Re:Learn Vim (2021)
by femto113 on Friday February 24, 2023 @06:23PM
(#34931659)
Setup how? I've used vi/vim daily as my main editor for the past 35 years or so, over that time I doubt I've put more than 20 total hours into its setup. I've been using some evolution of the same .vimrc for decades and it's only accumulated a couple dozen lines. The longest setup task I can remember was a few years ago getting MacVim to launch with one window per folder (with files as tabs, in most cases that equates to one window per repo, handy when I'm working across a couple different ones), but that was all shell work, not within vim itself.
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Personally for me the setup only gets annoying when you want IDE-like features: text completion, treesitter syntax highlighting, go to definitions, ...
no thanks, I'll go with tests.
jvm language goes to the IDE. Others can use vim.
20 hours???
Your comment makes it sound like you think it's a small amount? I get that it's over 35 years, but still!
It's a tiny amount--I'm guessing I've probably easily logged 20,000 hours of active use in vi by this point, I can't think of any other tool I use regularly that has a better time-of-use/time-of-setup ratio. Compared to the time I've spent, say, installing Ruby gems and fixing dependency conflicts it's a rounding error, and Ruby's only been a focus for a small fraction of my career. To clarify that wasn't ever one 20 hour chunk, that's a rough guess at the total time spent setting it up on dozens of different computers across many different operating systems and window managers. It's typically well under an hour of setup per computer, and much of that time goes towards remembering where to find installers, picking fonts, etc.