[OT] Which IDE / Editor do you use?

H. S. Teoh hsteoh at quickfur.ath.cx
Fri Sep 13 15:10:30 PDT 2013


On Fri, Sep 13, 2013 at 09:48:05PM +0000, Justin Whear wrote:
> On Fri, 13 Sep 2013 14:29:02 -0700, H. S. Teoh wrote:
> 
> > vim (and all vi-derived editors) is... shall we say, a unique beast
> > all its own. It requires a different *mode* of thinking (har har)
> > than your usual GUI-based editors.  In most other editors, you think
> > in terms of "move cursor here, type some characters, move cursor
> > there, hit delete a few times", etc..  But in vi(m), you operate on
> > a different level of abstraction. Rather than thinking in terms of
> > individual cursor movements and single-character operations, you're
> > thinking in terms of abstract editing operations: "go to the word
> > that begins with 'vo', replace the word with 'int', go back to the
> > start of the paragraph, open a new line of text above it", etc..
> 
> I've introduced a few young developers to Vim and the major hole that
> they tend to fall into is printing out a list of vim "keyboard
> shortcuts", because that's how other editors work: you memorize a
> bunch of arbitrary key combinations.  So the thing that I emphasize is
> learning Vim's *language*.

Mmm, I like that description! You're right, it's actually a language,
not just a bunch of shortcuts. That's why is far more expressive than a
shortcut-based editor. You'd need an exponential number of shortcuts
just to keep up with all the possibilities -- clearly impractical.


> Say you already know that "d" means delete--whenever you learn a new
> noun such as "e" (end of word), you can combine the two:  "de" (delete
> to end of the word).  The same applies when you learn a new verb, e.g.
> "y" for "yank" (copy): "ye" copies from the cursor to the end of the
> word.  Then mix it up with adjectives like counts ("d5e", delete to
> five word endings) or "i" and "a" (inside and around, "di{" for
> "delete inside this block").

Heh. Can you believe this is the first time I've heard of 'e', in spite
of having used vim for more than a decade? ;-) Here I've been using w
and W and thinking they were good enough... I learned something new
today.


T

-- 
MAS = Mana Ada Sistem?


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