Killer feature Vim

If you open a VIM file, move the cursor to the right place and start typing, then anything will happen to the text on the screen, except what the user wanted to do. A brief panic attack, mixed with anger, will pass quickly, because no one has saved the file yet, so you can simply turn off the power, turn the computer back on and google it.

Googling, it turns out that to turn the Vim into a normal editor, you need to press i . Only you cannot save the edited text, before that you have to press the escape several times, and then type : w . And to close it, you need to press the escape and then dial : q . Heavy legacy of the past. Well, but vim is everywhere.

But in some of the articles, telling how to spend 5 minutes in a vime and stay alive, it will surely be written that wim is the best text editor in the world. And it turns out that people are programming in it. That is, naturally, they write code. That is, in the 21st century yard, at any moment you can download Visual Studio, Intellij Idea or, God forgive me, Eclipse, and they write code in Vime. Voluntarily.

The IDE makes the work of a programmer so easy that to abandon the use of an integrated development environment can now only have very good reasons. And, since some reject IDE in favor of the sim, then there must be something cooler than automatic refactoring, cooler integrated debugger, cooler import substitution and integration with version control systems.

I wonder what such features are in Vima, which are not even in the IDE, not to mention the banal notepad ++?

Sadly, if you ask this question to the average guru of Wim-golf - he simply will not understand him. You can make sure of this by reading the comments on Habré and generally climbing the Internet. In response to the question of what is good for them, they often write that you can delete a word there by typing diw , and if you don’t want to delete, but if you want to select, type viw . Well, that is, in the first case at the beginning of d , in the second v , but then here and there and there iw , which means inside word . Well, is not it cool! I exaggerate, of course, but very much like the truth.

But to program in it as?

The questioner usually clarifies - vim somehow cope with the tasks that the IDE usually solves. I wonder how? He is told that there are many awesome plug-ins in Vima, only they need to be installed and configured.

Than these plugins are better than the features provided by the IDE, as a rule, it’s not possible to figure out, sometimes it turns out that the IDE slows down.

Here everything becomes clear, the person who wanted to know why vim is needed, recommends that the second side of the discussion buy a computer quickly and is eliminated from the conversation.

Meanwhile, he should have put the question straight.

For the sake of what features, users are willing to endure such fatal flaws, such as several modes of operation, the need to memorize a bunch of keys, and voluntarily refuse to use arrows?

After all, in fact, the opposite is true.

This is not for the sake of features, users are willing to endure modes, but in order to continue to use modes, users saw new features in the form.

Yes exactly. The fact that at first glance it seems to be an inherited teddy bear is actually something that everyone needs to see.

You, probably, consider that there is nothing good in these regimes and cannot be. Suppose even that the way it is. Nevertheless, Vim is used precisely because of them, everything else is secondary. Actually this is the main and only thought of the article.

Modes are not a fatal flaw, but a killer feature.

In a normal editor, in order to move the cursor to the end of a word, hold down Control, and then, without releasing it, move your hand to the arrows and press the key to the right. In the editor it is better, you can press not to the right, but any key on the alphabetic part of the keyboard, for example d , but you still have to keep Control. And in vima, you just need to press e . Wima users appreciate the ability to manipulate the cursor and text without having to hold the modifier keys or hold hands off the home row. It's relaxing.

I will focus here - we are not talking about the fact that with the use of modes you can do such things that you cannot do without them. We are not talking about the fact that with the use of modes, everything is faster than without them. We are talking exclusively about the fact that it is more convenient and pleasant to work with the use of user modes. Or at least they sincerely believe in it.

And, if you want to understand what is good in Vime, you need to try to understand what is good in modes, and not find out what features are in the plug-ins and, especially, not try to understand what these features are better than those provided by the IDE.

And, if you want to prove to someone that wim is complete sucks, then you need to prove that regimes are complete sucks. To those who use vim, this is actually never obvious.

The opposite, by the way, is also true. If you want to explain to someone why you need VIM and why it is so wonderful - it’s useless to talk about plugins. Plugins in IDE no worse. In addition, if you port a plug-in from a VIM to an IDE, it cannot be used instead of a VIM. For this you need to transfer the main thing - modes.

Instead of an afterword

Perhaps someone will say that writing an entire article for the sake of such trifles is overkill. I also thought so, but the picture described above, I have been watching for several years.

There is a grandiose and at the same time a completely stupid misunderstanding between lovers of Vima and the rest of the world, and I hope that when I meet him next time, it will be enough for me to give a link to this article.