Maybe she just wasn’t impressed by your noob skills and is having doubts herself?
My jaw literally dropped reading that.
I think it’s time to go outside.
“See if you just learn these 87 simple keyboard shortcuts, you won’t need to simply drag with the mouse and cut and paste at all!”
“nothing fancy” that’s the issue, just some jumping won’t impress her; you gotta do the real crazy shit. Friggin “wife not impressed by my cooking? I make a hard boiled egg and she isn’t impressed”
jumping won’t impress her
Unless it’s jump humping.
I refuse to see how vim and emacs is worth learning. I only use it because that’s the only option when editing server files. Beyond this, I couldn’t imagine coding in these environments from scratch.
The biggest benefit of (neo)vim is the motions.
Honestly if you don’t use vim motions in your ide of choice, you’re missing out big time. Being able to do things like “Delete everything inside these parentheses”. di( or “wrap this line and the two lines below in a pair of {}” ys2j{ , or “swap this parameter with the next one” cxia]a. with a single shortcut is game changing.
Even just being able to repeat an action a number of times is ridiculously useful. I use relative line numbers, so I can see how many lines away a target is and just go “I need to move down 17 lines” and hit 17j.
Absolutely insane how much quicker it is too do stuff with vim motions than ctrl-shift-arrows and the like.
Honestly those things just don’t sound like common enough actions to be worth shaving 0.5 seconds off. How often do you know exactly how many lines to move a line by? And how often do you even need to move a line that far?
I still don’t buy it.
Relative lines means each line except the one your cursor is on is relative to your current line. Like this:
5 5k jumps here
4
3
2
1
6 your cursor is here
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8 8j jumps here
The main reason I like it is I don’t like mouse ergonomics. Keeping my hands on the keyboard just feels better
Yes I understood that. My point is how often do you know you need to move a line exactly 17 lines? Do you count them? Clearly much slower than doing it interactively by holding down ctrl-shift-down for a bit.
I just look at the line number. If the code I want to edit is 17 lines up there’s a 17 next to it. My ide window looks like my comment. Normally an ide would look like this
1
2
3
4
5
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7
8
9
10
11
Thoose are line numbers in IDE. You don’t count them, you see them
Line numbers are absolute, not relative (normally anyway; I think some editors allow showing relative line numbers). Anyway I think holding down (page) up/down is going to be just as fast.
There are both modes for absolute and relative line numbers in vim. Holding up/down might be intuitive nd easy to remember, but saving 1 second everytime you need to do this can add up pretty fast
Not “move the current line of code”, but instead “jump the cursor a number of lines”
Oh so like page up/down then? Not exactly showing the raw power of Vim when you can use an existing key press! 😄
I can’t tell if you’re trolling; Page up and page down are different from “I need to jump 10 lines down” with
10j. Or 11 lines with11j. Or “Delete the line I’m on and the six below it” withd6j.They’re not significantly different. Maybe it takes you 1s and me 2s. Not worth the effort of learning. Especially because Vim comes with significant downsides compared to full IDEs that will make you slower overall.
Name a downside, I’ll tell you how you’re probably wrong
Being able to do things like “Delete everything inside these parentheses”. di( or “wrap this line and the two lines below in a pair of {}” ys2j{ , or “swap this parameter with the next one” cxia]a. with a single shortcut is game changing.
Those are handy, but most IDEs make at least the second two easy to do without reaching for the mouse (not sure about the first one), and for most people the other conveniences offered by IDEs are pretty attractive. I do use vim when I’m working in the terminal though, because it’s solid and handles large files better than anything else I know.
I have most of the features of an IDE in my neovim config; name a feature and there’s almost certainly a plugin for it!
Those are just a few small examples. One of my favorite things that vim enables for me is working with text objects. Things like functions, variables, classes, conditionals, paramters… Etc. Any action works with any text object - Want to jump to the next function in the file? Copy everything inside of a conditional? Cut everything up to (but not including) the nearest capital D on the line? Delete just the word your cursor is in the middle of (and one of the spaces around it)? Delete the current line and the N lines below it?
The motions make editing code incredibly fast, and I still have modern features like variable completion, copilot, intellisense, ‘jump to definition’, “hover” information, fuzzy search in project… Name a feature. I highly recommend giving it a closer look for stuff like that.
That does sound pretty good, and all without an IDE that hangs several times a day too. I haven’t really taken advantage of vim’s power.
Feel it’s worth noting that
ys[motion][symbol]is a plugin (vim-surround or nvim-surround at your option) and most IDEs therefore don’t support itAlso as for plugins, Tim Pope’s vim-argumentative is another one I love. “Swap this parameter with the next one” is
>,and “swap this parameter with the previous” is<,Ah right, I forget that that one is from vim-surround. Though I know some ides do support somewhat custom vim-configs!
I didn’t know about argumentative, my swapping is powered by Tree-Sitter
I only use it because that’s the only option when editing server files.
suggestion 1: use nano. Unlike vi(m) and emacs, it’s meant for humans, all the command shortcuts you can execute are listed at the bottom.
suggestion 2: browse the servers in question via your file explorer (
sftp://user@serveror justsftp://server) of choice or WinSCP if you’re on windows, open whatever file with your local graphical text editor of choice.By the way, for editing server files consider nano. It’s also widely available, has simpler shortcuts and displays them on the screen. It’s obviously not powerful like vim, but a good match when you just need to edit a config file.
Nano is just as fiddly as vim and way less powerful when you actually figure out what you’re doing though?
Ie a completely redundant piece of software that has no place being pre-installed anywhere
how is it just as fiddly as vim? it’s the only one that’s even half intuitive
Where “intuitive” means “shows important shortcuts on the bottom of the screen”.
It’s sufficient as a basic text editor, in the sense that it allows me to edit
configuration.nixto include helix (a couple of years ago, nvim) without having to learn it because the commands to save and quit are, as said, displayed on the bottom of the screen. That’s about the extent of nano’s feature set, anyway, it’s a text editor, and a simple one as that, doesn’t even try to be a code editor.When it comes to actually being intuitive though I vastly prefer the old DOS-style editors. The editor that shipped with it, as well as the likes of Turbo Pascal. “Press and release alt to get to the menu bar” type of interface: It allows you to have an at least half-way adequate feature set without requiring people to learn shortcuts. If Turbo Pascal displayed all its functions and their shortcuts at the bottom it’d take up more than half of the screen.
Really, “intuitive” when it comes to UI generally means “dumbed down, featureless”. Once a program actually has features things quickly become complicated and it’s counter-productive to keep things usable for users which aren’t willing to set at least a modicum amount of time aside to learn the very basics. The Blender Fundamentals series is what two hours of video. Text editors can get away with less as the feature set isn’t as broad but you should be willing to go through at least half of of the tutorial which is going to take 15 minutes or so, both for
vimtutorandhx --tutor.I just find the saving mechanism frustrating to use compared to vim’s as an entry level user, and now as a mid-skilled user I dislike how featureless nano is - when I was first learning how to use the terminal I hated having to edit anything as I was pretty much force-fed nano with no alternative provided, but on finding vim and remembering literally 3 things (
:w,:qandi) everything became so much easier, but I definitely do have an extra bitter taste left about not being told about something much easier to use which irked me when I saw someone preaching how amazing nano isI also really don’t get the hate for vim when remembering 3 things gives you as much/more functionality as nano and is a starting point for so much more functionality - intuitive doesn’t mean featureless and don’t try and pretend nano’s shortcuts are the same as 99% of other editors (text or otherwise), in fact they’re totally different, making it less intuitive
Nano is perfectly fine for me.
But I know the basics of vim if I need to use it.
I have a cheatsheet of all the necessary vim shortcuts!
:q!
:q looks like a person which jaw hit the desk. Which adequately described me when I found out how to exit vim.
> my wife
> vim user
fake
As someone who’s been a software developer for over a decade and in IT even longer, I still don’t use vi/vim for anything other than when crontabs have it set as the editor.
Honestly if you don’t use vim motions in your ide of choice, you’re missing out big time. Being able to do things like “Delete everything inside these parentheses”.
di(or “wrap this line and the two lines below r in a pair of {}”ys2j{, or “swap this parameter with the next one”cxia]a.with a single shortcut is game changing.Even just being able to repeat an action a number of times is ridiculously useful. I use relative line numbers, so I can see how many lines away a target is and just go “I need to move down 17 lines” and hit
17j.Absolutely insane how much quicker it is too do stuff with vim motions than ctrl-shift-arrows and the like
That’s really neat, but I don’t think I do that often enough to really make the performance hit of learning a whole new thing and memorizing keyboard shortcuts and commands worth it. I don’t find myself refactoring code a ton, especially after moving to a more TDD-like model.
It’s less about refactoring and more about navigation of your code while editing. Ever wanted to delete a single word?
dawdeletes the word your cursor is currently in. How about "copy everything up to (but not including) the nearest “D” on the current line?yfD.The whole point is that editing code in the middle of writing it, not just refactoring it, is immensely faster.
Absolutely insane how much quicker it is too do stuff with vim motions than ctrl-shift-arrows and the like
Those tasks are a very small part of work time, so most people don’t feel the need to optimize it.
As a software dev, they’re significant parts of what I do
Are you one of those rare developers who spend most of their day actually coding?
Yes, absolutely. And I refuse to let my day be anything else! :-)
ive heard women are into emacs these days
- melpomenesclevage ( @melpomenesclevage@lemm.ee ) 14•1 year ago
We are, but, like… Just preferring something else doesn’t make vim unimpressive. Silver medal’s still pretty fucking prestigious, you know?
It’s not like ed had any chance of being anything other than last, anyway
Stop showing off VIM to your wife would be a good start. I mean, I would do the same if she tried to show off her make tutorials to me.
Make? As in Makefiles or make-up?
You know what, that was mistype, but I’m not going to correct it since it fits better in this sub Lol
You realize that this is !programmer_humor@programming.dev, right?
Yes, and?
Divorce.
He tried, but he doesn’t know how to exit.
Vimorce
:n!
Realising that your partner doesn’t care about you after 10+ years can indeed be hard.
Can confirm, am getting divorced after 12 years
“Muuhuum, vim is wrecking havoc on relationships again!”
:q!
You have to adopt Emacs and show her that she can even play Tetris on it.
Guy shoulda tried emacs instead, wife is probably an elitist
Have you tried tiny macros with q and @? Syntax highlighting? Z-folds? Or turn vi into a hex editor with :%!xxd ?
If that doesn’t work, try :divorce
Emacs can do that obviously. And everything else.
Relevant xkcd
C-dto initiate a divorce. So convenient.However with Vim she won’t know how to quit.
Do you really want to be with someone who cant quit vim?