I also find that vim defaults are very lackluster, I could spend all day listing its faults:
- hjkl is not a reasonable default mapping for motion, for one it doesn't make it obvious that j is down and l is up since the keys are next to one another (which makes it a lot harder to memorise in the first place) but on top of that it wastes two very premium home row keys, h and l, for something that you really shouldn't end up using a whole lot (b, w, f, t, e and friends are usually much more efficient for moving on the current line).
- To make matters worse, the one key that's easiest to access on any keyboard, the space bar, is... just doing the same thing as l, it moves right. So now you have two of the best keys on the keyboard mapped redundantly to a relatively little used function.
- What about the enter/return key? It does the same thing as j, it moves down. Brilliant.
Those are just minor nitpicks of course, but I have a laundry list of those if anybody cares to hear them. It's littered with small inconsistencies and idiosyncrasies that stem from historical baggage and not actually trying to design an ergonomic editor.
That being said I don't get where you're coming from with VScode. Do you consider the editor part of VSCode to be better than Vim, or are you talking about Vim failing as an IDE?
It's important not to mix things up, VSCode is an IDE, Vim isn't. If you wanted an IDE and tried to get Vim to do that by adding 3MB of vimscript from various sources to make it work I can't blame you for giving up, it's probably going to end up being a mess.
> but on top of that it wastes two very premium home row keys, h and l, for something that you really shouldn't end up using a whole lot
Even if with all the advanced search and move features, I still use the h and l keys pretty often. Being able to skip to a certain character is nice, but I find pretty often I just need to move a few characters forward or back, and a mindless `lll` is much easier than doing the mental math of which character I want to stop at and using the appropriate navigation command.
I've also grown to appreciate that the default keys are the most basic commands: on the right side, single-unit navigation, and on the left, basic character entry/removal.
> To make matters worse, the one key that's easiest to access on any keyboard, the space bar, is... just doing the same thing as l, it moves right. So now you have two of the best keys on the keyboard mapped redundantly to a relatively little used function.
I'm actually very thankful for this. I never thought about it before, but I realize that I never use my thumb when in Vim (other than to add spaces when typing normally) and I _think_ I like that. It let's me concentrate on the other fingers. Might be a matter of practice, but as it is I don't feel a need to incorporate the space bar or my thumb into my vim commands. It lets my thumb stay "dumb" so it doesn't interfere with any non-vim typing habits.
> If you wanted an IDE and tried to get Vim to do that by adding 3MB of vimscript from various sources to make it work I can't blame you for giving up, it's probably going to end up being a mess.
Agreed with this. For people that want to work in an IDE, they shouldn't work in Vim. Personally I dislike IDEs, and in part use vim to stick to a (relatively) simple editor.
> hjkl is not a reasonable default mapping for motion, for one it doesn't make it obvious that j is down and l is up since the keys are next to one another (which makes it a lot harder to memorise in the first place)
This, people in this thread are talking like the defaults like they were handed down by devine beings from the ancient past. The truth is that they are often just warts from and old past that can't be removed for backwards compatibility.
My personal vim ethos: You can, and you SHOULD tailor it to yourself.
- hjkl is not a reasonable default mapping for motion, for one it doesn't make it obvious that j is down and l is up since the keys are next to one another (which makes it a lot harder to memorise in the first place) but on top of that it wastes two very premium home row keys, h and l, for something that you really shouldn't end up using a whole lot (b, w, f, t, e and friends are usually much more efficient for moving on the current line).
- To make matters worse, the one key that's easiest to access on any keyboard, the space bar, is... just doing the same thing as l, it moves right. So now you have two of the best keys on the keyboard mapped redundantly to a relatively little used function.
- What about the enter/return key? It does the same thing as j, it moves down. Brilliant.
Those are just minor nitpicks of course, but I have a laundry list of those if anybody cares to hear them. It's littered with small inconsistencies and idiosyncrasies that stem from historical baggage and not actually trying to design an ergonomic editor.
That being said I don't get where you're coming from with VScode. Do you consider the editor part of VSCode to be better than Vim, or are you talking about Vim failing as an IDE?
It's important not to mix things up, VSCode is an IDE, Vim isn't. If you wanted an IDE and tried to get Vim to do that by adding 3MB of vimscript from various sources to make it work I can't blame you for giving up, it's probably going to end up being a mess.