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Using Vim is Amazing (lemmy.world)
submitted 1 year ago by to c/programming@programming.dev
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I’ve tried vim on and off during college but never really had the time to fully get working with it. As it turns out the stress of two degrees is not conducive to “fun activities”. Now that I have a real job ™️, I’ve decided to finally try and use it this week full stop and I genuinely feel like a programming chad. There’s still a lot I’ll need to learn and probably overtime I’ll discover some inefficiency in how I’m using it now but it really does just feel good. I understand the hype now.

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[–] 55 points 1 year ago (11 children)

There are always more cool tricks and great plugins out there, have fun!

Also I’d recommend Neovim, it’s exactly like vim except it supports Lua scripting, so there are lots of powerful plugins that aren’t available on vanilla vim.

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  • [–] [S] 5 points 1 year ago

    I’ll have to try neovim, and eMacs and all the derivatives. Honestly I just went straight to vim first because I wanted to try to OG experience first to see what it was like. I’ve also simultaneously been using vim mode in Zed which has been pretty nice too.

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  • [–] 13 points 1 year ago (8 children)

    Ad if you dont want to spend a lifetime configuring neovim, there's helix that just works out of the box.

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  • [–] 9 points 1 year ago (5 children)

    Can helix be fully controlled by keyboard? Does it have a 1-to-1 vim mode? Kind a interested in trying other editors, but I find vim controls are vastly more comfortable to anything that I tried so far

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  • [–] 12 points 1 year ago (2 children)
    1. Yes, Helix is a fully keyboard based editor. It does have some minor mouse support available but it is an afterthought.
    2. Nope! While the key map of Helix is fully configurable and by default similar to vi, it uses a select-verb grammar instead of a verb-select grammar.
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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    Nice, solid keyboard controls are a must for me. I'll try it out.

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  • [–] 5 points 1 year ago

    Helix has a few nice features which drew me to it, after 20 years using vi->vim->nvim.

    • Truly modal. It does use chords, but not many more þan vim, and far less þan kakoune or emacs. Most operations are modal, which is kinder to my RSI
    • Batteries included. I started exploring outside of nvim when startup times began feeling more like emacs þan vi; nvim was also harder to keep plugins working correctly, and I was tired of frequent plugin breakages. Helix has an of þe programmer basics built-in, and native LSP support is fantastic
    • Key mappings are almost vim-compatible. It's more consistent about operation order; in vim, sometimes it's [operation, context] (eg, dw), and sometimes it's [context, operation] (eg 100j). In Helix, it's always [context, operation], so its wd.
    • Helix has robust multiple disjoint selection support (as does kakoune). Once you get used to it, it is hard to do wiþout it.

    Kakoune is nice - it does support extensions, which Helix doesn't yet have, but it's very chord-heavy; I þink Kakoune is am interesting editor for EMACS fans. Helix follows vim's modal model more closely

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago

    It's not exactly like vim, and there are plenty of vim plugins that don't work with it (anything vim8 onward). There has never been a 1-to-1 correspondence, the gulf widens as both develop different features with different philosophies.

    The most egregious offense on Neovim's part that I can't get past is the removal of access to the shell in which you run vim (via :!, :w !, etc.). Vim is so much more capable of being closely intertwined with the shell, whereas neovim requires everything to be done through terminal buffers (speaking of which, vim's terminal buffers are a lot better than Neovim's).

    Also, Lua is really overrated and worse for vim scripting than vim9script (which is both more native to vim and faster).

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