Why Vi Rocks (opens in new tab)

> some if not all these features are in vi as well

I'm not sure exactly which vim features are also in vi. Vim has been a daily use tool for me since about 2007.

Vim has really good Macro recording. Vim + Tmux is great for side by side code frames, and there are plugins for showing multiple buffers in one Vim instance. Remote file editing is good with SSH + Vim. Vim has multiple registries for yanking/putting. Vim has column editing functionality.

Almost anything Emacs does out of the box Vim can do with either a plugin or with an external program pairing. I prefer Vim's keybindings because there are less "chords" (Ctrl-C and Ctrl-V are copy and paste chords, they requiring pressing two buttons at the same time). Too many chords causing my pinky fingers to become tired. Vimscript is a surprisingly powerful language for dealing with text data, but it's cryptic the first decade you are exposed to it.

EDIT: I'm more interesting in the code people write than the way people write it, but I wanted to share some of my vim knowledge and point of view.

Friendly reply -

> Unlimited yanking from kill rings

vi has named buffers, which aren’t the same thing you’re talking about, but definitely more than a single clipboard

> Macro recording and playback

vi can “execute a buffer” which are arbitrary commands, and at least nvi can do automatic substitutions as well in a “dumb macro” sort of way

> Two or more code frames...

Same for vi. In nvi it’s :E for vertically stacked or :vsplit for side-by-side. Like emacs, you can even run an interactive shell in a buffer (frame) and cut/copy/paste with another.

> Remote file editing

I presume you’re talking Tramp. Not out of the box with nvi, but it interacts with the Unix shell fantastically if you’re lucky enough to be developing in such an env. I’d be surprised if vim doesn’t have a decent Tramp-like feature.

I think vim does columnar edits, but I’m not a vim user; nvi is out of luck there, unless again one finds a solution punting to the shell - which isn’t the end of the world. But this case I think would disappoint you the most from your feature list (speaking for nvi).

All of these features are also in "graphical" editors, despite the claims. M$ had been doing it for decades.

I remember a friend of mine showing how easy it was to block select in vim. I waited 30 secs or so. I showed him the same in visual c++ (circa 2000s). We then had a "vim-off". eg. Find/replace/regex across a range of things -- using only the keyboard. The best I conceded was how the highlighting of results was probably superior... (sublime text, and vs code are as good as that now)

I know a lot of people here love vi (and Emacs), but personally, the only command I'm happy to learn is :q (and I presume negative karma for this comment will result) :D

I always install le for my terminal connections, and fall back to nano where needed. I've been meaning to write a console editor of my own that matches ye-o olde vc++ and visual studio...

I think there's something in the vi evangelism that I haven't quite grasped... otherwise I'm sure I'd have been using it for decades.

edit: not sure about the yank/ clipboard history... but that's part of the os in gui world.

> two or more code frames/windows side by side, even displaying the same file Surprisingly modern IDE guis seems not designed for it, eclipse can do it but clumsily.

It's embarrassing how much better emacs/vim/tmux/others are at windowing compared to supposedly advanced IDE's built on advanced windowing systems.

I think this says more about those developers than it does about Vim. In my experience, people who are highly effective at programming in Vim typically have it configured in such a way that it offers language-specific functionality comparable to any IDE. You don't get that out of the box (unless you use a Vim distro), but you are able to personalize it to your workflow more exactly than you can with an IDE. A junior developer probably isn't going to be more effective in Vim than an IDE, but a very senior developer easily could be. And somebody who is committing code with lots of obvious errors is almost by definition not a senior developer in my book, regardless of whether they're programming in nano, Vim, or an IDE.

I see the same thing from people using vscode. Its safe to say that those who know their tools well will be more productive than those who do not.

Hmm, I've got syntax/compile checking, linting, automatic code formatting and generation, and code completion based on context in vim right now. I don't see how any of the problems you mention are vim specific.

Most of the things you're describing as editor issues would be caught by formatters and linters and a test suite, so I have a hard time understanding where you're coming from with this.

edit/ A word.

In a refactoring IDE, you never risk overmatching or under-scoping. You just rename the syntactic object and it's renamed exactly where it needs to be, including possibly on the filesystem and in git.

I search for /def.*partial_name/ frequently when I can’t quite remember what a method is called in Ruby.

I've got resurrect and continuum installed and all they ever seem to do is load up an empty vim window that is rendered improperly. What is your setup?

I use IdeaVim at my day job and can confirm it's gotten better. There are still some rough edges, especially around handling movements like L, M, and H which don't always go where you expect them to. And some operations like undo don't play well with the vim commands such as undo.

And yes, I completely agree about switching between vim and ideavim for different languages, the experience is very different and the sight differences are very noticeable.

For the most part it does what I want it to do. As the other responder said, undo/redo can occasionally have some issues if you mix them with the IDE's version of those. I also have problems with the tag stack and jumplist (like ctrl+i/o) having serious latency problems so I stick to marks and `` as much as I can. The last thing I have problems with is when the IDE changes your code for you during an action - for example an auto-import when you type out a new class. The repeat action tends to mess up in those cases, trying to redo both your own typing and whatever the IDE did.

Again, I'm not a power user so to me these are the main issues and they're tolerable. For cursor movements I don't do anything too tricky, and all the movements I'm aware of do what I expect them to do.

Why do you feel that Vim on Dvorak is insane?

`action [number] movement` also works, and makes more sense to my brain.

I used dvorak for a bit. I didn't remap HJKL, since JK were still beside each other, and H was to the left of L (albeit, not on the same row).

In terms of transferring Vim 'motor memory' from a qwerty layout to a dvorak layout, IMO it meant focussing more on an added indirection of "which letters" rather than "which fingers where".

Funny you ask. While you were writing, I posted about a friend of mine who did that in a sibling message.

Yeah. It's really not too bad. It's certainly a little bit better if you take the ~4-10 lines to reconfigure a couple of keys. I map dhtn to hjkl and move d to j, n to l. It's pretty natural after that.

I do, and it works well. I tend to use movements other than hjkl for moving around, so that doesn't bother me too much. I don't remap anything, and my config is pretty bare.

I did for a long time and I found the switch to be painless. I then replaced most of my daily used software with Emacs.

I use vim with colemak.

Just use it a perfect 5/7

I think the future on this front is looking pretty bright. I use the awesome vim-go plugin which has support for the features you mentioned. And it's getting better as gopls (the language server) gets finalized. As the Language Server Protocol and the Build Server Protocol develop, I think we'll start to see Vim more closely resemble an IDE for many languages.

I use Vim because I love the history behind it and love knowing that investing my time in learning it is unlikely ever to go to waste. It's a solid editor and also helps keep me as close to understanding the ins and outs of my system and build tools. And for better or worse I just enjoy figuring out the best way to configure things exactly how I want them.

I imagine there are probably IDEs out there with low-friction searching, highlighting, diffing, replacing, block operations, and convenient macros, but I never ran into those features in the IDEs that I've used. I also expect there are probably IDEs out there that don't crash on code bases larger than a GB and code bases which can't be compiled locally, but I haven't used those ones.

>> Here's just a few IntelliJ features I use daily that Vim doesn't have: vim is intended to work with an operating system. The following assumes C or C++ since that's what I use. Maybe someone will find this list of equivalents useful? 1. Go to declaration: I use ctags which is built into vim. clangd can do better, but I've never bothered. 2. find usages: ctags also has support for this I think. 3. rename method/class: I haven't needed to rename something that wasn't exclusively in one file yet, but I expect clang-rename works well. 4. change method signature: not sure what this does. If it's just changing the declaration of the function, that seems pretty easy. ci( 5. auto-import: This one seems harder to get, but I never noticed it wasn't there. For in-project stuff, I just jump to definition. For standard library stuff, it's standard library. 6. shortcut to override method: I don't do much inheritance, so I never really noticed. This seems pretty easy to do a hack job with a macro and jump to definition. 7. easy-to-configure style rules: clang-format 8. really good code completion: basic autocomplete is built into vim. clangd is probably pretty good, but I don't usually need autocomplete. 9. quick access to javadoc: cppman is pretty good. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2272759/looking-up-c-doc...

Maybe the state of tooling for Java isn't as openly accessible outside of an IDE and isn't as good for vim as C++? If using an IDE works well for you, great. I like using vim because it's lightweight, has good support for different file endings and large files, scales to any size code base I've encountered, and it gets out of my way. I feel like it's optimized enough that my brain is the limiter.

Vim was designed for editing _text_. It was not designed for semantic analysis of _code_. The semantic plugins for Vim are hacky addons.

Having Vim bindings in IntelliJ is indeed the best of both worlds.

this is _exactly_ my point. Take the plunge. Go IDE-less. Discover how you can play the piano and rename methods yourself with something called "typing" and auto-import is so much fun, it's like a game where I yank and paste the right import from another file. I know it sounds crazy. But at the end of the day I don't fight Intellij but just play music on my keyboard. Disclaimer I was avid eclipse java programmer for years and one day went to vim and never looked back.

> Sure, but I bet Intellij is a bit better when it comes to debugging java applications.

I don't know about intelliJ specifically, but a good debugger beats the crap off the limited interface an IDE provides to them. It looks like IntelliJ only offers basic breakpoint/step through, etc. For a quick overview of what you're missing out on checkout "Give me 15 minute and I'll change you min on GDB": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PorfLSr3DDI (hopefully the right video, can't check at work)