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Ask HN: Replacement for VIM

11 pointsby toblenderalmost 11 years ago
Hi HN,<p>I&#x27;ve been using vim since university to do software development. I love that it&#x27;s on virtually every platform and is fast.<p>I&#x27;m looking to upgrade. Is there a replacement that allows me to split screens (vertical&#x2F;horizontal) and virtually never use the mouse?<p>I&#x27;ve tried Sublime in classic mode, not enough split screens for my workflow.<p>Intellij only support vertical split and the vim plugin is lacking.<p>Thanks!

20 comments

farresitoalmost 11 years ago
You have several options: like someone has already mentioned, vim + tmux works amazingly well, and that&#x27;s what I personally use. Not sure what you are using. A second option is emacs + evil-mode, which, to be honest, is pretty good and would definitely recommend it if you want to move away from vim but have the biggest compatibility.<p>That said, what&#x27;s the reason you want to move away from vim? Once you have the right plugins, there&#x27;s no editor that can beat it. I personally use vim + tmux for pretty much everything except for clojure, for which I use emacs + evil-mode (paredit is very very nice, and the vim equivalent didn&#x27;t work well for me).
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T-Ralmost 11 years ago
If split screens are your thing, it might be worth it to try a Tiling Window Manager. I agree with you that Sublime doesn&#x27;t natively have enough split screens, so I use XMonad, and split them and organize them as I please.
therealidiotalmost 11 years ago
I thought vim could already split both horizontally and vertically, with the :split and :vsplit commands
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300almost 11 years ago
Vim already can split window both horizontally and vertically. If that&#x27;s not good enough for you, you could maybe try different approach: keep Vim, and try some of the tilling window managers (if you&#x27;re using Linux), like i3 or awesome.
jarinalmost 11 years ago
Install Janus and all your heart&#x27;s desires will be fulfilled:<p><a href="https://github.com/carlhuda/janus" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;carlhuda&#x2F;janus</a><p>Bonus: plop this in your .vimrc.after for super easy movement around split windows<p><pre><code> nnoremap &lt;C-h&gt; &lt;C-w&gt;h nnoremap &lt;C-j&gt; &lt;C-w&gt;j nnoremap &lt;C-k&gt; &lt;C-w&gt;k nnoremap &lt;C-l&gt; &lt;C-w&gt;l</code></pre>
aylonsalmost 11 years ago
Emacs is the obvious answer: it allows keyboard-only operation, has a very flexible frame splitting tool and you may leverage your VI experience by using evil-mode.
johncoltranealmost 11 years ago
What about telling us <i>what</i> you want to upgrade?<p>Are you looking for a &quot;better&quot; looking interface ? Try Sublime Text, Atom or Brackets.<p>Are you looking for better $LANGUAGE support? Try any $LANGUAGE-specific IDE.<p>Are you looking for better scriptability? Try Emacs, possibly with evil-mode.<p>Are you looking for a better editing experience? There&#x27;s nowhere to look.
notduncansmithalmost 11 years ago
If you use a Mac, iTerm2 has nifty Cmd+D binding to split windows vertically, and Cmd+Shift+D to split horizontally, then Cmd+[ and Cmd+] to move around. It actually has an advantage over splitting Vim since you can actually split off a whole shell.<p>You can achieve the same thing with tmux of course, this just feels very natural and is available out of the box with no configuration required.
elibenalmost 11 years ago
What&#x27;s the problem with splitting the screen in Vim? Or is this not the problem you&#x27;re trying to solve?<p>I regularly have Vim open split to 2-6 windows, depending on the screen. I prefer in-vim splitting to out-of-vim splitting (tmux et al) because all buffers are shared for quick jumping between them, completion, copy-pasting, etc.
rayineralmost 11 years ago
Uograde from VIM? Emacs.
kbensonalmost 11 years ago
I won&#x27;t be able to offer much help, I&#x27;m still using VIM, but I&#x27;m curious as to what is spurring you to change? Are you just exploring to see if there&#x27;s anything better and&#x2F;or finding interesting features of other editors, or are you finding something lacking?
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webmavenalmost 11 years ago
I&#x27;ll note that you can upgrade Vim <i>itself</i> via plugins. The easiest way I&#x27;ve found so far is to use a &#x27;distro&#x27; like spf-13: <a href="http://vim.spf13.com/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;vim.spf13.com&#x2F;</a>
wbondalmost 11 years ago
Not sure if splitting is your only real issue with Sublime, but the Origami package may help: <a href="https://sublime.wbond.net/packages/Origami" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;sublime.wbond.net&#x2F;packages&#x2F;Origami</a>
steveeq1almost 11 years ago
What&#x27;s wrong with emacs?
gfodoralmost 11 years ago
for dynamic languages i always use vim with tmux. for Java&#x2F;C# I use IntelliJ&#x2F;VS.NET with IdeaVIM or viemu since those IDEs allow easy refactoring and navigation based on the type system. I don&#x27;t program in any other statically typed languages like Go or Scala so YMMV. I picked up tmux about 2-3 years ago and it was a major step forward, so I recommend you do that first before abandoning vim.
dustintranalmost 11 years ago
You can split screens (and virtually never use the mouse) in Vim. What particular feature are you looking for here?
kazinatoralmost 11 years ago
There is no replacement of Vim; it is the best thing of its kind. I&#x27;ve been using it since 1994 and wouldn&#x27;t even think about replacing it.<p>The current region of the screen you&#x27;re working in can be split horizontally with Ctrl-W s, and vertically with Ctrl-W v.<p>Moving among the splits is done using Ctrl-W + movement keys, where movement keys are arrows, or h, j, k, l. Plus undoubtedly in other ways.<p>There are ways to rotate and rearrange windows themselves, and perform actions that open windows: many familiar actions can be prefixed with Ctrl-W so that they open a new window, such as chasing a tag (Ctrl-]).
ulisesrmzrochealmost 11 years ago
Try Atom.io on Vim mode. Split screens with command + k + arrow key.
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slambamalmost 11 years ago
tmux with vim
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oneandoneis2almost 11 years ago
Wait for neovim?
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