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Overview of Vim

Rittik Dasgupta on November 16, 2020

What is Vi? Vi was the first screen-oriented text editor created for Unix, it was designed to be simple yet powerful for text manipulati...
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Vishnu Dileesh • Edited

Vim is pure awesomeness, Am very much happy with my current Vim customization.
I have recently switched to NeoVim and has everything pretty much set up like code autocompletion and stuff.

Alt

Once you overcome the learning curve, then it is a huge jump towards productivity. For over 3 years, I would try to use Vim and fail badly. But in 2020 just choose to give it a shot.

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Pedro S • Edited

May I ask you how you got code autocompletion? Is there a neovim built-in plugin I'm not aware about? I've taken a look at coc, but it requires some configuration, so I always leave that for alter.

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bosiarquitetura

The configuration for COC is pretty simple. You can just copy and paste from the repository and them change as you use and learn what you like. However, if you prefer, neovim nightly has LSP. It that requires more configuration than COC, but it works using LUA

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Vishnu Dileesh

I am using coc-nvim plugin but never delved into any configuration. But everything works fine.

github.com/VishnuDileesh/dotfiles/...

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agitri

can you elaborate more about your setup, i have heard of neovim, but havent got around to actually switch to it. what did you change about it? (or didnt ;) )

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Hayden Rouille

Neovim is great. You can use Lua to write plugins which is far more friendly, and in general the community is better. From a development perspective you won't notice much if any differences, but the idea behind neovim is to make it far more open source and provide features that the community want, not just the core maintainer of vim. I'd recommend making the move even if you don't have any immediate necessities for it, to at least support the movement.

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Vishnu Dileesh

Got any tutorials/articles suggestions to get started with building vim extensions?
I will be taking open source contribution seriously from 2021

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Hayden Rouille

I'd recommend checking out this dudes twitch and youtube channel twitch.tv/teej_dv - he's a maintainer of neovim and does some good lua plugin development. Other than that for me I haven't spent ages learning, other than googling and looking at other plugin repositories is potentially the best bet

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Vishnu Dileesh

Thanks, yep looking at the source code of few plugins I use is where am planning to get started

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Vishnu Dileesh

Have not done much customization, just installed a few plugins and made some tweaks here and there.

youtube.com/watch?v=gnupOrSEikQ

youtube.com/watch?v=65Wq4fjREUU

Both those videos were a great inspiration in the tweaking

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Akira

I'm curious - did you have any particular best ways to learn VIM, or was it more a matter of just going for it and learning as you went along that worked best for you?

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Poohdish Rattanavijai

I recently started learning VIM as well. Amount of things you need to learn early on is rather scary, there's no two way about it. However, vimtutor(should already be installed alongside vim) walks you through step by step of what you can do with it. For common actions, vim command is rather easy to understand. It usually follow the three steps of "action" (modifier) "direction". This helps me the most with learning the keys.

When I used it, if I get stuck not knowing what to do, I'd just google them then add those actions and keys into init.vim so I can easily remind myself of what it is. Usually after a few time your muscle would start to memorize it any way.

In the end, I don't think you need to learn vim. Lot's of great IDE is out there and provide easy extensions out of the box as well. I only learn it to be able to work faster inside a Docker container.

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Rittik Dasgupta

Definitely there are great IDEs like VSCode but they have their cons too. Their startup time is much greater than vim, so I don't really like IDEs. Though IDEs have great autocompletion but they are slower in file navigation and movements. Everyone has there own set of perferences, so no IDEs or text editor is bad.

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Rittik Dasgupta • Edited

Initially I learned some basic commands of vim and used those commands for making edits in my files. If I get stuck somewhere I Google the command for it and if the command is not in my comfort zone I make a keybinding for it. I use vim regularly so I keep on learning new things on the fly.

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Hayden Rouille

Sounds cliché but just use it every day. I swapped it to my main editor before I was more productive and I'd say I had about 2 weeks of being less productive and it was all up hill from there.

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Akira

That's not too bad! Could be worth doing side exercises in a low-stakes environment w/ VIM and then switching to it from time to time for work.

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Hayden Rouille

Also, there is a great plugin twitch.tv/theprimeagen created which you can practice on github.com/ThePrimeagen/vim-be-good

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agitri

like the nike guy, Just Do It!

its hard but will reward you even more with the mastery of text editing in full speed :)

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Akira

ah, that's the dream!!

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Hayden Rouille

I love vim, but you are so right about high effort to customise. I've spent many hours coming to the setup I have today: github.com/haydenrou/dotfiles
But I've enjoyed the journey and learnt so much along the way.

If you like customising your setup and always striving to be faster - vim is for you. If you are looking for a generic code editor and don't necessarily want to spend time with it nor care about the internals, don't bother.

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Andrew Pazikas

Your so right about vim/vi its the only text editor on my work servers, I can use it like the back of my hand, I've never had the luxury of a more "modern" editor so have never known any different, its always quite funny seeing people that have years of experince and cant use vim

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Ben Sinclair

Hi Rittik. Could I suggest you use something other than "click here" as your link text? It makes things more difficult for people using screen readers.

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Vishal Raj

I have been using Vi / Vim for almost 15 years now. Cannot get over it. Plus, the plugins make it more awesome. For those who want to learn, vimtutor is the best.