> 'left' actually means right
But yeah I agree with the sentiment of parent OP
Yes. The advice to turn the yoke upside down is supposed to reference remapping Caps Lock to Escape, without which Vim destroys your pinky on a standard keyboard. But it's the choice of professionals, so what can we do?
If any vim enthusiasts haven’t read this history before, this article [1] provides a good overview of how ex/vi came to be. The photo of the Lear Siegler ADM-3A keyboard used by Bill Joy largely explains the odd choice of keys.
[1]: https://twobithistory.org/2018/08/05/where-vim-came-from.htm...
Note that however crtl-c and esc are not strictly equivalent: if you do esc or ctrl-c, the position of the cursor when back in normal mode will differ. You can see this if you do insert then esc repeatedly, seeing the cursor moving. Cursor doesn't move with ctrl-c (which somehow I prefer).
More alternatives: https://vim.fandom.com/wiki/Avoid_the_escape_key
What if you need to type `jj`? Not uncommon to do so while writing math or physics papers. a_{jj}
Happy vscode user these days. If I find myself fiddling with an editor it's a huge red flag to me that I hate what I'm working on.
What if you need to type "fd" in insert mode? Like fd0, fd1, etc. Isn't that going to be a pain? Do you never have to type "fd"?
That's a pain, but it doesn't come up often. In return you get quite a lot of functionality (due to vim being modal) without having to move your fingers beyond the letter keys, which is quite relaxing.
JJ Abrams disagrees, though.
The freaking movement keys. The amount of rationalizing about them is INSANE. CRAZY. MADNESS. "Touch typing"/"more efficient"/bla bla, with 0 studies backing it.
Why do I say this? They shouldn't be in a line. No mass manufactured device in the last 30+ years has them in a line. They're... you know, up is up, down is down, left is left and right is right. Yet some people will defend the setup to their deaths.
And the reason they're like that is... because a terminal 50 years ago, that probably only sold tens of thousands of units, at best, had the setup like that to make it cheaper to produce:
http://xahlee.info/kbd/history_of_vi_keys.html
It's basically the QWERTY keyboard story all over again.
Backwards compatibility is a major pain in the neck.
They're just dumb but people have been beaten over the head with them for so long that Stockholm syndrome is SUPER strong, as proven by these comments.
I use QWERTY because I have to, I don't like it and I can't do much about it in practice. People frequently defend Vi's HJKL vehemently - just like - if I'm not mistaken - you, presenting it as a superior option for some reason.
Personally I don't want to move my hands from where I'm writing to the other side of they keyboard just to move the cursor.
In the end, use whatever your feel most comfortable. I hate the VSCode interface and all of those notifications/popups and general slow interface, but I can understand who doesn't care or think that even with those VSCode is still more efficient for them. I also can completely understand the issue that folks say when they lost a long time tuning their Neovim configuration to their preferences, considering that I just have done so. But I still prefer neovim to VSCode nowadays, and not everyone needs to think the same, and this is fine.
They could have laid out the arrow keys WASD style. One up, one mid-down, two to the sides.
Nobody said they had to use dedicated arrow keys. Just lay them out like a normal human being. Whatever key for up should be up, whatever key for down should be down, whatever key for left should be to the left, whatever key for right should be to the right.
HUJK, for example. WASD is the standard example.
Not only that, but I posit that any context that uses vi-style binds uses vertical motions much more often than horizontal ones (pagers, editors and other applications with vi bind ports, etc.).
As for games, whilst WASD might be more intuitive, it is technically inferior in tactical shooters, where having the W and S keys on the same column means your (admittedly somewhat rarely used) forward-motion counter strafe will always have an inherit delay due to having to move your sole finger dedicated to those two keys. In this case, vi-style ASDF is again marginally better.
That being said, your gripe seems to be overstated, if this is your biggest problem with vi-style binds.
I like their composability and I'm generally fine with them, the real Vi problem is just... bad embeddability. Almost none of the apps that I'd want to use with Vi bindings support them to a native Vi level (Firefox - it used to support them well but then they killed the extensions; shells with Vi support only have half baked support, same for IDEs, let alone stuff like Outlook and whatnot :-) ).
Their lack of ubiquity will always doom them to a niche thing used by devs and sysadmins, sometimes, and only by some of them.
The fun part is when web apps like GitLab, GitHub and my email provider provide their own keyboard-centric, vi-style navigation layer, and I have to compromise between either using my browser extension's vi layer or the web app's one.
Nyxt and qutebrowser try to tackle this by offering a native, keyboard-centric, vi-style navigation model - though neither is (yet) a full-featured replacement for Firefox or Chromium-based browsers.
For IDEs, I find the emulation to be alright for basic editing, falling apart soon after. There is an implementation for VSCode that is actually pretty good, as it makes use of Neovim as a backend server - though, it's of course not perfect, and customizing it is a pain I imagine.
Perhaps somewhat ironically, Emacs's evil mode is the best vi layer implementation I've used - probably mostly because customizing it in elisp is much nicer than interfacing with arcane vim APIs.
The vi emulation really is only as good as the implementation. The problem is that it has to be reimplemented for every context, and made to play nicely with the limitations and edge cases of said context. This is, of course, a lot of work.
(I wouldn't blame vim so much, but more the vim greybeards who think they're still using a 70's terminal)
HUJK instead of HJKL, basically WASD moved to the right :-)
For that use case, it's absolutely great. No complaints.
I do use Zed for working on projects when on my home turf. It’s just that I’ve sworn off wasting time configuring Vim everywhere. That too is advantageous because you have to have a much more thorough knowledge of the vim tool instead of relying on plugins to make it work for you. And vim is everywhere.
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12886067 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23902124
If you don't know your tools, then you can easily mess the knife modification and not end up with a carving knife. The chainsaw with ready made attachments is way easier to get going, but in return you have to carry the chainsaw with you and if there are any problems with the tool itself you probably aren't going to be able to fix or modify it yourself.
So it is more like trading initial speed with more precision, but also being able to do more after the initial learning curve.
This is where your analogy breaks down for me. The "chainsaw" (VSCode) is absolutely perfect for the tasks I'm using it for. When I write Python code, the Python extension gives me exactly what I want. That's because the environment it creates has been fine-tuned based on feedback from thousands of users with similar requirements to my own. There's no need for me to modify anything, any more than I modify my car or my trousers. It's simply ready for me to do professional work, and whenever I have special requirements, I know that I will find an extension that caters to them also. I don't need or want to reinvent a wheel that has been invented hundreds of times already, and polished to perfection through more man-hours than I could ever hope to invest myself.
Chainsaw is very good at doing chainsaw things.
If what you need to do is cut down bunch of trees then chainsaw is exactly what you need. No one in their right minds would start with a knife and start building it into a saw and then attach a motor to motorize it. Mind you we were carving a bowl, but as per Internet argument you completely dismissed the use case and inserted your own.
If VSCode does exactly what you need out of the box exactly how you want it to do it, then you are set and you should use VSCode.
The output of both tools is practically the same thing.
The niche of things Vim can do and VS Code can't is tiny and constantly decreasing.
Only difference is that because vim has been open-source for decade, there are many many more plugins, and hence the choice is harder to make. VSCode also helped improve the (neo)vim experience (e.g. language servers)
Comparing VSCode and Vim is like comparing a standard calculator with an RPN one.
No, the main difference is in the quality of plugins, not in how many there are.
For example, Rust-Analyzer provides an official VSCode extension, which is professionally maintained by members of the Rust core team. The extension is part of the Rust-Analyzer project itself, and can be installed with a single click, at which point it just works.
For Vim, you have to manually download (and update) the Rust-Analyzer binary, install a third-party plugin, configure them to work together, and hope (1) that the whole thing doesn't break when the plugin or the language server is updated, and (2) that this concoction provides a tiny fraction of the functionality that the official VSCode extension does.
The people who _enjoy_ the toil seem to truly struggle to comprehend that someone might not want to spend hours upon hours learning how to get things working, only to immediately forget.
It's worse than that, it's a religion. Many of them truly seem to believe they're achieving a higher "hacker rank" or something, while most of it is just tedium and very low level learning.
It's rarely learning huge, game changing concepts. Frequently it's just chasing obscure docs to obscure forums to obscure repos for stuff some PhD student half baked a decade ago on their way to their biochemistry thesis.
Guess what, I work in DevOps, that's just my dayjob, anyway, I don't want to do it as a hobby in Vim, too :-))
And I say this as an "also Vim user". I.e. I use Vim and I've used it for more than a decade, just not exclusively, best tool for the job and all that.
It can definitely lead you down all sorts of twisty paths if you look at other people's elaborate configs and decide to do that sort of stuff yourself but it's very pleasant/low-maintenance if you stick to the basics (meaning roughly what people do with VSCode). It takes me roughly a few minutes to configure Neovim for a new language :)
(Of course, there's some other stuff in my init.lua that I've put there for fun, like clipboard and window management scripts, but that's not strictly necessary. I've spent a bit more time figuring out the Lua API to write these, but I personally think it's worth it for the extra ability to mold the editor to my needs).
One of the tips in The Pragmatic Programmer is "Achieve Editor Fluency", wherever it's Vim, VS Code, or Sublime Text. I use IDEA for java code because in my job, I browse code more often than I edit it, and IDEA is nice for that. I also use WebStorm for the JS part because it's also good for that. But I invested my time into VIM because I can do everything above with it and even more. I don't want my editor to become an IDE, I want it to be powerful in editing and allow for integration, as there are slews of tools that work with code and text.
You should invest in your tools, be it Vim or VS Code. I chose Vim and Sublime Text because of their speed, and JetBrains' IDEs because of their code analysis engine. You may have different criteria, but try to follow the tip.
What I'm perturbed by are the people who take it to extremes, and are happy to spend hours a week tweaking things, and can't fathom someone else might not enjoy doing the same.
However, I program rust using the lunarvim default configuration for vim and it has been very straightforward. I have all features I need to program comfortably and I didn't need to configure anything, the defaults were good enough for me. So that doesn't mean that vim cannot have the same easy of use if there exists some sane default configuration you can just install. I am happy with it and not going to change to vscode or something else.
I don't think that is true. If you browse the vscode marketplace and search e.g. for python [1] you literally get hundreds of plugins. If you scroll down only a bit, you quickly end up at plugins that only have a few hundred to a few ten downloads. I highly doubt that the quality of those plugins is better than the plugins for (neo)vim.
For your Rust-Analyzer Plugin example: I can install Rust-Analyzer with Mason in a few seconds as well and then (if you have lsp-zero [3] installed) it also just works™.
But I agree, keeping a vim configuration up to date is akin to a hobby (which I by the way enjoy quite bit).
[1] https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/search?term=python&targ... [2] https://github.com/williamboman/mason.nvim [3] https://github.com/VonHeikemen/lsp-zero.nvim
Then just use the chainsaw... and accept that the knife may be absolutely perfect for the tasks of somebody else.
Slightly more unwieldy than a plain hook knife but you don't need a second tool to cut the log you take the wood for the bowl from...
Referencing the Gimli glider. But does vim have any analogous issue? In matters of technical correctness FOSS is usually the more exacting. You won't find a 1 TB hard drive full at 931 GB of used space on Linux, for example.
And yes, it was also a reference to the Gimli glider.
"This airplane is the choice of professional pilots! The first thing we advise you to do is turn the yoke upside down, it's much more ergonomic like that. Also, you probably want to rip out the altimeter and replace it with a custom one that has more features. And bring your own GPS unit and tape it to the windshield, because this plane doesn't have one by default. And of course, remember that unlike in your car, 'left' actually means right in this plane. This is the professional way. Ah yes, when you fly over Canada, you will see a blinking warning sign telling you that you're out of fuel. That's just a small glitch caused by metric/imperial confusion. It has been known for 23 years but we haven't quite gotten around to fixing it yet. Don't worry, this plane is still excellent for professional pilots. If you feel otherwise, you are probably not a real professional."