I mainly use vim and occasionally use Jetbrains. My setup in vim is super complex. I can tell you exactly how I feel about it:
Vim is a better text editor than anything else. By far. Unfortunately, vim is terrible at basically everything else.
The problem is, once you learn to use vim's text editing capabilities, then editing code using anything else feels like a pain. I'm not talking about variable lookups / etc. I'm talking the pure "move the cursor to a certain place and enter some text" aspect of it. If you don't know vim, then it's hard to understand how slow editing text feels without it - it's kind of like going from not knowing how to type properly to being a solid touch typer. (not that extreme, but that's what it feels like).
Unfortunately, because vim sucks at everything else, my setup has to be complex to actually get it to do the other things a good IDE does out of the box. If I could do it the other way around, I would - I'd love to be able to use vim-like editing inside of an IDE, but every vim-mode I've tried so far just doesn't work properly (except one - evil mode in Emacs - which is why I recently switched to Spacemacs, but that's another story).
> "move the cursor to a certain place and enter some text"
In vscode, I'm usually already looking at the call site of a function I want to edit. So I move the cursor into the function call and hit F12 which takes me to the function definition to edit it. Once I'm done, I hit Alt+LEFT to navigate back to where I was to continue on...
If I didn't start from a call site but I know the file I want to edit - I hit Ctrl+P, type the name of a file, hit ENTER - now I'm in the file, ready to edit it.
To jump to a function, I collapse all functions (Ctrl+K,Ctrl+0/1/2/3/4) and then scroll (or PAGE UP/DN) to find it...then use arrow keys or Ctrl+G to enter the line number. Now I'm ready to edit the function. I might have to hit Ctrl+Shift+] to expand the body of the function.
Alternatively, I Ctrl+F and type the name of the function I want to edit, pressing ENTER to find it...and I'm ready to edit the function.
You're talking about how it's easy to move to a function or a file, and then you're "ready to edit", but edanm is talking about actually doing the editing.
For example: say I jump to this function and want to fix a bug (the `search` should strip off the first two characters here, not just one). So I need to change `regex.search(s[1:], ...)` to `regex.search(s[2:], ...)`:
def compile_hg_glob(line):
pat = glob_to_re(line)
# Mercurial ignore globs are quasi-rooted at directory boundaries or the
# beginning of the pattern.
pat = '(^|/)' + pat
# Mercurial globs also have to match to the end of the pattern.
pat = pat + '$'
try:
regex = re.compile(pat)
return lambda s: regex.search(s[1:] if s.startswith('./') else s)
except:
warn("could not parse hgignore pattern '%s'" % line)
return lambda s: True
If I've just used a fancy shortcut key to jump to this function, my cursor is probably on the function name. In Vim, I'd do `cinr2:<esc>`. Seven keystrokes. I could also do `/[<cr><ctrl-a>` which is only four keystrokes, but a little more awkward to reach. If I tried to do this editing with arrow keys and backspaces I'd need 12 down keystrokes just to get to the right line.
Or suppose I'm looking at this and want to add a `,` character to the end of each of the type entries, because I forgot Python likes its commas:
In Vim I'd press `j` to get to the first entry, then `A,<esc>` to append the `,` after the first one, then `j.` to move down and repeat the action. I then press `j.` a bunch more times (which is really easy to do rapidly with your index and ring finger on Qwerty) and in 2 seconds I'm done. Vim's `.` to repeat the last action is really powerful and can save you a ton of time for small ad-hoc edit repetitions that don't warrant doing a full macro with `q`.
These kinds of things happen constantly, and when you've got Vim burned into your fingers trying to edit text without it (actually edit text, not just jumping to something) feels like typing with oven mitts on.
Or just use the mouse to point and click in the same time. With laptop mousepads it's just moving a finger. Most devs aren't writing that much code and all these Vim efficiencies are vastly overstated.
I've seen many Vim/Emacs-only devs being easily beaten in speed by others using modern IDEs that have tooling and functionality (auto formatting, refactoring, templating, etc) focused on actually getting things done.
Exactly this. I pick type, and I've never found that it feels too slow. I spend more time thinking about the change I want to make, and reading the code to plan that, than actually making the change most of the time. My typing speed wouldn't address the bottleneck. I think vim is the same. Sure you can edit the text faster, but that's not the bottleneck anyway.
Vim was never about typing efficiency. However, it is indeed the best way to navigate and edit text. This statement is very subjective because, just like any tool, it depends on the user. Chainsaw looks ugly, heavy, cumbersome and dangerous to someone who doesn't know how to use it. But with some practice it becomes an incredibly efficient tool. People make ice sculptures using chainsaws.
And I'm not talking about Vim the editor. I'm talking about Vim as an idea. Which is today implemented for pretty much every single [popular] editor and IDE in use. That fact alone is pretty illustrative of awesomeness of the idea of Vim.
And the comment about Emacs is quite disingenuous. I have never been inside a Formula One cockpit, but I can totally get "the job done" with my Camry, because it is totally more efficient for parallel parking.
I have used many IDEs, including InteliJ (which I used for about seven years). Emacs wins solely by its extensibility, no editor/IDE has ever matched its capabilities. For some people that is not an important factor, just like the efficient parallel parking might not be important for Formula One pilots. But when you can automate pretty much anything it feels very empowering and liberating.
Small example: when I'm about the create a new commit, an emacs-lisp script can figure out the current ticket I'm working on (based on currently clocked Org-mode task), generate a branch name based on the ticket description, generate part of the commit message (in the way that it is in compliance with git tool like gommit), I would just have to type the rest of the message.
That is not only more efficient, but also reduces frustration. Compare that with the workflow in any other editor and IDE - most of these steps will have to be manual. Then someone might say: oh there's actually a plugin for Editor X that does some of that stuff for Jira. But what if I join a different company that uses Pivotal Tracker instead? I can extend my emacs-lisp script. Whereas if that's an InteliJ plugin I would either have to go through daunting process of forking and modifying the plugin or submit a feature request and wait for something that may never happen.
I think where the IDE’s are really powerful is when refactoring. Need that one class renamed? File is automatically renamed too, and all references in every file that link to it (instantiations, calls, imports) are updated too.
Exactly, the code structure, navigation and intellisense features are far more useful and let you code at the same level of abstraction as the logic you're coding.
Moving a little bit faster through the text file to edit characters is rarely the issue and I certainly wouldn't give up IDE features for it.
2: select the first :, ctrl+d until all are selected, right arrow, comma
Doesn’t sound any more efficient? Plus, who writes code without an auto-formatter these days? Problem two would have been solved by the linter the moment you wrote that.
It's not just code and linting though - this kind of thing happens when you're editing YAML files, when you're editing pure text, when you're editing CSVs, when you're editing some obscure thing no one's heard of - once you have the primitives down, it's just so easy to apply it everywhere.
This is a bit frowned upon in HN, but may I just say I'm a fan. I'm not sure, but it's likely I got my way of speaking of vim as a language from you, and as you can see in my other comments, it's stuck with me :)
> In Vim I'd press `j` to get to the first entry, then `A,<esc>` to append the `,` after the first one, then `j.` to move down and repeat the action. I then press `j.` a bunch more times (which is really easy to do rapidly with your index and ring finger on Qwerty) and in 2 seconds I'm done. Vim's `.` to repeat the last action is really powerful and can save you a ton of time for small ad-hoc edit repetitions that don't warrant doing a full macro with `q`.
Eh. I'd probably do 'qqA,<esc>j0q', and then '8@q'.
That's also probably not the best example, since that's also trivial if you have an editor supporting multiple cursors.
That's hardcore, I would rarely use a macro for something like that :)
That said, I think multiple cursors are the greatest addition to text editing since, well, vim. I was an enthusiastic user of Sublime Text 1, right before I learned about vim.
Luckily, vim has multiple cursor support, which is... decent. Not great, but decent. I actually think that the only thing that makes multiple cursors more awesome, is being able to combine them with vim's commands, since multiple cursors rely on you being able to do precise things at each cursor, and vim gives you the language for it.
> That's also probably not the best example, since that's also trivial if you have an editor supporting multiple cursors.
Yeah, it's hard to come up with a decent example because I don't even think about it any more, it's just burned into my fingers. I just know how excruciating it feels to edit without Vim (I even wrote that last comment in Vim and then copied it into the browser because writing it in a text field is miserable).
I long ago created a special script (in Macos it's via something called Hammerspoon, I used to have a Windows version).
It basically gives vim-like keys anywhere you want, when holding down the caps lock key. So e.g. caps+h/j/k/l are movement keys.
It goes a lot farther than that: I have a key to delete a line, a key to select a word, a key to go up/down by 4 lines, a key to delete the last word, etc. I even mapped caps+f to jump forward 20 characters (to badly simulate using 'f [letter]' in vim).
This makes so it I never have to leave home position on the keyboard, because while holding caps I have all the movement keys I want at my disposal. It's a total lifesaver, and the only way I can effectively use a keyboard outside of vim :)
>So I move the cursor...What do you do in vim that is far easier?
The part about moving the cursor. Vim users typically don't move the cursor with the mouse but rather with the keyboard. Having to move your hands off the keyboard to reach for the mouse then back is the part that starts to feel sluggish if you get used to not doing it.
Quite the opposite actually, by the time your hand even finds the mouse the vim user will already have jumped to the desired code block and have started editing it.
Having worked alongside longtime vim users, that's almost never the case. There's often more time spent on finding out/remembering the efficient way to get to a particular piece of code. And then there are the inevitable mistakes (oh, I counted give spaces/quotes/paragraphs, but there was one more/one less; oh, I failed to account for some minor thing in my macro etc.).
In a modern IDE you have a multitude of shortcuts and a mouse, and they complement each other.
> Having worked alongside longtime vim users, that's almost never the case. There's often more time spent on finding out/remembering the efficient way to get to a particular piece of code.
Longtime vim users who didn't know how to use vim? That's... interesting.
Reading the parent comment (and being somewhat a vim user) - "move the cursor to a certain place and enter some text" - sounds mostly about the first thing you mentioned - "move the cursor".
Stock vim is mouseless, and without arrow-keys, which means relying on /? (searching) or other keys to achieve the function of arriving at text. CTRL-F never quite matches that (after you hit enter, the CTRL-F dialog is still open, and needs to be closed with ESC or by clicking away), and moving to the arrow keys/pgup/pgdown/mouse is slow.
Having said that - there are some plugins that match this behaviour - I particularly like the ones where a key (f in vimium) highlights each word with a character, allowing for one or two keypresses to jump anywhere on the screen.
I do all of the same in emacs (and vim), and because I use doom-emacs I get all this basically for free without much configuration on my end.
- Go-to-definition is `g d` (with the cursor over the function name in question)
- Project-wide file search is `SPC SPC`
- Jumping to a function is `SPC s i` and then just start typing to fuzzy-match the function name
I stick with this setup because it does pretty much everything I could want from IDEA, and does it without churning up most of the resources on my machine. And trust me, I've tried to switch to IDEA, but it's just too big and too slow, and too poor of an editor for me to actually make the switch.
Even something simple like reading code line by line (and of like me you like to move the cursor as you read the line), and your cursor reached the bottom of the screen, and you want reset the viewport where the line the cursor is on is at the middle of the viewport, is one keystroke ‘M’
The one related function that I would miss is using vimgrep and the QuickFix list to get a list of the locations where the function name appears which I can use e.g. to do a search and replace in those files (or a subset of them)
It's not so much the moving between the files - which vim is terrible at (one of the many things I had to extend in vim in order to get it to work like an IDE). But it's moving and editing within the file itself.
E.g., say you somehow got to a file, and it now has a bunch of functions in it, and you're literally looking at the line you want to edit. To get to that line, there's a bunch of different ways, but you can do this in like 3 key presses. Then, within the line, you can change anything in it really easily.
This sounds weird, so I'll try to give an example. Let's assume you have something like:
Func(self._something, self.something_else).validate, 'Validate exam foundation table')
And let's say you want to change the string that says 'Validate [...]' to say 'Change is good!!'.
To do that, once you've gotten to the line, I'd probably hit two key presses that mean "go to the first open quote in the line", then I'd hit the keys that mean "delete everything inside of the quote character", then I'd type what I want. All in all, I'd be typing these characters before actually writing what I want to write: f'ci' (so, 5 characters).
That probably looks either idiotic or daunting - but the idea of vim is that it's a language - you are literally thinking in your head "go to that quotation mark", then tell vim to do that and it does. Then you're thinking "delete everything inside of these quotations", and it does it. The distance between thinking what you want to do and doing it is almost zero - it's as close as you can get to literally telling someone exactly what to do.
If you're using a non-vim editor, you'd probably have your cursos in the begining of the line, and have to do "cmd+right" several times to skip over words in order to get to the first word of the string, then have to "shift+cmd+right" to get to the end of the string, then write what you want.
There might also be some small annoyances - the last shift+cmd+right might take you over the last quotation mark, and you'd end up selecting the closing paren as well. In vim - that doesn't happen, you're saying exactly what you want to have happen.
Or you might want to undo this change - in vim, it's always hitting "u" once, because in vim, changing the string to something else is an atomic motion. In another editor, you might have to undo a few words at a time, or maybe not - it's not always predictable. And since it's atomic in vim, it's also easy to re-apply the same action to another string - so changing another string to the same thing is a simple matter of hitting "." on it.
And of course, this is just a tiny example. It's easy to dismiss as trivial or unimportant - these are tiny savings of time, after all, and even if you add it up, I doubt the "time saved" in doing things more efficiently is worth much.
But once you know this language for telling an editor exactly what to do, then using an editor that doesn't speak that language just feels super slow - it feels like you are not able to communicate properly, and suddenly, what used to be zero gap between thinking and doing, takes a long time.
> If you're using a non-vim editor, you'd probably
Double-click the word to select it, and start typing right away.
> it's as close as you can get to literally telling someone exactly what to do.
I usually tell someone "Change the word 'validate' to 'something else'". SO i grab my mouse/trackpad, and get there in one click (or double-click).
> It's easy to dismiss as trivial or unimportant - these are tiny savings of time, after all
You should observe most of these "savings" in real life. There's rarely a time when I can't do stuff with code faster than a Vim user. Because by the time the vim user has typed the required sequence of letter, or counted which line/symbol/mark to go to, or wrote a macro correctly, I'll have finished all I needed to do using IDEs built-in capabilities and/or a mouse.
I wanted to say exactly that. I've never been a big fan of vim plugins in IDE's, even though I still prefer them over no vim bindings. The VS code or Eclipse vim bindings are 'not great' at best, for example. But CLion + vim plugin is actually very good: it uses my .vimrc, doesn't mess up undo/redo, supports things like block select in visual mode, etc. The only downside is that it interferes with some standard CLion keybindings (which is inevitable I guess), so you have to remap some things.
Out of curiosity is the plugin just called vim or what? I've been craving getting back to using vim style controls to edit text (and use CLion when working with Rust) so would be interested in at experimenting with this.
It also has two popular vim packages, surround and easymotion you can use too, which I really like.
I then customize all the IDE stuff to vim combos.... super nice.
only PITA is in some drop downs on a number of jetbrains products is that it doesn't play nice with auto hotkey, I have ALT-J and ALT-K bound to up and down arrow keys which makes for a much nicer vim experience when dealing with autocomplete drop downs ( or any drop down )
Was going to chime in to say the same, the VIM plugin in Intellij is hands-down the best vim emulation I've seen. It takes your vimrc as `.ideavimrc` and fucking works.
Been paying for Intellij for nearly a year now and I don't regret a day of it. Well okay, I do regret the one day EAP was totally broken by the VIM plugin, by besides that it has been brilliant.
Of course. I don't even know if I'm actually more productive in editing text.
I just know that subjectively, going from speaking a language with powerful concepts, to using the super crude tools available in most editors, just feels sluggish.
I highly doubt it was actually a good investment time wise to master vim, but I salary really enjoy messing with editors so it was partially for fun.
I always wonder how good and productive people who claim this are in reality. Personally I consider typing as a strong bottleneck for my productivity. I type all the day, and the less time I waste on transfering my thoughts into commands, the more time I have for focusing on the important parts. Not all typing is for textediting, but editors like vim&emacs are not limited to textediting.
The vim emulation for the IntelliJ tools worked very well for me. Used to use only vim with a complex setup. Have been using Goland, and IntelliJ for about a year now.
I actually haven't tried it (just started using PyCharm again very recently). But I gave it a go right after posting my comment.
And like almost every other emulation I've ever tried, within 1 minute, I found 5 things that didn't work correctly. And I'm not exaggerating here - I literally spent 1, maybe 2 minutes and found 5 things.
I'll have to use it for a while to find out whether it's just a few minor annoyances, or much worse than vim.
Can you briefly enumerate some of them here? I'm a casual vimmer and have plateau'd on the basic vim features that are good enough, so I'm curious what advanced commands are useful day-to-day.
Nothing really advanced, I think, although maybe one or two obscure things. Here's the problems I found and remember (I wasn't looking for anything, I was just trying some basic stuff). They all might seem trivial, but we're talking muscle memory heI'M.
1. First thing I did was to fold all the functions in the file - this is something vim does pretty badly, actually, because it doesn't know how to deal with Python syntax without lots of customization. But anyway, the command for "fold everything that can be folded, recursively" is zM. Then the command to open everything back up is zR...
Except that for some reason, this vim emulation doesn't open everything, it kept the imports at the top of the file closed.
Verdict: Probably not a big deal, just inconsistent (but maybe PyCharm's way is better?)
2. I then did a standard thing I like to do - if you want to delete a paragraph, you hit 'dip'. Works well. If you have a few lines of whitespace between paragrpahs, and you want to delete everything except one line, the command in vim is 'dvip'. This is actually somewhat obscure but I use this constantly to clean up code. Didn't work.
Verdict: obscure command that's rarely copied correctly, but I use it all the time. Annoying.
3. I then tried to change some text. Let's simplify and say that I did 'ci(' to change the contents of parenthesis. Worked well. However, I tried to undo the change. In vim, this is a single 'u' since the change command is atomic. However here, this required hitting 'u' three times.
Verdict: Ok this is really annoying. It's unpredictable and screws up my muscle memory, plus it's a very very used feature.
4. This might just be my fault - I tried to navigate my Python file using ']]' and '[['. The second one took me to the end of the file, the first did nothing - neither did what I want, which is to jump through various methods/functions. I also tried ']m' and ']d'. This one is not stock vim though (or not exactly), so it might be possible and I just don't know it.
--
I don't remember the other thing.
And btw, I totally don't mean to diss PyCharm, which is awesome in many ways. And I could be only nitpicking here - though again, finding 4/5 problems in 1 minute is not a good sign. But that's my point - emulating vim is, for whatever reason, either really hard, or not something that people spend a lot of effort on. That's why I have to rely on vim itself (or actually Spacemacs nowadays, which amazingly does have an almost completely working vim emulation.)
Agreed that it’s not perfect emulation. I took some time to find alternatives to everything it lacked for me and now I’m satisfied.
The biggest plus is when working with larger projects. The single-threaded autocomplete and jump-to-definition functionality was very slow in Vim, stalling the UI updates. Goland feels so much smoother in these cases.
Response Speed. Most emulations tend to fall behind my actual Vim command speeds, which really destroys the vim editing flow.
Occasionally emulators will not honor mode switches correctly or on the first try. So I would expect to be in insert mode after a complex set of commands but the emulator isn’t there. This is also likely due to speed issues, but maybe not.
Emulators do not do a good job of handling macros, and vim’s repeatability. The auto stuff they try to do (such as formatting, etc) precisely the reasons one would prefer an emulator, can mess up repeatability.
Many of them don’t handle certain basic commands. A lot of emulators, for example, do not handle commands like HML which shift the viewport, possibly because the IDEs do not really give them access to it, or maybe because they aren’t known well enough that they fall way down the priority list.
Everyone does, that's totally legit. However, even without editing anything, just "moving around the file" is much snappier with vim. Even when I'm reading code I'll move to certain parts of a line to better understand what's going on. Plus, you do eventually have to edit code.
If you really never did anything except read code, then I think vim wouldn't give much of an advantage. Then again, neither would any of the shortcuts that every IDE provides.
Vim is a better text editor than anything else. By far. Unfortunately, vim is terrible at basically everything else.
The problem is, once you learn to use vim's text editing capabilities, then editing code using anything else feels like a pain. I'm not talking about variable lookups / etc. I'm talking the pure "move the cursor to a certain place and enter some text" aspect of it. If you don't know vim, then it's hard to understand how slow editing text feels without it - it's kind of like going from not knowing how to type properly to being a solid touch typer. (not that extreme, but that's what it feels like).
Unfortunately, because vim sucks at everything else, my setup has to be complex to actually get it to do the other things a good IDE does out of the box. If I could do it the other way around, I would - I'd love to be able to use vim-like editing inside of an IDE, but every vim-mode I've tried so far just doesn't work properly (except one - evil mode in Emacs - which is why I recently switched to Spacemacs, but that's another story).