, Funny)
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Ni [wikipedia.org]!
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Yes. Once you have vim, you can install cscope, and there you are.
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for proper results
"Steep" learning curve (Score:4, Interesting)
A steep learning curve refers to something that is quickly learned, as the curve that represents knowledge over time would indeed be steep in that case.
Something difficult would have a shallow learning curve, not a steep one.
Re:"Steep" learning curve (Score:5, Insightful)
This is one of my pet peeves.
A steep learning curve refers to something that is quickly learned, as the curve that represents knowledge over time would indeed be steep in that case.
Something difficult would have a shallow learning curve, not a steep one.
I think usually when people talk about learning curves, the horizontal axis represents knowledge and the vertical axis is your investment to acquire that knowledge.
Is there some established convention that contradicts this?
Re:"Steep" learning curve (Score:5, Informative)
This is one of my pet peeves.
A steep learning curve refers to something that is quickly learned, as the curve that represents knowledge over time would indeed be steep in that case.
Something difficult would have a shallow learning curve, not a steep one.
I think usually when people talk about learning curves, the horizontal axis represents knowledge and the vertical axis is your investment to acquire that knowledge.
Is there some established convention that contradicts this?
The problem is that in mathematics, the independent variable normally goes on the X axis (horizontal). In the case of learning, "effort" is the independent variable since "knowledge acquired" depends on "effort" and not the other way around. By that model a steep learning curve is one where a little bit of effort gains you a lot of knowledge. Unfortunately this doesn't match the classic usage of the phrase.
And that's why I don't use that phrase. Instead I say things like "python has a gentle learning curve" or "emacs has a tough learning curve"
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The problem is that in mathematics, the independent variable normally goes on the X axis (horizontal). In the case of learning, "effort" is the independent variable since "knowledge acquired" depends on "effort" and not the other way around.
Hm, I disagree with that. Assuming that knowledge acquired is a one-to-one function of effort, it does not matter which of the variables is dependent and which is independent. I think more common question is going to be "how much effort do I need to acquire certain kno
Re:"Steep" learning curve (Score:4, Funny)
He’s assuming that the horizontal axis is Time, which would be pretty typical for most graphs. Not for learning curves, though.
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You're right about the technical / original intent of the phrase, but it's clearly entered the colloquial more literally (you have a steep [ie, difficult] path ahead of you to learn).
Think of it this way...if you have a revolutionary new product that's very easy to learn to use, would you advertise it as having a "steep learning curve" and expect people to think that's a good thing?
This phrase, like many others (think "begging the question") due to the literal meanings of the words has a different meaning f
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Wrong-o. Something with a steep learning curve is somthing that has a lot to be learned in a short period of time in order to put it into productive use.
It's not about how easy it is to learn the stuff, it's about how much stuff there is and how much of it you need up-front.
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my latest vim post-it note is at eye level:
s symbol
g definition
d called by this fn
t text string
e egrep pattern
f file
i including this file
extra credit for anyone guessing what it's a list of
Get the following volumes too: (Score:5, Funny)
Get the followup volumes too:
Noise cancelling algorithm design using sh. ( Shhhhhh... )
Real-time traffic control with bash.
Time-domain-reflectometry made easy, with sed.
GPS satellite tracking with tr.
Build a species database with Python. ... and many more ...
Vim most definitely can't "do everything" (Score:2)
Case in point: I want it to show me a vertical line at 80 chars, like TextMate or GEdit. Not even GVim can do this. :-)
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Well, you could create a syntax rule that would highlight the 80th character on each line, or the first 80 characters, or the 81 and higher characters...
The problem is, what is a character?
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My copy of vim does. It's called "the right edge of the window". That's why running an xterm in 80x24 is good.
My main peeve with vim is when it goes into "recording mode" or whatever that nonsense is, when I try to ":q" and hit something by mistake and the screen splits. I still don't know what I did wrong. And that vim always wants to go back to the last place in the file you edited, ev
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My main peeve with vim is when it goes into "recording mode" or whatever that nonsense is, when I try to ":q" and hit something by mistake and the screen splits. I still don't know what I did wrong. And that vim always wants to go back to the last place in the file you edited, even if you edited the file ten years ago and really want to start at the top. The only way I found around that one is to make the .viminfo file chmod 000 so it can't save status.
Recording mode is your friend. It means you hit "q" followed by some letter. It's a macro recorder. Let's say you want to do some complicated operation on a number of lines. Type "qq" to start recording into "q" and do the commands in a generalized fashion on one line, making sure that at the end you end up with the cursor on the next line. Type "q" to stop recording. Now type "@q" to execute those commands again, and the current line should get fixed. Or type "20@q" to do it 20 times. You get the
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My main peeve with vim is when it goes into "recording mode" or whatever that nonsense is, when I try to ":q" and hit something by mistake and the screen splits. I still don't know what I did wrong.
You entered q: which open the command line window.
And that vim always wants to go back to the last place in the file you edited, even if you edited the file ten years ago and really want to start at the top. The only way I found around that one is to make the .viminfo file chmod 000 so it can't save status.
There is a autocommand defined for this by default. Do a au! vimrcEx BufReadPost to disable it.
VIM totality (Score:2)
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ppl w lk tpg les
Rating inflation (Score:5, Interesting)
Chapter 3 is about text navigation. Sadly, the book doesn't go into as much detail on movement commands as I would've liked.
I had high hopes for Chapter 6 and 7, which deal with Vim scripting, but I was largely disappointed.
If you're looking for any advancing information on writing your own functions in Vim script, you're mostly out of luck here.
Overall, stylistically the book is a bit dry and humorless
I do feel the book should've gone into more detail in many areas. At 244 pages, the book is short and gives a rather shallow view of many of Vim's features.
There's nothing in this book you won't find in Vim's built-in documentation
At best, it seems like this would earn a 5 rating.
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That makes the scale twice as wide as that used by video game mags.
Decline & Fall, "Back in my day ..." (Score:2)
There are cases where VIM is Better than Emacs (Score:2)
For example, most censors at the FCC use Vim to generate the BEEPs over forbidden words. For everything else, you there is Emacs.
But does it tell you how to do animation? (Score:2)
I remember seeing a vim hack once, a few years back, where someone used the stdin/paste to make vim animate a picture of ASCII art. :(
Can't find the link, though
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C source code [ioccc.org]
Hints [ioccc.org]
From the 2004 International Obfuscated C Code Contest!
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Re:but... (Score:5, Informative)
I've always pronounced it with vim and vigor. That seems to help.
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I have always pronounced vi as (Vv eye). So i would pronounce vim as Vyme (Vv eye mm). like vine, but with an m.
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Hmm, I always heard vi was supposed to be pronounced "vee eye" so I always
say the whole name when speaking about Vim, therefore "vee eye improved".
Not sure it's right though and I suddenly feel like just saying Vim (as :-)
in your vim and vigor example that is) would have saved me at least a
small portion of my time over the years!
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Being Hungarian, I find 'weem' most natural.
Re:but... (Score:5, Informative)
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Well, it has been pronounced "six", but only as a joke [userfriendly.org].
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And is often the best way to get the job done.
Why are you looking at me like that?
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Re:You know you're doing something wrong when (Score:5, Insightful)
How on earth is this insightful? I don't know of a single software dev who doesn't end up adding significant hacks/customizations to their editor to make the tool fit their working style better. There's even a nice spectrum in most popular dev editors between "customize" and "hack" -- which goes right up through the occasional feature addition or bug fix in the app itself.
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I suspect most users of Visual Studio don't add significant hacks (other than installing third-party plugins like Resharper)
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My main one is using this plugin: http://www.viemu.com/ [viemu.com] :)
Re:You know you're doing something wrong when (Score:4, Insightful)
Configuring your editor is something you pretty much do once then forget about. The time wasted by not configuring your editor is ongoing.
Re:You know you're doing something wrong when (Score:5, Funny)
... you finish your subject in the comment body
Mod parent (Score:5, Funny)
up
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-1 wooosh
The subject's changed, so you have to change how you finish it. Duh.
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He didn’t finish his subject in the comment body of his post, he started his comment in the subject line of his post. There’s a difference.
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Unlike you, I wasn’t trying to be funny.
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You know you're doing something right when you can hack your editor.
You know there's something terribly wrong with you when you don't feel the urge to hack your editor.
Don't confuse those.
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Please tell me you're not using OO.o for writing code!
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regex.
Not having to waste time with the mouse.
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But if you really must waste time with a mouse to feel superior, you can just run vim as gvim.
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Just thought I would mention it, vimperator is the best firefox plugin of all time.
Brings the glory if VIM to firefox.
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If all I had was a text terminal... maybe. But I don't know of anything that Vim does that I can't do quicker in Open Office. Can someone allay my ignorance as to the virtues of Vim over anything but Emacs?
I can't imagine editing code in Open Office would be at all enjoyable, personally...
VI isn't exactly my cup of tea, either, and I can appreciate people's complaints about Emacs - but I'd hate to edit code in something that didn't simplify the process of formatting code, and which didn't let me adjust the rules for how code should be formatted...
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It's primarily best as a code editor. It has syntax highlighting support for many different language, probably more than any other text editor other than Emacs.
It is extremely fast at doing search and replaces, both of which can be quite complicated (although using a bastardized version of RegEx that requires a lot of backslashes to do anything complicated). It also provides a ridiculous amount of control over cursor position via keyboard commands which can certainly increase your efficiency at editing code
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Actually, that's not correct. My terminology and details may be a bit off, but Vim (along with ed, sed, grep, awk, etc.) uses Basic Regular expressions. Extended regular expressions (along the lines of egrep, etc.) came later. Those did away with most of the escaping that you're referring to. Then, of course, there's Perl (and Perl-compatible) regular expressions. They make everything else look unwieldl
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Put \v at the beginning of your regex and you won't need as many backslashes. This is the so-called "very magic" mode. You can even switch back and forth between magic and non-magic in the same regex via \v and \V.
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you can go
esc:%s/old/new/g
of course you can do that in OO without stretching the neurons.
but let's say you need to be trickier and only remove it from the end of line
esc:%s/old\n/new/
sure you can figure that out too..
ok how about find numbers at the end of the line and you want them on a new line as well
esc%s:/([0-9]*)\n/$1\nEndLineNumber was: $1\n/
ok now that is getting a bit odd in OO. now Vi can go quite a bit further before you thro
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You can hardly do anything in OpenOffice without using the mouse. You can do everything in Vim without taking your hands off the keyboard.
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:%s/ChangeAllInstancesOfThis/ToThat/g
And I didn't need to use the mouse or a Function key. Plus I get the power of a regex to boot. It's by far my most favorite feature of Vim.
Re:Anything but Vim, please (Score:4, Informative)
Imagine you have the following line of code:
$welcome_message = "Welcome to my site!";
How would you go about changing the welcome message?
Most people I know would use a combination of Home, End, Backspace, Shift, and the arrow keys to select or delete the string, and then type in a new welcome message. Some would reach over to grab the mouse and select the string, then type over it. In vim, I just need to get my cursor between the quote marks (and there are many ways to do this, personally I'd probably use a quick find and then a couple pushes of w or e). Once anywhere inside the quotes, I just type ci" (a 3-part command, change inside ") and it erases everything inside the quotes and puts me into insert mode. I can easily do this faster than your hand can even get to your mouse.
Yes, vim is hard to learn, and it's frustrating for quite a while. But once you start actually understanding the "language" of its commands and how they fit together, you'll wonder how you ever used anything else.
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Re:Anything but Vim, please (Score:5, Informative)
However, ci" (or ci{ etc) are most useful when you are inside the text object. Then you don't have to find or move to the boundaries of the text object to modify its contents. This is even more useful for XML tags, e.g.
<tag>
line 1
line 2
line 3
</tag>
If your cursor is in line 1 or line 2 etc, you can type dit (delete innner tag) and delete everything between <tag> and </tag>
similarly
if (condition) {
line 1
line 2
}
if your cursor is anywhere in the {} block (line1, 2 etc) the command ci{ will delete all lines between { and } and put you in insert mode. Very useful.
For a complete list of all supported text objects type
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Cool, that's a new one for me. Thanks!
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So y'all are saying I should learn more than "i" for insert and arrow keys and backspace for everything else?
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Pff. I never do that; it’s much easier to just flip the (light)switch.
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Funnily enough, F1 works in VIM as expected: open the help. And the :qa! tip is right there close to the top (in my VIM is on 4th line).
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Perhaps we should define "old machine". To some people, my dual core Opteron on an Asus SK8V clocked at 2.2 Ghz might be an old machine. To other people, you might have to go all the way back to a socket 7 to be "old". Yet others might argue, and insist that it isn't "old" unless you're running a 286. *shrug* I don't know what you mean by "older machine"!
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If you ever look at :version, it spits out this huge list of features, each with a "+/-" in front.
I suppose when you build your own custom verion, there is a way that you can configure your version to leave most of those features out.
In fact debian seems to have done just that, they ship "vim.tiny" in the base install with just 640k, which should be enough for everyone.
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Add :filetype off to your .vimrc. That should disable most of the cruft.
Last bit is this (sorry for ma poor Engrish) [blogspot.com].
To lesser extent, but yes, VIM is slowly getting more and more bloated - more and more time one has to invest into disabling all the annoyances. Though it is still worth it. (Unlike Emacs, where you can't configure much. You either take it as a whole or look for another editor.)
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% time emacs -nw -Q --kill
real 0m0.089s
user 0m0.067s
sys 0m0.012s
If I force it to load CC mode with a ~4kloc C++ file to edit, that rises to about 0.185s real. More importantly I only pay the extra delay the first time. Things are pretty much instant after that. If that's not enough, I can amortize the cost over a persistent session running for week
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Have you tried it? I did.
I once wanted to make sure that Emacs always indents with tab, but even cc-mode developers couldn't help me. I have tried to unroll the nested hooks which are responsible for the handling of keys where the broken indentation was happening but at the IIRC 7th level of nesting I have simply given up.
That's [*BEEP*]ing unmanageable. I have a full-time job already. And configuring Emacs is a full time occupation, a luxury I can't afford. Nor I wanted to become dependent on someth
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Who cares? Emacs is far superior anyways due to its superior customization.
Yeah... If only mere mortals could do it. Or the mythical sages of Emacs configuration left their caves once and enlightened us all.
The simple truth is that yes, Emacs is much much much more customizable. But the extreme customize-ability makes it impossible for normal users to customize anything without breaking something else. I yet to see a single Emacs user who has written the .init.el her/himself - not grabbed some decade old copy off the net.
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Or the mythical sages of Emacs configuration left their caves once and enlightened us all.
I yet to see a single Emacs user who has written the .init.el her/himself - not grabbed some decade old copy off the net.
It's probably just me, but these statements seem contradictory.
Seriously, emacs users are actually a really helpful bunch, check out the emacs wiki [emacswiki.org] for instance. Or consider the amount of effort that's gone into making the customization system (M-x customize) easy for both end users to use and emacs-lisp developers to incorporate into their extensions. Or the quality (and price!) of the Emacs manual, [gnu.org] Introduction to Programming in Emacs Lisp [gnu.org], or Emacs Lisp Reference Manual. [gnu.org]
Emacs users might be perceived
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Emacs users might be perceived as elitist or something [...]
I have learned VIM already. It's too late.
But actually my impression of an Emacs user is far from "elitist." It's more like a "helpless baby."
I have worked in company where 90% of people used Emacs. And literally nobody could customize it. They had ~120K init.el from somebody else, it got copied all over the company, everybody used and nobody had a clue what was in it.
I also knew real pro Emacs user who knew pretty much all shortcuts and modes of the Emacs. But he also hardly ever tried to configu
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Oh really? And here I thought it was designed by touch typists who needed powerful editing features, and were willing to put some effort into achieving it.
Ah well, guess I'm autistic then.
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Really, are you sure you don't have that switched up? Every Linux system I recall has had vi as an alias to vim.
Re:My review--it hasn't improved (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, I realize I could put in a little effort and get much further, but I've already wasted more time just in this session than I could possibly gain back in the next the years by knowing VI inside and out.
And therein lies the crux of your problem. You're simply not a serious programmer.
Think of Vim as a mainframe: for those that require heavy computing power the investment pays for itself practically the moment you turn it on, but for a regular Joe a mainframe is nothing but an insanely expensive computer that you can't even use to browse Facebook on.
I don't recommend mainframes to regular Joes looking to browse the web, I don't recommend Hasselblads to grandmas looking to photograph their grandchildren, and I don't recommend Vim to people that need to make slight changes in a plaintext file only sporadically. But that doesn't mean they don't have a market out there.