Editor recommendations for new users.

via Digitalmars-d digitalmars-d at puremagic.com
Wed Aug 30 08:23:36 PDT 2017


On Wednesday, 30 August 2017 at 11:28:35 UTC, Anonymouse wrote:
> On Sunday, 27 August 2017 at 12:11:14 UTC, Petar Kirov 
> [ZombineDev] wrote:
>> vim or SublimeText
>
> I want to get into vim. It has to be vim, can't be Neovim or 
> gvim or any other clone; I'm doing it for a Linux class. I'm on 
> Arch Linux (or Manjaro), so I have plenty available from the 
> official repos and plenty more from the user AUR repos.
>
> The wiki page on vim[1] lists several plugins which I assume 
> are mutually exclusive. DSnips[2] was very easy to install by 
> just installing UltiSnips and placing d.snippets in its 
> appropriate place, but it seems to only provide, as the name 
> suggests, boilerplate snippets. Dutyl[3] seems much more 
> interesting but also more daunting, considering that my vim 
> knowledge so far largely consists of :wq and :q!.
>
> Are those the two alternatives available to me?
>
>
> [1]: https://wiki.dlang.org/D_in_Vim
> [2]: https://github.com/kiith-sa/DSnips
> [3]: https://github.com/idanarye/vim-dutyl

To be honest, I'm not the right one to ask. I prefer vim (to be 
specific, now I use Neovim, though not to the level that I can 
tell difference :D) mainly because it works inside the terminal, 
it's easy to use (well, after I learned it), offers a ton a 
customization, requires no complex setup and I can find it on 
almost any machine.
I don't use any D specific plugins, the D syntax file that's 
included in the default installation is good enough for me. A 
couple of years ago I was into setting up IDEs and language 
specific plugins on editors, but nowadays I just don't bother.

My advice would be to start a basic vim installation, learn the 
difference between the different modes (normal, insert, visual, 
terminal - specific to nvim, etc.), learn the basic normal mode 
commands, windows splitting, macros, and so on. The best way to 
learn vim is to make it your default editor so that you're forced 
to be proficient with it. At first your productivity will be 
quite low, because you will be constantly looking basic stuff up, 
but after a while it will become part of your muscle memory, just 
like Ctrl+A/Z/X/C/V are probably now. There are plenty of good 
guides to follow, e.g.:

http://www.terminally-incoherent.com/blog/2012/03/21/why-vim/
https://scotch.io/tutorials/getting-started-with-vim-an-interactive-guide
https://gist.github.com/bpierre/0a0025d348b6001394e0
https://danielmiessler.com/study/vim/#gs.rvBIWrI


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