I’ve tried vim on and off during college but never really had the time to fully get working with it. As it turns out the stress of two degrees is not conducive to “fun activities”. Now that I have a real job ™️, I’ve decided to finally try and use it this week full stop and I genuinely feel like a programming chad. There’s still a lot I’ll need to learn and probably overtime I’ll discover some inefficiency in how I’m using it now but it really does just feel good. I understand the hype now.
You can delete everything inside the first parentheses on the line by “cib”
The bad part is when you learn vim bindings you want to throw up when you use any other editor.
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Vim is great for editing in general and coding simple things but I kind of gave up on using it as an IDE. Too many plugins to configure, to many breaking changes, too many bugs. My current issue is that after couple hours or days code formatting simply breaks and starts mangling my code. Only full restart fixes the problem. It’s impossible to figure out were the issue is as there are so many plugins and external tools involved. I still think it’s amazing you can setup vim to work as a full IDE with code completion, refactoring, formatting and all but it’s just not stable enough. I reluctantly switched to Zed with vim mode. I miss smooth scrolling but other then that it’s really nice.
I tried nvim with all the bells and whistles and it’s just too fiddly
Moved to helix instead, it does the light editing I need with LSP support and themes
I tried helix and it’s nice but it’s still not ready to be an IDE. Too many features missing. And I’m not learning completely new tool just to edit text. Vim is still great for that. Let’s hope it grows and gets all the features eventually.
Yea its definitely not an IDE
I use it mostly when I need to edit a config file quickly and don’t want to bother with a full IDE or VS Code
There are always more cool tricks and great plugins out there, have fun!
Also I’d recommend Neovim, it’s exactly like vim except it supports Lua scripting, so there are lots of powerful plugins that aren’t available on vanilla vim.
Ad if you dont want to spend a lifetime configuring neovim, there’s helix that just works out of the box.
Or LazyVim
Also, if you don’t want to spend a lifetime setting Vim up there’s kickstart.
I’ll have to try neovim, and eMacs and all the derivatives. Honestly I just went straight to vim first because I wanted to try to OG experience first to see what it was like. I’ve also simultaneously been using vim mode in Zed which has been pretty nice too.
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It’s not exactly like vim, and there are plenty of vim plugins that don’t work with it (anything vim8 onward). There has never been a 1-to-1 correspondence, the gulf widens as both develop different features with different philosophies.
The most egregious offense on Neovim’s part that I can’t get past is the removal of access to the shell in which you run vim (via
:!,:w !, etc.). Vim is so much more capable of being closely intertwined with the shell, whereas neovim requires everything to be done through terminal buffers (speaking of which, vim’s terminal buffers are a lot better than Neovim’s).Also, Lua is really overrated and worse for vim scripting than vim9script (which is both more native to vim and faster).
Helix is really fucking good too, it was really easy to pick up as a VIM user and it’s 99% batteries included. You still have to manually install the LSP for most of the languages, but it makes it really easy for you to do so, just run
hx --health <language>and if the LSP is not installed it tells you the name and you can just look up how to install that on your system, which is usually just one command.Also it’s written in Rust so added bonus for that 🦀
I like to say that using Vim turns editing into an optimisation puzzle. That will either sound super fun to you in which case you’ll probably love it or it will sound like a nightmare in which case maybe it’s not for you.
I’ve always liked vim but one thing that I really loved about it was when I started using vim mode in zsh.
Being able to just navigate through commands in my terminal and easily highlight and edit and all that … it’s so good.
HOLY CRAP
Let’s say I run a command that spews output. Are you saying that with Zsh I can use only the keyboard to navigate the spew, copy a bit of it, and paste it in a new command?
If so I should try it out!
Zsh probably can’t do that, because zsh is involved with typing commands, not handling their output. You should look into the docs and settings for your terminal emulator — some of them do support selecting output with the keyboard. Alternatively, something like tmux might be able to handle that too.
Some say you don’t need it, but I personally use this plugin: https://github.com/jeffreytse/zsh-vi-mode
but I also use this: https://github.com/zdharma-continuum/fast-syntax-highlighting for syntax highlighting and it makes it more readable too.
Vim is 40 year old garbage.
If you need to edit files directly on a device go ahead bust it out, but you’re wasting your time decking that shit out with plugins for half the usability of an ide.
On a related note, try Vimium (FF / chrome extension) that brings vim motions into your browser. You will have a more complete experience.
Wait that’s awesome. Any chance that there’s a safari extension? I use safari and FF at home since I use both Linux and macOS
Just FYI, if you just use Firefox in both OSes, you can sync the tabs, history, and extension settings. Though I’ve seen the opinion that Safari works faster, but OTOH extension developers are unhappy with Apple’s publishing/vetting process, and some devs dropped support for Safari that they provided previously.
Not a safari user so don’t really know but on a quick google search did find this : https://github.com/televator-apps/vimari
wait until you try emacs
I went from vim to Emacs and loved it, right up until I found Helix. My “just trying it out” became “never opened emacs again”.
You probably already know this, but most IDEs have a setting to enable Vim keybinds or you can easily install an extension to add them.
I really like Neovim but my job often requires some stuff that it doesn’t easily do. So, VSCode is what I use a lot of the time… with the Vim extension.
Just something to consider if your stack isn’t super well supported in Vim/Neovim or you need tools it doesn’t have for your work.
I tried vim keybinds in an IDE, and it sucked.
It wasn’t even that advanced usage, but it just didn’t work.
Instead I know run language servers in neovim.
I use vim keybindings in both IntelliJ and VSCode with no problems.
Keybindings are OK, but anything beyond movement was way less ok.
Don’t remember if macros or buffers were implemented correctly.
Buffers do work in IntelliJ. Not sure about macros since I don’t use them. Haven’t checked VSCode. I found the IntelliJ plugin was better though.
Welcome to the club. Don’t worry too much about setting it up perfectly in your first attempt. You’re gonna rewrite your whole config every year-ish anyway. (Or is that just me? 😥) Also, try Neovim. It’ll be a drop-in replacement for your current config. But
Luais just a superior language compared toVimscript, so you’ll have a much better performance in the future. You also get all the sweet LSP and treesitter features.
