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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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[–] 2 points 1 year ago (3 children)

I have used many ides and editors over the years, including nano, emacs, vi, Notepad++, CodeWarrior, JetBrains, Code Composer, MPLAB, Cider, VS Code, and now Helix.

I've found that the most important things for me to be productive are:

  • UI speed. Lag in the UI is a constant friction that just eats away at you.
  • Fast fuzzy search for files, names, definitions, and references. The larger the codebase, the more important this is.
  • Good keyboard controls for everything with sane, discoverable bindings. Digging into a menu to do something or having hesitation about hitting a key because I'm not sure what it will do is a huge time suck. It's not about the time it takes to move the mouse, but the context switch from typing to looking for how to do something.
  • Good out of the box experience. I don't want to have to spend hours or days rebuilding my setup if I'm on a new machine and can't bring over my stuff for some reason. Sure, I want to be able to adjust things to my liking but a clean setup should be good enough to be productive. And bringing over my setup shouldn't be more difficult than copying over a zipped directory.
  • Really good multi language syntax support, tree parsing, highlighting, etc.

Currently for me Helix is winning on all of the fronts. Cider was surprisingly great, particularly at search, but isn't available to us plebs, VS Code is ok, emacs and vi can get there but have terrible out of the box and discoverability issues. The others have major problems with multiple criteria.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (2 children)

    Hackability not on your list? It's the ability to extend and adapt it to my particular needs that, above many other things, means I am too deep into Emacs to even imagine leaving.

    Plugins are a very weak substitute that cannot provide that utility, and I notice Helix doesn't even offer plugins. That sword does have the horrendous opposite edge of almost total lack of security, so perhaps I'll regret that one day. There are so many ways I value Emacs that isn't matched by any other text environment that none of the others are even on my radar as possible replacements.

    Out-of-the-box experience is very weak on Emacs, but I'm decades past that being a concern to me directly, though it does inhibit newcomer uptake.

    Other than that, for me it ticks your boxes while barely scratching the surface of its merits. At least its speed and latency is not something I notice any meaningful benefit when working with something that people praise, like vim. Come to that most of the time like now, typing into a browser text box, I'm not even bothered by latency, and that's way worse than Emacs.

    It's biggest failing to me is working remotely when there's significant network latency, where VSCode is clearly superior, but I have neither the time, nor probably the ability, to fix it.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (1 child)

    Surprisingly, no, hackability isn’t high on my list. Sure it’s nice, but I tend to value good defaults and simple configuration more than creating a super bespoke system that only works for me. With Helix if I really needed to extend it there are the shell commands for now and plugins are coming soon. But I haven’t really felt the need to. 🤷‍♂️

    I do agree that VS Codes remote is fantastic and I wish that there was something as good as it more generally. I do see a proposal for adding it to Helix based on the distant library. That might become my first PR for helix.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago

    Hmm, I'm not taking about hacking defaults, I'm talking about hacking functionality. I'm talking about making capabilities that didn't exist, all seamlessly part of my typical integrated text manipulation environment (that's way broader than editing)

    The unique power of emacs is it doesn't have typical boundaries, so integrated personal unique functionality is possible. May well be a huge downfall, security wise - it rides a lot on security through obscurity.

    Frankly it's taken me decades to properly appreciate how my computer experience can be so fungible. Most computer systems don't allow it.

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