Why, oh why, do those nutheads use vi? (2007)

Re:Why, oh why, do those nutheads use vi? (2007) by edanm on Tuesday December 07, 2021 @03:23AM (#29470205)

It is way harder to use macros than to do multiple-cursor editing, especially for the kind of fast changes that happen 10 times a day. The difference is between seeing interactively exactly what you are doing and where something is going wrong (with multiple cursors), vs. recording a macro, replaying it, realizing you forgot to do something like use the correct keybinding, rerecording, etc.

I say this as a huge vim advocate, who used vim exclusively for 8 years before switching to emacs and lately to vscode.

Vim gets a lot of things right, and there's no comparison to using vim-style editing. But multiple-cursor editing is a killer feature that really does improve your workflow a lot of the time. Luckily most editors have some version of it now, though often not as good as the original and doesn't always play nicely with the various vim modes.

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Re:Why, oh why, do those nutheads use vi? (2007) by sva_ on Tuesday December 07, 2021 @04:00AM (#29470391)

If you insist, you may have a look at https://github.com/mg979/vim-visual-multi

It implements multi cursors in vim and combines it with vim movements etc.

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Re:Why, oh why, do those nutheads use vi? (2007) by edanm on Tuesday December 07, 2021 @04:38AM (#29470618)

Yeah I used it (or something similar) when I was actively using vim. It wasn't as good as a proper IDE but was fairly good for a variety of use cases.

(I actually tried to implement my own multi-cursor plugin in vim, and got a decent amount of the way there before realizing my fundamental approach probably wouldn't work.)

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Re:Why, oh why, do those nutheads use vi? (2007) by xtiansimon on Tuesday December 07, 2021 @07:21AM (#29471629)

Maybe because I’m also a maker I don’t expect my tools to do everything… what’s wrong with using vim for what it does very well, and then Sublime (geany, kate) when a gui is just easier?

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Re:Why, oh why, do those nutheads use vi? (2007) by edanm on Tuesday December 07, 2021 @07:30AM (#29471695)

Nothing at all!

But the way I use my editor is that I'm usually in it all day. Both for editing code, but also for personal notes, etc. So it's on all day and I spend most of my time in it.

This effectively means I have one tool that I mainline. I'll still use vim in the odd situation where I can't use my main editor, but it's usually just easier for me to open files in the editor I already have open.

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