Go watch a dev who is competent with vim/emacs and you will feel like a 7 year old on a tablet. I didn’t give neovim a try until I was thoroughly embarrassed with my ability as a professional text editor (software dev).
Is it the motions you don’t like or the editor itself? After 3 days with the motions I could never go back.
Are there any videos of this sort of editing, because honestly every single person I’ve watched use Vim has just been like “oh wait that’s the wrong thing… hold on.” constantly. You’re going to say “they aren’t competent” but that’s kind of the point - approximately nobody is competent in Vim because it isn’t worth learning.
Even so, I’d be interested if there are any videos of pros doing real editing (not “look what I can do”) on YouTube. Anyone know of any?
The Primeagon and Rene Rebe come to mind. Tsoding uses emacs and flys around. I’m still new to neovim and can say the speed at which I can transfer my ideas into the editor is significantly higher.
approximately nobody is competent in Vim because it isn’t worth learning
Come on, you really think its a giant conspiracy from elitists lying about their experience? You think thousands of developers are handicapping themselves for bragging rights?
Not op but yes, I actually do. Dev for about 20 years, and the vast majority showing vim/emacs struggle when presenting. Could be presentation jitters ofc but the answer to:
You think thousands of developers are handicapping themselves for bragging rights?
Yes, yes I do. Thousands is not all, but they are definitively in the thousands
There is absolutely nothing I do in an IDE frequently enough to memorize a bunch of arcane commands, especially in 3 days. Regex solves any mass-operations. For everything else the bottleneck is how long it takes to reason about code, not how quickly I can manipulate it.
I will say that if I keep getting jobs where I have to use an IDE on a remote VM on AWS, I might prefer SSH/Vim to that bullshit. The frequency with which IntelliJ locks up all four of those virtual hamster wheel powered CPUs requiring a full restart is basically daily and sometimes multiple times a day.
No it doesn’t not after you’ve used LSP-enabled identifier renaming. But that’s the thing: Emacs, vim, helix, all have LSP integration, they’re actual code editors they aren’t lacking any feature that you’d expect from an IDE.
I can write regex to replace variable names in a matter of seconds despite not needing to do it very often, but I can also use regex to turn a list of data exported to csv into SQL. Or take a list of variable names and turn them into method stubs (or even full methods if they are small and consistent enough).
I don’t even need to think about LSP-enabled identifier renaming. It would be handy if I find myself having to use Vim - I’m not denigrating Vim. Those features are all great if it’s your IDE. But for example I had to look up what that even means because it’s nothing I need to know in any other IDE. And that’s really my point.
Vim has tons of power. The thing it’s really lacking is discoverability. You have to know how to do everything before you can do it. Meanwhile in IntelliJ or VSCode I just find the menu and if I want to be super quick, next to the menu item is the keyboard shortcut which makes it super easy to learn how to do a thing faster while still being able to do the thing. But with vim I have to change to a completely different context and open a browser and Google how to do a thing.
That’s the only problem I have with vim - it takes a huge and consistent investment to get as fast with it as I am with any other IDE out of the gate. Maybe I could eventually even get faster, but could I ever recoup that time investment? It doesn’t seem like it to me since my tools are so rarely the thing slowing me down.
Again, I’ve no doubt vim is great once you learn it thoroughly. Nothing against vim or those who use it. Should the need arise, I’ll put in the effort. But until then I’m just using it for tweaking config files and bash scripts.
I can write regex to replace variable names in a matter of seconds despite not needing to do it very often
You can write a regex to replace a string in a matter of seconds. And so can I. What neither of us can do is write it such that the replacement is limited to the identifier we want to rename (because pumping lemma), that needs syntax if not semantics-aware editing and that’s exactly what LSP is for.
You’re using a screwdriver as a hammer. Does it work, sure, is it advisable? Even if you don’t have a hammer it might be easier and quicker to drive to the hardware store and buy one, depending on the particular nail you’re dealing with.
Meanwhile in IntelliJ or VSCode I just find the menu and if I want to be super quick, next to the menu item is the keyboard shortcut
Helix: <space>? opens function search, enter “rename”, “rename symbol” will be the first hit and it’ll also tell you that it’s bound to <space>r.
Blender: F3 instead of <space>r. Get out of here with clicking through menus. I have no idea where to find recalculate normals in the menus and I don’t care. “face” in edit mode, probably. Nope, just checked: Edit mode, mesh->normals->recalculate [inside, outside]. Kinda makes sense while normals are a property of faces you can’t calculate them without reference to a mesh as you wouldn’t be able to tell outside from inside, only stuff like “face camera”.
This isn’t so much about gui or not gui thing, both IntelliJ and VSCode come from the windows school of GUI design which says “discoverable without a manual, hotkeys are available for power users”. Blender, OTOH, follows the UNIX philosophy of “RTFM, start working like a pro from the beginning it’s worth it, the interface is just a suggestion, adjust it to your workflow”.
Maybe I could eventually even get faster, but could I ever recoup that time investment?
How would you know without giving them an honest spin? Personally I wouldn’t recommend vim, btw, lots of hysterical raisins and inconsistencies to be found there and configuration is a PITA which wouldn’t even be that bad if the out of the box experience was good. Helix cleans up both the command language and the whole configuration shebang (just make sure that LSP servers are installed and you’re good to go) while definitely sticking to the vi/blender style of interface design.
First I want to say this is a great comment overall. I appreciate it. But a couple notes:
What neither of us can do is write it such that the replacement is limited to the identifier we want to rename
\Widentifier\W - harder to navigate markdown than write the pattern. This would also catch references to the identifier in comments as well, though if the identifier isn’t a unique word it might take a little repair, but that’s rarely the case in Java where the convention is expressive identifiers.
UNIX philosophy of "RTFM, start working like a pro from the beginning […]
That only works for small manuals. Take Git for example, because that’s something I often use the CLI for. There are a huge number of things to learn out of the gate and you can’t just RTFM and you’re good to go. And it’s really not particularly big or complex. Something as simple as cherrypicking - well first I need to log to see the commit ids. Oh not just log but --pretty-something so I can just see the commit ids. Off to Google shit to remind me how to do another thing I only do every few weeks. Compare that to a GUI where I can just right-click cherry-pick. This absolutely kills my productivity because I do so much different shit, I can’t possibly remember everything that I barely use.
How would you know without giving them an honest spin?
I only have so many hours in the day to experiment. And I do, but the “cost” here is pretty high and the opportunity for return is low. We’re talking about things I might do a couple of times a month.
Now it’s possible I’m an idiot and I’m just slower or dumber than folks who like vim. It’s also possible my roles have been really fucked up and I don’t get to focus enough to get good at stuff that ought to be its own niche. All I can say is I’ve stuck my toe into the water and it’s fucking cold. Currently I’m probably 85% GUI and 15% CLI and other keyboard-centric tools. I just use whichever is the most expedient.
I wrote a one line bash script to start my vpn because I couldn’t remember each little keystroke but I can remember start-vpn.
Once again, I appreciate your comment. Upvoted. I don’t know what helix is. Blender I know but isn’t really a business software writing tool so I have maybe 20 hours playing around with it total. I’ll look into LSP on my PC, but I might just forget I have it by the time I try to figure out what to do with it.
Git is simple in its operations, but utterly complex in the stuff you might need to do because the operations aren’t mathematically clean. Things like git rerere should plainly not exist because states which require using it should be impossible to reach. And the likes of vim, or pre-2.8 blender, kinda ended up there as they grew organically, the more you tack on the more likely it is that different things don’t work well with each other. Which is why I recommended helix: It’s a clean-slate redesign. E.g. helix’ command language is consistently <selection><action> while vim is all over the place, you end up learning things by rote instead of really exploiting the combinatorics. On the VCS side darcs is sane in principle but it’s patch theory didn’t really have efficiency in mind and there’s a very nasty complexity explosion you can run into, pijul fixes all that: It has both a vastly superior interface without surprises (such as patches not being associative) and it’s fast.
We’re talking about things I might do a couple of times a month.
The most striking difference between the likes of VSCode and Helix are not things that you do once a month, but stuff that you do all the times: Navigating and basic editing. Within the first couple of pages of going through the tutorial you’ll know if navigating with hjklwWbB etc. is a thing that would save you time, whether it’s worth making the interface modal, having to type i (or various other options) before actually writing text. I certainly still haven’t really gotten my head around Helix’ multiple cursors because I don’t need it that often but VSCode wouldn’t be any faster at those kind of things, either.
I’ll look into LSP on my PC, but I might just forget I have it by the time I try to figure out what to do with it.
Language Server Protocol. Actually started out on VSCode, it’s how language integration works: The compiler writers (or whoever) provide functionality such as “give me docs for a certain identifier”, “rename this identifier” etc. and the editor/IDE simply offers those options, display the docs in-line, etc. It quickly caught on everywhere, 20 years ago you certainly wouldn’t have seen me advocate writing Java in vim because the likes of Eclipse were just way better at wrangling the language, but the times of those language-specific functions not being available in good ole code editors are over.
Tell you what. As I’ve just ended a contract and have some time to work on my side project while I job hunt, I’ll give it a shot for the rest of this month and report back.
There is absolutely nothing I do in an IDE frequently enough to memorize a bunch of arcane commands, especially in 3 days. Regex solves any mass-operations.
Yeah, don’t memorize a bunch of arcane commands. Use regex instead!
Lol I like your writing. The amount of headless boxes I work on has definitely contributed to my desire to get proficient at vim. Now I feel confident when I have to edit some text on a server, rather than hoping the server has nano and the file isn’t too big.
And that 3 days was how long it took until I was moving faster in neovim than vscode after 4 years of use. Though it’s still perfectly valid to use vim motions in any editor you want. Theres a reason most every editor has vim motions.
Go watch a dev who is competent with vim/emacs and you will feel like a 7 year old on a tablet. I didn’t give neovim a try until I was thoroughly embarrassed with my ability as a professional text editor (software dev).
Is it the motions you don’t like or the editor itself? After 3 days with the motions I could never go back.
Are there any videos of this sort of editing, because honestly every single person I’ve watched use Vim has just been like “oh wait that’s the wrong thing… hold on.” constantly. You’re going to say “they aren’t competent” but that’s kind of the point - approximately nobody is competent in Vim because it isn’t worth learning.
Even so, I’d be interested if there are any videos of pros doing real editing (not “look what I can do”) on YouTube. Anyone know of any?
Jon Gjengset on Youtube is doing live coding where he uses neovim quite well. And you’ll learn about Rust while you’re at it.
Thanks, I’ll watch some.
The Primeagon and Rene Rebe come to mind. Tsoding uses emacs and flys around. I’m still new to neovim and can say the speed at which I can transfer my ideas into the editor is significantly higher.
Come on, you really think its a giant conspiracy from elitists lying about their experience? You think thousands of developers are handicapping themselves for bragging rights?
Not op but yes, I actually do. Dev for about 20 years, and the vast majority showing vim/emacs struggle when presenting. Could be presentation jitters ofc but the answer to:
Yes, yes I do. Thousands is not all, but they are definitively in the thousands
Pretty much, yes.
Absolutely. That’s completely normal human behaviour.
I like mouse more.
and only thing bottlenecking my work right now is me not my tools.
I personally die a little every time I need to take my fingers off the keyboard and reach for the mouse.
There is absolutely nothing I do in an IDE frequently enough to memorize a bunch of arcane commands, especially in 3 days. Regex solves any mass-operations. For everything else the bottleneck is how long it takes to reason about code, not how quickly I can manipulate it.
I will say that if I keep getting jobs where I have to use an IDE on a remote VM on AWS, I might prefer SSH/Vim to that bullshit. The frequency with which IntelliJ locks up all four of those virtual hamster wheel powered CPUs requiring a full restart is basically daily and sometimes multiple times a day.
No it doesn’t not after you’ve used LSP-enabled identifier renaming. But that’s the thing: Emacs, vim, helix, all have LSP integration, they’re actual code editors they aren’t lacking any feature that you’d expect from an IDE.
I can write regex to replace variable names in a matter of seconds despite not needing to do it very often, but I can also use regex to turn a list of data exported to csv into SQL. Or take a list of variable names and turn them into method stubs (or even full methods if they are small and consistent enough).
I don’t even need to think about LSP-enabled identifier renaming. It would be handy if I find myself having to use Vim - I’m not denigrating Vim. Those features are all great if it’s your IDE. But for example I had to look up what that even means because it’s nothing I need to know in any other IDE. And that’s really my point.
Vim has tons of power. The thing it’s really lacking is discoverability. You have to know how to do everything before you can do it. Meanwhile in IntelliJ or VSCode I just find the menu and if I want to be super quick, next to the menu item is the keyboard shortcut which makes it super easy to learn how to do a thing faster while still being able to do the thing. But with vim I have to change to a completely different context and open a browser and Google how to do a thing.
That’s the only problem I have with vim - it takes a huge and consistent investment to get as fast with it as I am with any other IDE out of the gate. Maybe I could eventually even get faster, but could I ever recoup that time investment? It doesn’t seem like it to me since my tools are so rarely the thing slowing me down.
Again, I’ve no doubt vim is great once you learn it thoroughly. Nothing against vim or those who use it. Should the need arise, I’ll put in the effort. But until then I’m just using it for tweaking config files and bash scripts.
You can write a regex to replace a string in a matter of seconds. And so can I. What neither of us can do is write it such that the replacement is limited to the identifier we want to rename (because pumping lemma), that needs syntax if not semantics-aware editing and that’s exactly what LSP is for.
You’re using a screwdriver as a hammer. Does it work, sure, is it advisable? Even if you don’t have a hammer it might be easier and quicker to drive to the hardware store and buy one, depending on the particular nail you’re dealing with.
Helix: <space>? opens function search, enter “rename”, “rename symbol” will be the first hit and it’ll also tell you that it’s bound to <space>r.
Blender: F3 instead of <space>r. Get out of here with clicking through menus. I have no idea where to find
recalculate normalsin the menus and I don’t care. “face” in edit mode, probably. Nope, just checked: Edit mode, mesh->normals->recalculate [inside, outside]. Kinda makes sense while normals are a property of faces you can’t calculate them without reference to a mesh as you wouldn’t be able to tell outside from inside, only stuff like “face camera”.This isn’t so much about gui or not gui thing, both IntelliJ and VSCode come from the windows school of GUI design which says “discoverable without a manual, hotkeys are available for power users”. Blender, OTOH, follows the UNIX philosophy of “RTFM, start working like a pro from the beginning it’s worth it, the interface is just a suggestion, adjust it to your workflow”.
How would you know without giving them an honest spin? Personally I wouldn’t recommend vim, btw, lots of hysterical raisins and inconsistencies to be found there and configuration is a PITA which wouldn’t even be that bad if the out of the box experience was good. Helix cleans up both the command language and the whole configuration shebang (just make sure that LSP servers are installed and you’re good to go) while definitely sticking to the vi/blender style of interface design.
First I want to say this is a great comment overall. I appreciate it. But a couple notes:
\Widentifier\W - harder to navigate markdown than write the pattern. This would also catch references to the identifier in comments as well, though if the identifier isn’t a unique word it might take a little repair, but that’s rarely the case in Java where the convention is expressive identifiers.
That only works for small manuals. Take Git for example, because that’s something I often use the CLI for. There are a huge number of things to learn out of the gate and you can’t just RTFM and you’re good to go. And it’s really not particularly big or complex. Something as simple as cherrypicking - well first I need to log to see the commit ids. Oh not just log but --pretty-something so I can just see the commit ids. Off to Google shit to remind me how to do another thing I only do every few weeks. Compare that to a GUI where I can just right-click cherry-pick. This absolutely kills my productivity because I do so much different shit, I can’t possibly remember everything that I barely use.
I only have so many hours in the day to experiment. And I do, but the “cost” here is pretty high and the opportunity for return is low. We’re talking about things I might do a couple of times a month.
Now it’s possible I’m an idiot and I’m just slower or dumber than folks who like vim. It’s also possible my roles have been really fucked up and I don’t get to focus enough to get good at stuff that ought to be its own niche. All I can say is I’ve stuck my toe into the water and it’s fucking cold. Currently I’m probably 85% GUI and 15% CLI and other keyboard-centric tools. I just use whichever is the most expedient.
I wrote a one line bash script to start my vpn because I couldn’t remember each little keystroke but I can remember start-vpn.
Once again, I appreciate your comment. Upvoted. I don’t know what helix is. Blender I know but isn’t really a business software writing tool so I have maybe 20 hours playing around with it total. I’ll look into LSP on my PC, but I might just forget I have it by the time I try to figure out what to do with it.
Git is simple in its operations, but utterly complex in the stuff you might need to do because the operations aren’t mathematically clean. Things like git rerere should plainly not exist because states which require using it should be impossible to reach. And the likes of vim, or pre-2.8 blender, kinda ended up there as they grew organically, the more you tack on the more likely it is that different things don’t work well with each other. Which is why I recommended helix: It’s a clean-slate redesign. E.g. helix’ command language is consistently <selection><action> while vim is all over the place, you end up learning things by rote instead of really exploiting the combinatorics. On the VCS side darcs is sane in principle but it’s patch theory didn’t really have efficiency in mind and there’s a very nasty complexity explosion you can run into, pijul fixes all that: It has both a vastly superior interface without surprises (such as patches not being associative) and it’s fast.
The most striking difference between the likes of VSCode and Helix are not things that you do once a month, but stuff that you do all the times: Navigating and basic editing. Within the first couple of pages of going through the tutorial you’ll know if navigating with hjklwWbB etc. is a thing that would save you time, whether it’s worth making the interface modal, having to type i (or various other options) before actually writing text. I certainly still haven’t really gotten my head around Helix’ multiple cursors because I don’t need it that often but VSCode wouldn’t be any faster at those kind of things, either.
Language Server Protocol. Actually started out on VSCode, it’s how language integration works: The compiler writers (or whoever) provide functionality such as “give me docs for a certain identifier”, “rename this identifier” etc. and the editor/IDE simply offers those options, display the docs in-line, etc. It quickly caught on everywhere, 20 years ago you certainly wouldn’t have seen me advocate writing Java in vim because the likes of Eclipse were just way better at wrangling the language, but the times of those language-specific functions not being available in good ole code editors are over.
Tell you what. As I’ve just ended a contract and have some time to work on my side project while I job hunt, I’ll give it a shot for the rest of this month and report back.
Blog post! Blog post!
Yeah, don’t memorize a bunch of arcane commands. Use regex instead!
I use regex. And it has arcane stuff I don’t know, but I’ve memorized the rather simple basics that cover 90% of what I need to do.
Lol I like your writing. The amount of headless boxes I work on has definitely contributed to my desire to get proficient at vim. Now I feel confident when I have to edit some text on a server, rather than hoping the server has nano and the file isn’t too big.
And that 3 days was how long it took until I was moving faster in neovim than vscode after 4 years of use. Though it’s still perfectly valid to use vim motions in any editor you want. Theres a reason most every editor has vim motions.