VI keys.

Post #173,819

9/12/04 8:38:39 PM

VI keys.

I intensively used vim for editing code for a few years. Like you, I found it to be so much better at putting my coding onto the screen than anything previous. I recall the old MS Visual C programming environment - they would be impossible to use if you didn't have a) a mouse and b) function keys.

When Infoworld visited this issue some months ago, Maggie Biggs got quotes from a lot of us here - surely you remember that. I recall, not without some pride and perhaps selectivity, she held up Scott as The Emacs programmer and I got quoted as The Vi(m) programmer. :-) This latest article dances around but doesn't quite say that people stick with text editors like Emacs and Vim because they are so powerful at editing text. Far too many "IDEs" are just not.

Wade.

Is it enough to love
Is it enough to breathe
Somebody rip my heart out
And leave me here to bleed

Is it enough to die
Somebody save my life
I'd rather be Anything but Ordinary
Please

-- "Anything but Ordinary" by Avril Lavigne.

Post #173,847

by bluke

9/13/04 2:51:52 AM

9/13/04 2:53:08 AM

I have heard this many times but never understood it

What do you do with the text that Vim is so good at? I find that while I write a lot of code the editor that I use doesn't interest me that much. I write a line of code go to the next line and write another line. I don't really use a lot of editing features. What kind of editing features do you use? What I find most useful about the IDE is the refactoring support, where I can take pieces of code from an existing method and create new methods, move things around etc. and the fact that with autocompletion I can see the parameters.

Edited by bluke Sept. 13, 2004, 02:53:08 AM EDT

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Post #173,849

by static

9/13/04 3:42:10 AM

Refocus down just a little bit.

Think about *how* your IDE makes it easy to refactor: what is involved in copying a fragment of code and then modifying it slightly for it's new location?

In an IDE such as Microsoft's Visual Studio (note that the last version I used was for MSVC++ v2), this involves lots of action on the editing keys (cursor keys, delete and insert) to highlight relevant text and modify as appropriate, accompanied with a quantity of mouse-work also for selecting or moving text and for actvitating toolbar buttons.

Vi has many tools for changing text in efficient ways that be combined in hundreds of variations. The fact that they activated by the typewriter keys helps because your hands can stay there instead of moving off to hit a cursor key (this is the same for Emacs, BTW). For example, non-vi-ers think that having 5 basic ways to switch into a text-entry mode is superfluous. It's not. They all setup your insertion differently. The extra efficiency is slight in typing o to enter a new line below the current one over pressing End then Enter, but it adds up over time.

The difference in approach is one of a complete, but predominantly not-overlapping, set of basic tools for modifying text (typified in part by more keystrokes) versus a much larger toolset that has lots of overlapping functionality (typified in part by less keystrokes). It's difficult to explain.

Wade.

Is it enough to love
Is it enough to breathe
Somebody rip my heart out
And leave me here to bleed

Is it enough to die
Somebody save my life
I'd rather be Anything but Ordinary
Please

-- "Anything but Ordinary" by Avril Lavigne.

Post #174,200

by Simon_Jester

9/14/04 12:14:46 PM

For me?

The reasons I like VI

I can do everything on the keyboard, without taking my hands off of it to touch a mouse.
I can do a :set list and see every character, whether it's a tab or a space or a something else
I can then do a :set nolist :-)
I can indent 10 lines (by tabs, my preferred programming style) by 10>
I can delete 10 lines by simply typing 10d
I can see all line numbers by doing :set numbers
I can delete lines 100, 1000 by typeing :100,1000d
I can delete all lines that contain /foo/
etc...

and that's just a sample, without even touching macros.

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