Vim Creep

This is an extremely awesome, fantastic, exhilarating use of hyperbole.<p>What I gained from the article wasn't any explanation of why Vim is great; indeed, there was little included in this respect, aside from moving "entire blocks of code with the flick of a finger." Even the cool feeling of proficiency you get from knowing a tool well, and the fun of getting to show off a skill to a "how did he do that!?" audience was secondary.<p>My favorite part was the implicit reminder to relax about my tools. The most effective use of hyperbole is not the emphasis of a particular point, but a caution not to take ourselves too seriously, and place our self-satisfaction in proper perspective. The most powerful instances border on satire, and in that respect, this piece was perfect.<p>Addendum: I use vim and pentadactyl. They are extremely awesome, fantastic, and exhilarating.

This feels like an article about a religion or cult, not a software program.<p>I just don't get it. Ever since newer editors got block editing or multiple insertion cursors, and RegEx find &#38; replace across multiple files, and searching filenames to open... I feel like I've already got everything I need!<p>What am I missing out on? I don't <i>feel</i> like my text editor holds back my productivity. Using something like Sublime, I never think, man, if only Sublime did <i>x</i>, it would save me five minutes, twenty times a week!<p>I've never had anyone explain to me what specific kind of code editing is so much more productive in vim than in any other editor. Can someone give me a real-world, <i>commonly occurring</i> example?<p>Or is it not about productivity? Is it an interface thing? People like the way it feels to use? The article explains the "feeling" I always hear about, how vim is so much better, but for the millionth time, fails to tell me why, in a way a non-vim-user can understand.

My first week in college a distant relative of mine at the same school pulled me into the Sun lab. The sum-total of his instructions were:<p>* This is how you log in.<p>* This is ls.<p>* This is cd.<p>* This is man.<p>* This is apropos.<p>* Learn vi.<p>* Have fun.<p>What came from that 5 minute intro to Unix has been applied orders of magnitude more often than anything from 5 years of an EE degree.

Can we all stop patting ourselves on the back for being vim badasses now?<p>Yes, its a fantastic editor. Yes, its probably going to make you more productive. Yes, its every bit as capable as any other IDE or editor out there.<p>No, it will not make you a better person. No, mastery of vim does not make you fart sunshine. No, it won't make you an enlightened buddha.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again...<p>Editing text is a solved problem: vim or emacs. Pick one and get back to work.

Somehow this reminds me of an Everything2 article about Nethack titled "You have a sad feeling for a moment, and then it passes."<p>It inspires the same kind of nostalgia.<p><a href="http://everything2.com/title/You+have+a+sad+feeling+for+a+moment%252C+then+it+passes" rel="nofollow">http://everything2.com/title/You+have+a+sad+feeling+for+a+mo...</a>

I have never been moved so close to tears by an article about a text editor before.

I started using vi in high school. Used it extensively throughout college. Then I had my first taste of a proper GUI IDE.<p>Since then, I've only used vim for editing config files on a remote unix system.

Not so subtly the author is telling the reader if you program with Vim you'll be just like "all the really great programmers" who can write 4 line solutions to problems that take ordinary programmers 10 pages. You'll produce "impossible patterns of code and text manipulation", and be able to "fill dozens of registers" (admittedly I don't know what that means). This is all bit silly and reminds me of "hacking" in the Hollywood films.<p>I understand that this post was tongue in cheek. I also understand that not all text editors are equal, if you see someone writing their first hello world program in Notepad yes you should tell them about much better alternatives. But this post confuses ability to program with ability to use Vim.<p>Being really good at using Vim will definitely let you say you're part of the club of people who are really good at using Vim. It just might make you more efficient at manipulating code. But let's not perpetuate the elitism that is pervasive enough in hacking, it's a text editor. It doesn't make you more intelligent, better at problem solving, or writing more efficient code.

You could do a global search and replace of "vim" with "emacs" (or pretty much any other development tool for that matter) and it would not change the semantic content of this article at all.

LOL so in my early days it was "vi" but I too use "vim" now a days.<p>Either way the funny thing is when someone asks me "how do you do THAT in vi?" I often find myself typing in the air to replay the muscle memory that executes those instructions.<p>For better or for worse I've become muscle programmed to execute vi commands in flashes of thought that really never reach my normal cognitive functions. I love to watch people stunned as they see me do something I've taken for granted for years or figured everyone else knew how to do.<p>All that said, all tools are not for all situations and all people. I do at times find myself jumping into eclipse (Java I'm looking at you!!!) because of the many additional features available in a good IDE.<p>I know you can run the vim extensions in eclipse but I've never bothered. I figure if I'm going to mouse my way through an IDE I'm not sure what having vi commands will do to make my life easier. :-)

Nice. Very nice.<p>I even tweeted it. With TwitVim, naturally. <a href="http://vim.sourceforge.net/scripts/script.php?script_id=2204" rel="nofollow">http://vim.sourceforge.net/scripts/script.php?script_id=2204</a>

Also feels good to have vim bindings inside of emacs using evil (<a href="http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/Evil" rel="nofollow">http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/Evil</a>).

This article has changed(or at least I hope) my life. I'm installing Vim today on my Windows Laptop. Does anyone know of a good guide for beginners?

I've never found that symbols -&#62; buffer is the bottleneck for me. Instead, it exists somewhere between problem -&#62; symbols.

looks like he forgot to switch to command mode at the end of the post.

I'm all for vim or whatever other editor you prefer.<p>But to somehow claim that one editor or another is going to make you a better programmer and make your 10 pages of crap code become 4 elegant lines is pretty nonsensical.<p>No matter what editor you use; if you're not good at problem solving, you're not going to make a good programmer.

You know, I'm doing an experiment like this with Tetris. I was looking at the world record for 40 line clear (20.55 seconds at <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WzUUKKuye24" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WzUUKKuye24</a>) and I realized that the limit is not how fast he thinks, but how fast he is pressing the keys.<p>So I designed my own system. One key press drops the piece instantly into the correct spot, with the correct rotation. It's making my brain hurt practicing because it requires so much thinking, but once I get it into muscle memory, things are going to get really interesting. My 40 line best using the arrow keys is 45 seconds and with my new scheme it is 2:21. But I'm dropping time quickly and I'm sure very soon I'll beat my record.

"Knife skills" don't make you a good developer. Cook a great steak and worry less about cutting it. Tools are boring. People are far more important. A post like this is akin to "I LOVE BRITNEY SPEARS." Please God, make the programmer pop culture stop.

Nope. Don't get me wrong, I love vim, but I don't need to have it <i>everywhere</i>. It makes no sense in the browser. It's lacking some features Eclipse has (although if Eclipse had a <i>proper</i> Vim mode, I'd use it in a heartbeat).

I'm like that, exactly, but with Emacs.<p>A long time ago I narrowly escaped being like that exactly, but with TECO :-)<p>I've learned not to fret about people's choice of editor. FOr instance, if someone was happy in NotePad, as long as it didn't affect me, I learned not to care. (I might grit my teeth in frustration, watching them flail for minutes at something I could do in seconds with my choice of editor, but that's my problem).

For me pragmatism wins the day. Vim has been installed on every machine I've ever ssh'ed into. Not true for emacs or even nano or pico.

Fully recognize I am outing myself here but the timing seems great given the Vim articles that have been coming up lately, as well as my Lead Engineer keeps bugging me to really get into Vim. I have used it before, but never GOT it. Is there an online guide that is great (and not just a story like this one) or do I need to get the O'Reily Vi and Vim book?

I chose vim because it was radically different than anything else.<p>All text editors have crazy shortcuts that do magic, but only vim has the ironically named NORMAL mode with its verbs, movements and registers...<p>I treated it like a new game to learn. Sometimes I will write a macro because it is more fun, even though it might not save me raw time.

Nice writing, this goes straight to the HN monthly. Ultra nerdy nonetheless.

Being somewhere in the middle of that timeline, I'd watch that movie. This piece reminds me that an authors vision is always more important to communication than the subject itself.

If someone can always "churned out 4 line solutions for an assignment that took you 10 pages of code to complete", he can use any editor or maybe simply "cat &#62;".

How do people use Vi on large projects? Do you just manually type in the name of the file you're looking for every time?

I definitely save this article not for the awesome main post but for the useful comments and replies.<p>Thanks all.

I admit that this is beautifully written, even though I strongly disagree with the premise.

macvim for objective-c? That sounds like a PITA to set up properly.

why vim creep, it should be titled "ode to vim"

What a feel-good piece.

No, I didn't.

I still can't believe people love that damn thing so much, even after all these years. There are way better tools in my opinion.<p>Of course, if you like it by all means continue using it. But if you think it has anything to do with your talent as an engineer, you are wrong. And if you see other engineers not using it and think it implies anything about their talent, you are wrong.<p>Side note: if anyone wrote in such a breathless tone about Apple, they would be skewered as a fanboy and a drinker of the Kool-Aid.