hckrnws
Can't really say enough good things about Vim. I retired early as a staff software engineer because of the work I did using Vim. From hacking silly games in C in high school to now, I've always been able to use Vim and run circles around any "modern" text editor or IDE. I feel like I owe Vim as much public praise as I can give so others can reap the rewards like I did.
What really frustrates me is how little people seem to want to invest in their tools, or the outright lies they tell themselves about how much configuration they need to use Vim on a daily basis. My Vim config is 200 lines, and my last commit was 3 years ago. I've invested maybe a few days of my life into configuring Vim and I use it 8-16 hours a day.
Vim can do so much on its own. It has autocomplete, fuzzy finding, integration with build systems, file search, navigation using a directory browser, jump to symbol, parse compiler output to jump to bugs, support for gdb and breakpoints, a built in terminal, copy to and from the system clipboard, and with literally 8 lines of code you can get support for every linter, LSP, etc. known to man, fuzzy finding, and git integration that let's you use native git commands with seamless editor integration.
I've been rocking dual Pycharm w/ Vim bindings plus a neovim setup and bounce between. The only thing preventing me from going 100% neovim is Pycharm's python debugger.
I have setup neovim-dap[0] with all the related plugins, it works for simple script but it bugs out and crashes when running our Flask web app. I rely heavily on the Pycharm debugger to step through our app.
Have you had a good experience with setting up a debugger in vim/neovim or is that not part of your workflow?
I don't use DAP so I can't help you there. I use vim for editing code. When I need to debug I run lldb or gdb in a separate tmux window, if I need to see the code I enable TUI mode. There are many wrappers including TermDebug, Vimspector, termdbg, etc. to add visual breakpoints, but I have never found them necessary - because again gdb/lldb can already show you the code in various formats including assembly. It sounds like you are using Pycharm in exactly the same way you can already use a standalone debugger.
For Python I find a built in debugger especially unnecessary. Most interpreted languages have a debugger that can be triggered from the source code to drop into an interpreter, and Python is no exception - see pdb and breakpoint().
A little ashamed that I have never used pdb directly, I'm going to try to broaden my horizons and learn about it more :) Appreciate your perspective.
Cheers
Could you share your config?
> sorting and reversing over motion
Vim can run shell commands as filters over selections as well.
Although vim does provide its own `:sort`, you can also sort the current selection like
v{motion}!sort
For reversing,
v{motion}!tac
This general concept is quite useful in many other ways, since it is quite universal - selection goes to stdin of arbitrary program, stdout of that program replaces selection.
For example, if you want to quickly test a function that takes a json string, and you're in a language where instantiating good mock objects and serialising it takes quite a bit of code, you can quickly make a mock by writing JS code within the string quotes and have the code console.log json and then `vi'!node` will replace it there.
This is very powerful. Unfortunately, as an Ex command, `!` only works on full lines. One can of course also teach vim to operate `!` over any motion (or visual selection), whether it is part of a line, a full line, or a block https://vi.stackexchange.com/a/46304/48750.
I also have a plugin that has commands for this https://github.com/robenkleene/partshell.vim?tab=readme-ov-f...
There's `Psh` that pipes part of a line through a shell command, and `P` which takes any `ex` command and does the same (this means `P !` is the same as `Psh` but the latter supports tab completion for shell commands).
It always infuriates me how well nano handles this out of the box as opposed to vim. I don't see any reason why this shouldn't be the default. If you're in visual mode and want the whole-line behavior, it takes just 1 extra key press (V).
What if those external utilities are not available? Which might very well be the case if you run Vim on Windows.
It is better to have atleast some fall back capabilities(for searching across files, searching within files, sorting etc) build in.
I don’t think that effort is necessary.
The author likely has git, which provides a userland. And she/he is talking about gvim.exe, so is not restricted in what she/he can choose to install, and by now, might be using nvim-qt.exe.
Edit: just realized it always posed itself as a “building platform”, lol. It really is a full-blown GNU system that works on windows. As in GNU/Linux, but there’s no linux kernel. All the /usr/bin tools are there, including pacman as a package manager (from Arch). You can install virtually everything from there.
Now you need a whole userland to get basic functionality of the editor. Who will vett the correctness and suitability and efficiency of the 3rd party user-land?
Notwithstanding that the third party userland is possibly not necessarily, since the windows userland most likely has all the features needed for Vim to make these functionalities work.
Since the editor is intended to be a multi-plaform product, it is better if atleast a windows userland based mechanism could be provided on windows platform, if the mechanisms could not be achieved through an inbuilt platform-agnostic manner.
What if you need a "portable" ( in the windows sense of the term, it means that the program can be used without need for an installation process) version of the editor?
I think it all is a huge time sink on the end user, who would instead get some usefull progress done on their projects.
Agreed, ideally a multi-platform editor should include all the features an OS might have, or at least use a compatibility layer that equalizes all functionality and paradigms over all supported platforms.
If you do dev on windows you should mostly use WSL.
I think experienced windows devs would use and recommend windows libs/userland over WSL.
May because WSL becomes a huge dependency and many windows boxes don't have it installed, whereas windows userland is always available.
I'm a Linux guy. Have had that as my primary OS for over twenty years.
At work, though, I've been doing dev work primarily in Windows for over a decade.
Never needed WSL.
(Maybe because I use Emacs? I dunno)
Emacs suffers some on windows too, because it also depends on external utilities for some functionality. For example grep-find depends on external grep program which is not bundles in, and on windows, the operation will simply fail.
I use `:'<,'>!html-to-m` to convert arbitrary html snippets into mithril.js m() hyperscript.
The Vim configuration is something deeply personal, but I'd recommend as a wise choice always explore first the default settings because assuming those in your workflow gives an huge advantage using any new unconfigured vim environment eg to get out of any of the edit modes <C-c> works by default and is a great choice. To use CUA alike shortcuts there's already: ``` source $VIMRUNTIME/mswin.vim ``` And finally, is also a good idea to get used to use <Leader> as a prefix for your own shortcuts, in my case I use the space bar as <Leader>.
Strong agree. Failure to grok what comes with Vim often results in a permenent Nerdtree pane.
I've been using Neovim for about 6 months now but as a former VS Code user I was mostly investing into the various plugins. Fairly recently I started digging deeper into vim's built-in features such as vimgrep and quickfix and they are incredibly powerful. It will take me probably another year to learn to use all these tools effectively.
In its contrib directory, git comes with jump. `git jump grep` will load grep results into quickfix.
Eh. I tried to buy into this for years but I think my poor working memory just pushes me towards having something like it open.
Maybe a little less now that I’ve become a heavy user of tabs. When I start working on a unique task I create a new tab with a few splits with the files I’m interested in. In a way tab views are how I externalize my working memory. But a file tree is still useful to me because file names don’t stick so using a command or picker to swap is often slower
note that exiting a mode with <c-c> prevents autocmd events from firing. (so I have inoremap <c-c> <esc>)
I had no idea Vim had a terminal mode with ':ter|:terminal'! Definitely something I'll look into to improve my own Vim + Git workflow. I've usually just moved Vim to the background with Ctrl+Z, done my committing, and then moved Vim back to the foreground with 'fg'.
I found that once you use tmux+vim, the built in terminal is not much of use, it's even slowing me down
I don't even use tmux. I just have multiple tabs open in the terminal (usually gnome terminal but I suppose others would work) and toggle back and forth with keyboard shortcuts.
I usually develop full stack so will have a front end tab (with multiple Vim buffers), a backend tab (again with multiple buffers), dev servers, a database sql tab (if needed) and a command line tab to grep and git and whatever else.
Might sound kind of awkward but it's muscle memory by now and blazing fast for my use case.
The one thing I have not figured out yet is how to cleanly integrate AI tools into my workflow. A lot of cutting and pasting which feels very clumsy. I don't want to give up Vim nor my basic workflow. I never used co-pilot just GPT.
One main difference with tmux is that I can script the startup of my "tabbed terminals", and I can background the whole project and switch to another one (a new tmux session is akin to a new desktop workspace full of your tabbed terminals).
I used to use your setup, and I was fast. But tmux is much better. (I'm also a full-stack dev btw)
Another advantage, I can ssh into the server, start a tmux session, and work there the same way I do on my local. Doing that your way would require a lot of ssh sessions.
> The one thing I have not figured out yet is how to cleanly integrate AI tools into my workflow
Thanks. Checking Aider out!
No problem. I think aider is not just the terminal-nerd goto here, but I believe it's the best tool for programming with LLMs. It fits your ergonomics, though.
Tips: use `/ask` if you don't want it to make changes, and try to use it for small incremental commits, instead of broad sweeping changes. That may change soon with these reasoning models, though.
It's also good for writing shell commands.
As for AI, I use codeium and vim-ai. Codeium has upstream vim support, which is excellent, however the chat functionality is very basic, clumsier than in vscode, but good enough for my use case. I expect things will improve.
I tend to use it as `:vert terminal`, then start up mysql/psql in that terminal, and use <C-c> in the other pane to send SQL statements to the 'terminal'.
Works better than MySQL workbench and other things like that, for me, because it works in a terminal over ssh too.
Holy cow same! I use lazygit as my VC tool and now I can just open it in a pane next to vim to make it simpler to interact with git while I'm coding. Been using vim for way to long to have missed this.
I often use the :wa command to save all my open buffers. But it has the nasty habit of throwing an error when it’s not able to save all buffers
nmap <F2> :silent! wa<CR>
if has('unix')
set clipboard=unnamedplus
else
set clipboard=unnamed
endif
cmap <M-w> <C-R>=expand("<cword>")<CR>
vnoremap p P> Also, to type word under cursor into command line
You can also achieve this with <C-R><C-W> in command mode. It is inbuilt. Not sure if it's a vim or a neovim feature though.
> This articles looks an awful lot like a list of Vim tips
honestly, I like articles that are “a list of vim tips”. I can usually find some really good ideas that I didn’t consider. The tip about remapping copy to system clipboard to something easier than ‘“+y’ is genius, definitely using that.
The sort and reverse stuff is a bit overkill to me, maybe the guy writing tables?
Crafted by Rajat
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