💾 Archived View for midnight.pub › posts › 721 captured on 2023-07-10 at 14:30:07. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content

-=-=-=-=-=-=-

About how I try to learn to use Vim

~ahirusan

Hey,

I just restart to learn to use Vim with Anki flashcard, I have a question about Vim.

I try to learn to use Vim since many years and last year I learn Vim with flashcard, and it seems to work quite well, but I put this aside this year, so I restart to zero today. It will be cool if I can keep up. Also, I move to Neovim instead of Vim because it seems more modern, but I'm not sure is a good idea.

And you, are you Vim, Neovim or another text editor ? And Why ?

Write a reply

Replies

~2pie wrote:

I tried to learn Vim, but I stopped because it was too hard. I would have to spend a few weeks with regular frustration to be able to use it without hesitation. That's just too costly for me.

Note that I tried to learn it more because of the aesthetic than to be faster. I don't think being able to edit text faster makes a big difference in the work of a developer. However, I used to be fascinated by the "hacker" aesthetic (the command line, the obscure text editors...). Now I am passed it so I just use the standard easy stuff (VS Code)

~starbreaker wrote:

I've been using mostly Emacs because I find it more comfortable for composition. I break out nvm (classic BSD vi with UTF-8 support) when I need to do precision editing but can't be arsed to deal with sed.

(Bartender, a White Lady if you please...)

~tetris wrote (thread):

(Looks around at other replies... sees absolutely no one on team lisp.... sits in a corner and angrily fiddles with init.el)

Anki has been the greatest positive driving force in my life at the moment. I was using the decks to learn a new language, but I never had any real success and found the number of reviews too hard. My patterns evolved from:

Looking at the app maybe once every week, then ignoring it for months
Trying to use it every day, but being frustrated and tired by the number of reviews, and then ignoring it for months
Adjusting the numbers of reviews per day to something smaller, and finally turning it into a daily habit

As of a few days ago (after reviewing a deck every day for the last few months), I have now gotten 90% of my 5000 card deck in the "Mature" category and only have a remaining 10% in the "Young" pile. Up until a few days ago I was doing 30 minutes of a day, and now I now do maybe 5 minutes after the repetition started to "kick in".

I love Anki

~mieum wrote:

Nowadays I use neovim on my own machines, mostly because I am currently interested in learning Lua, so playing with the API to make little tools has been a fun way to learn. But on remote servers I use vim or vi/nvi mostly since they are ubiquitous.

What do you mean by using flashcards? It seems like you would be better off going through vimtutor then just jumping in an using vim exclusively---with an easily accessed reference for when you forget a command/key.

That said, I feel similarly to what inquiry said in their comment. Once you get acquainted with vi-isms, it becomes second nature, like riding a bike.

~ploum wrote:

Like you, I’m a bit unsure between Vim and Neovim. Favorising Neovim because it’s a community project but sometimes I feel that Debian/documentation on the web is more focused on Vim.

~bitdweller wrote:

I've used Sublime Text a lot, which is an awesome editor, incredibly fast for all it does, specially when I started working. Them came Atom, but that was short lived and I went back to Sublime.

I've known basic vim commands since I started playing around with Red Hat in 99, since getting stuck once, if you know what I mean. Being a little bit of a nerd I set out to properly learn vim and set up some plugins like autocompletion, tree view, learn panels, windows, etc.

I now use VSCode professionally with vim mode. I'm faster with a GUI and I like the bells and whistles, it makes stuff easier for me. I just wish it would be faster. Vim can get pretty slow too, if you load it with shit. Which I did for some time.

Vim has a special place in my heart and I use it daily on my homelab.

~inquiry wrote:

Vim. I've used it so long it feels an extension of mind/body.

Said another way, I want all of life to respond to vim keyboard shortcuts.

Better yet, I want to become able to see life as a vim input buffer, marching fingertips forward toward the bigger screen finally losing some of its entropy and/or Murphy's Law tendencies to respond without a handful of salt to the eyes and quickly rising knee to Where It Counts....

(sorry all... a few shots of gin.. a bit of thc vape.. this boy be... oh, just imagine as best you can)