Why Vim?

I talk about why you would want to use Vim as an editor, even if not as your main IDE.
My article about Vim / Tmux - www.colbycheeze.com/blog/2015/...
Vim Adventures - vim-adventures.com/
Vim Cheat Sheet - vim.rtorr.com/

[@freizagen]

Everytime I watch a vim video, I download and install vim. And everytime I use vim, I uninstall it.

[@zaimwaqar2788]

Freiza Gen You had to install vim?!

[@driedbark]

@@zaimwaqar2788 I had to on my Linux.

[@ubuntubukurange8753]

there is interesting tuto of vim by Jeffry Way on laracasts

[@fivesquaredyt2521]

Freiza Gen 69 likes

[@imrul66]

how do you uninstall vim?

[@GiI11]

Sold. Thanks for this. I always feel that having to click on things interrupts my work-flow. And the ability to rapidly change whatever is in tags. Amazing.

[@bobsieshow]

this video just shows a snippet of what vim can do...once you start using macros, windows tabs and buffers....and many more editing features and lots of copy buffers . indenting etc...you will see that vim is ultra powerful. anyone that says vim is overrated ..doesnt really know how to use it. it was the first editor i got on linux ...so i just used it as a text editor...many years later i was still only doing the basics..then some guy forced me to use the keyboard for everything so i had to learn a lot more vim features..this was mind blowing and tedious ..but now i have a decent config ....it is TRULY AMAZING.

[@skaruts]

Well, I mean, I have no doubt Vim is a really solid editor with really nice features, but I've been watching videos about it, and so far what I've seen people show about Vim is just stuff I can do in Sublime just as fast, but without having to memorize some esoteric commands... It does start looking overrated.

[@LightWrathme]

I've heard for years I should use Vim, I'm finally getting around to it. This video by a younger captain Picard has showed me what I've been missing

[@narrowkeel]

omg, 10x better than wasting my time watching some game montage Great stuff, Colby! mo4r mo4r mo4r

[@imisinjan]

Tony Stark used Vim in a cave surrounded by scraps, that's all I need to know :-)

[@ajinkyarathod5180]

No he didnt

[@julio_playa]

I love the way you have customised your terminal (styling), would you mind sharing?

[@youareafoolbutilike]

Hey man, nice video! Which program did you use to create the overlay with your keyboard commands?

[@ReductioAdAbsurdum]

Almost everything shown in the video -- jumping from word to word, jumping to start or end of a line, etc. -- can be done in _any_ editor, even Notepad. It never even mentions Vim's primarily distinguishing feature: modal editing.

[@code8860]

TO TALK AGAINST VIM FIRST YOU SHOULD KNOW IT. After watching this video and reading the comments, people think that Vim is only good on motions navigation and stuff like that. However, this video explains only a 0,01% of productivity into Vim. What about navigating between files from one project? I use CtrlP plugin for Vim. What about navigating between commits? GV. What about navigating between git-gutter hunks? GitGutter. Linting code? ALE. (read more...) I can even search words using grep, vimgrep, ack into the history of git (all commits). Do everything from small and customized shortcuts. I can open and close the errors list and navigate between them. I can replace text using REGEX. I can search text using REGEX. Vim is not only fast, is also fast at doing everything you can imagine about programming and editing files. You don't even need the multi-cursor so popular in Sublime Text. Do you need to sort a list? Use external Unix commands like !sort. Do you want to put in one line all objects of an array? Use the plugin ArgWrap. You can program your own functions to do everything you need to do, use VimL or Python, or Lua... Do you want to check the spell of a text? You have it! For all spoken languages! Do you want snippets to autocomplete? You have it! Do you want emmet to write faster webdev code? You have it! Do you want autocomplete with definitions and documentation for all languages? You have it! Do you want to run the code, build, make and try it? You have it! I can even run blocks of selected code. I think people is not understanding what vim is when they compare it to Notepad++, Sublime Text or Atom. It must be a joke. I used all of them. BTW, Notepad++ is for Windows OS, another joke xD. Vim is good as well because you can use into a Unix-like system, into your terminal, with a multiplexer (see tmux, screen...), where your workflow is not only better than a simple IDE, is 100000 times better. You have the power of Unix tools like SED, GREP, AWK, pipeing. To program in Java I wouldn't use vim, though. Then it's better to use the JetBrains IDE because Java it's an old and burocratic language. To program in C# or any Microsoft related language I wouldn't use vim, neither. Then it's better to use their software, Visual Studio or Visual Studio Code (aka vscode). For the other languages, like C, C++, Python, Go, Rust, JavaScript, Perl, and web development, RoR, Django, PHP (Laravel, WordPress, ...), even BASIC, SQL and config files, use vim. About webdev, I even configured beautifiers for JS, JSX, JSON and HTML, minifiers and stuff like that. You know, I still remember when I had to use online tools for these details. My vim does what I need now. Not to talk about some other vim plugins to toggle text into comments, to open a tree files, to use git commands from the editor, to preview markdown into the browser while I edit markdown files, to navigate between history editing branches during a session, oh, and the great utility to save and open sessions, etc. Most of editors have limits. About vim/neovim (and emacs as well) there are no limits. Well, limits are only in your mind. PS. I programmed 5 years in NetBeans, 1 in Sublime Text with 20 plugins. I have some nice editors installed and I check things from time to time, like Atom, VSCode, Ninja-IDE, PyCharm (IDE)... The best thing I did in my life was to spend two months and learn vim. My configuration file has 1500 lines of code, and I use it with 65 plugins. My vim opens in 1 second, and I know this configuration is for the rest of my life. I saved it into a public github, so I can install it into a new machine in minutes. I couldn't be happier. So please, to talk about something you need to know it. PS2: I will learn Emacs in a near future as well, because it's similar to Vim. I know there's a "war" between Vim and Emacs users, but I also thing smart people with curiosity learn both and use both because you can find new contexts to explore, new ideas to implement, and new possibilities will appear to the horizon. Have a happy new year.

[@OpenGL4ever]

Debugging in gdb, which is the debugger you would use while using vim, isn't very comfortable. A graphical IDE is much better in doing this. This also applies to C and C++. I wrote a little more about that a few comments above. There are some really good features of vim, but they are rarely needed. For example switching columns of simple ASCII text. And the worst thing is, i need these features so rarely that i have forgotten how you can do that in vim.

[@code8860]

Vim is just a core, so you will add what you need to use. If you don't need something you don't use it. If you need something you use it. Simply adapt your config to your needs in the file ~/.vimrc. BTW, you can try a graphical frontend for GDB. For example: KDbg, DDD, Insight...

[@mynameizmaineimis1880]

Regex search/replace, toggling comment lines, usage with external tools, built-in Git commands, spell-checking are all things that IDEs like Visual Studio and Qt Creator can already do long ago. What they lack is that minimal support out of the box for almost any language that Vim has. But it's not like they don't have plugins, just like Vim. Other than that, it's basically just editing text that's more efficient in Vim, although by quite a margin in my opinion.

[@MoonShadeStuff]

Have you discovered spacemacs yet? It combines vim and emacs, kinda. Seems pretty usefull.

[@HimanshuPal-li7nj]

Would you mind sharing your .vimrc 😊

[@Belemrys]

Great video...I need to start using vim!

[@vimboy10]

Why me? Hahaha.

[@kaitsurugi3280]

Woah! Thats insane! And here I've been using nano 😅

[@adrbvb]

Hello! What do you using qwerty or Dvorak"

[@tarikzaki5442]

great video , it made me love vim and hate the sound of the keyboard too

[@martincohen28]

I don't really understand that view that for moving cursor or make selections in non-vim editors you have to use the mouse. I hear it in almost all videos that propagate Vim and I don't feel that distorting the reality is a good way to promote Vim. In fact I think it actually hurts it.

[@colbycheeze]

Martin Cohen You can use the keyboard in other editors, but it is much less precise. For example selecting an entire line isn't TOO bad, "home, shift + end, ctrl + c" as opposed to "yy" with Vim, but more precise movements aren't so simple like selecting in between parens "yi("

[@martincohen28]

Yeah, I'm not saying other editors are better (or worse for that matter). I'm just getting tired of Vim evangelists using the same mouse argument over and over again. It's not true, everybody knows it, yet I see it every other "Why Vim" video. It's similar to making a video about other editor and trying to show how you cannot even type text or exit Vim. Instead of that, I'd rather see Vim evangelists making a beginner .vimrc that would make it easier for newcomers to use it. Just make it start in Insert mode, allow at least for using arrows in it, and clearly explain (on the intro-screen possibly) how to create, open, save files or exit. That said, I've enjoyed the video and also subscribed. Looking forward for more!

[@williamseipp9691]

+Martin Cohen agree completely. At some points I'm thinking of creating a video series just on that: set down basics, set down super comfortable keybindings / shortcuts ( :wq to save and exit gimme a break ) and show the minimum viable configuration for vim. beginners arent married to notepad++ so all anyone has to do is sell a couple of killer features in vim ( / to search , modal editing, gg or G, ctrl+D )

[@martincohen28]

Sounds like a good plan, sir!

[@Nicholas108108]

lol dude. How about we have a competition between 10 vim users and 10 users with editors of their choice and see who is the fastest at doing a set amount of edits. Clue, your side would get their asses handed to them on a plate. No matter which way you swing it.

[@esmees6122]

well explained..thanks

[@PedroLuz]

Love the sound of ur mechanical keyboard \m/, if it is one

[@aleop6285]

Hi Colby, I am a high school senior. I was wondering, do you have any formal post-secondary education in programming? There is alot of hype around these coding bootcamps, and I was wondering if that (along with some hard work) was enough to land a job in web development. Moreover, did you strictly follow the curriculum outlined in the Odin Project, or did you learn from other sources as well? Thanks, and I love your work (gaming or not)!

[@colbycheeze]

Alex Smith I say go to college if you are young and have the money, otherwise Bootcamps will get you WAY farther than college as it is teaching you job related skills where college is more teaching you how to work hard and just academic / math type knowledge. If you go to college for CS you still will have to teach yourself pretty much everything, but a bootcamp will give you all of the foundations you need to keep learning. I didn't do either, and was a self learner (I did 1 year of college but didn't like the pace). Either way, just code a lot on the side and practice!

[@Wrathos]

Did you land yourself a job without a CS degree? Or are you self-employed now?

[@colbycheeze]

Yes. I did a bit of freelance at first, then took a job at IBM. I am a lead front end atm. Programming doesn't need a CS Degree, just someone willing to learn and solve problems.

[@Wrathos]

I am impressed man. How long have you been coding? And how long before you landed your first gig as a developer?

[@colbycheeze]

I coded some flash games and apps in Actionscript (Flash) back in 2009 for like a year or two, but just recently picked up Web dev at the end of 2014...got a job after about 4 months of teaching myself from tutorials and what not.

[@zanemx]

Thanks for the vid! I always knew the mouse was the devils work.

[@ZombieLincoln666]

you accidentally used dd twice to delete two lines, which caused you to paste in the last one twice

[@kolobcanyon8920]

Does it open the declaration of a function? Does it lint all different languages? Typescript, Powershell, .sh, by default?

[@WookENTP]

Why by default? And yes, it does all those things...

[@anjith]

Which keyboard are you using? Seems mechanical!

[@brandondavis5906]

Topre

[@mynameizmaineimis1880]

Topre? Sounds like Cherry MX Blues. Topre are not mechanical, but capacitive. This one had a distinct clicking sound.

[@JoeyTen]

This didn't show me anything that VSCode can't do, tbh

[@sophiak8715]

Thought this was supposed to be some weird meme-oriented video because "why vim" sounds like "why him" but ok

[@_dinesh]

Appreciate your time for putting together a video for this. I'm still struggling to understand how is this different from intellij or anything modern IDE's? (or am I mistake here?🙄) Everything that you described here can be done in intellij. Actually there is more you can do with intellij (for example: code templates and code snippets.). I think you would be more productive using intellij.

[@Inevitablerizzler]

People talk about vim like you can't achieve no-mouse work on other editors, which is not true, I use vscode with customized keybindings and I don't need to use my mouse at all

[@regedit33]

Thank for this quick teaser for Vim! But you type too fast and it's really hard to see which key you use, it's a bit frustrating. Thanks again anyway :-)

[@draakisback]

What distribution of Linux are you using?

[@Brakleet]

Abeltensor lol. looked to me like a mac

[@colbycheeze]

Abeltensor I was using Ubuntu for a while, and I installed Mint on my sister's laptop which is great. But yea, I use a Mac now.

[@user-yn6ii7ys3u]

my man getting all those ladies with those vim skills :0

[@zambo1511]

Can you make your own key commands?

[@ZombieLincoln666]

yes of course. and you can record macros on the fly as well.

[@terranrepublican5522]

How to increase VIM productivity by 100%: :set number

[@WookENTP]

rnu

[@malvarco]

Actually: set relativenumber set number ;--)

[@fafabis9095]

@@malvarco ActUalLY set number relativenumber

[@Krentiles]

thanks

[@mikael5743]

WTF, you can "jump" to words using ctrl + arrows in pretty much any editor, also jumping to beginning or end of a line you can use home or end buttons. To delete an entire word, just hold ctrl.

[@ba_livernes]

Well, this isn't well described here, but the moves are just a hundred times more performant. Just look for it, install vim, type :help and let your jaws drop

[@AlqGo]

Your editor jump to words: ctrl + arrow Vim jump to words: w (yes, one single button, no holding whatsoever) Your editor delete an entire word: *hold* ctrl + del Vim delete entire word: dd (two quick presses, no holding whatsoever) Your editor delete surrounding braces: use mouse or press arrow keys multiple times to move cursor to the symbols and delete them Vim delete surrounding braces: ds{ (three keys, no need for arrow keys or mouse movements) Your editor: inefficient Vim: super efficient

[@KlayySOC]

But when I want to type text I have to go into insert mode, right? Which is an extra keystroke.

[@AlqGo]

That's one very trivial trade-off for all the efficient shortcuts that you get in Vim that you won't get in gui-based editors like Word.

[@OpenGL4ever]

@AL Maybe, but debugging in a graphical IDE is much faster and comfortable. In an IDE i can display a window with all my variables i want to oversee and their values get automatically updated after pressing the next step button. In gdb i need to enter p + the variable name to see what's inside the variable and this for every step i want to see it. This might not be a vim problem by itself, but gdb is the thing you would use inside vim for debugging.

[@youtubesuresuckscock]

HKJL is a mistake in a modern context. WASD would make it a way easier gateway drug. Games have made WASD natural. Although I'm sure there's some WASD variant of it floating around.

[@ekipierrobert1989]

You can change it in the conf file or no .

[@skaruts]

Or at least IJKL. HJKL never made any sense to me.

[@MSH3423]

Ah, thank you for the video. I always wonder why a CS professor and others dev friends say Just use Vim. I guess when you get really good at coding, even IDE with all the features are too slow to jump around and get in the way of thought process. Since Vim has tons of shortcuts, I can see how one fly around the screen. Thank you for the useful video.

[@paultwocock5421]

Vim, if u you're absolutely beginner This book "vim from wtf to omg" will be useful for you

[@dagehol]

Use emacs instead of vim. I never figured out how to exit it -.-

[@OpenGL4ever]

:q and :q! to force an exit. If you need to save a file, add a 'w' to the command followed by a filename. If you have set the filename already, a 'w' will be enough.

[@ulissemini5492]

let me clarify, the bottleneck in programming is thinking NOT editing, using vim because of speed is not a good reason - i use vim because it makes me happier when programming and i waste less time thinking about my editor, to someone new that might seem strange "you spend less time thinking about vim?!?!?" but actually once you know the keybindings and ex commands its much easier then going up to a toolbar and finding what you want

[@imodium438]

Its selling point isn't insertion mode but that it's modal and useful when editing documents. For instance, removing multiple lines up or down, going to the middle of a line, changing cursor position to high/mid/low w/o scrolling, going to a specific linenumber w/o scrolling, traversing a line by words by 'n' number of times, moving to top and bottom of a document at the blink of an eye, searching, replacing, etc. Those are areas where regular GUI based editors are absolutely atrocious and why mouse input is often required to get things done in such environments. The interesting question is Vim or Emacs? As a Vim user myself (having used uemacs but I doubt it's the same) what are the real advantages of each and how do they compare particular for text editing. The main selling point of Emacs based on videos I've seen is that it centralizes everything into one terminal application (filemanager, calc, editing, browsing, etc). But it seems nobody is mentioning anything about editing in Emacs compared to Vim ..... From the little I've come across it seems Vanilla Emacs editing is practically useless (accounts of it causing wrist strain from hitting the CTRL key too many times) and needs to be custom tailored & configured to your liking to even be usable. I'd really like to hear from anyone using it what the experience is like and how they do their editing in Emacs.

[@skaruts]

*_"but actually once you know the keybindings and ex commands its much easier then going up to a toolbar and finding what you want"_* That's true of every editor, though. I only ever use the menu in sublime for things that don't have a keybinding, but that's usually stuff you rarely use anyway. That said, you don't need the mouse to navigate the menus.

[@skaruts]

@@imodium438 Those things you enumerate seem a bit arbitrary or not obviously (or frequently) useful. You don't need the mouse for most of them, if any, in Sublime, and maybe also in VSCode, Atom, Notepad++. But then these arguments that using the mouse is somehow a nuisance are pretty weak. *_"For instance, removing multiple lines up or down"_* Shift-up/-down multiple times, Delete. It's not as fast as typing a command with the exact number, but the difference is negligible, really. *_"going to the middle of a line,"_* Ctrl-right enough times? Again, the difference is negligible. If it's a big line you're most likely not gonna want to arbitrarily move to the middle of it either way. You're more likely gonna want to go to a specific place in it, which you can easily do in any editor by searching (or clicking). *_"changing cursor position to high/mid/low w/o scrolling"_* If there's a way in Sublime, I don't know it. But then, you can just goto line (see below) with negligible difference of efficiency. *_"going to a specific linenumber w/o scrolling"_* Ctrl-G, type number, enter *_"traversing a line by words by 'n' number of times"_* Ctrl-right/-left enough times... *_"moving to top and bottom of a document at the blink of an eye"_* Ctrl-Home/-End *_"searching, replacing"_* They all have that... Don't get me wrong, Vim is a pretty damn solid editor. I just find it amusing when I see people speaking about it like its miles ahead of everything else, when it's not really the case, or at least I've yet to find anyone that makes a strong case for it.

[@penggunaphp7297]

I am using vim just because it's very fun.. that's all

[@LoadingBarr]

GG

[@jasonreviews]

there has to be better command line editor for text

[@WookENTP]

yes, neovim

[@58elrond]

Doing programming/computing a level next year 0=

[@rickelmonoggin]

Vim is great, but it's really not for everyone. If you want to use Vim, you have to be prepared to do a lot of work learning it. It's wrong to suggest that it's easy to learn.

[@grabkey13]

Another Star Trek movie :D

[@ferus5583]

The best compiler is notepad ;-)

[@MoreChannelNoise]

hmm

[@enjoynetsl]

free of mouse when using vim

[@XhI8ZIRWnaVC1hVsVZ7VSa]

real programmer use 'ed'

[@simonsomething2620]

I highly reccomend this cheat sheet: www.viemu.com/vi-vim-cheat-sheet.gif And once proficient, this one: b2aeaa58a57a200320db-8b65b95250e902c437b256b5abf3eac7.ssl.cf5.rackcdn.com/media_entries/7986/vim_cheatsheet.png

[@spencerjones1844]

When all else fails.... nano

[@dangda-ww7de]

notepad

[@TrustEngineers]

Nothing that I can't do with Notepad++ or Sublime Text 3, but with much more intuitive hotkeys, and even faster workflow. Vim is overrated.

[@nerxit4751]

>much more intuitive hotkeys Why do you think they're more intuitive? Because you're used to them?

[@abcdef-gt1qw]

hes prob just some triggered webdev

[@code8860]

Good joke, hahaha. Funny.

[@Mladenac]

Notepad++ can only scroll two opened files concurrently. And Vim can indefinitely number of files.

[@MakeLinuxSimple]

No its not. I used to hate vim, couse Its key bindings looks crazy as F***K. Its definitly not a intuitive editor at first glance... .... But wen you lern your basics it happend to be extremaly fast and full futured editor ever. There is no gui editor that can get things done faster then vim. Who the hell will install gui on server mashine to use gui text editor. Yes we have nano but nano lacks 80% of vim abilities when it comes to complex text editing process. Again I'm not saying that vim is super intuitive best editor yada yada yada. Im just said its on every unix linux its usefull as hell when you lern it you want to use it everywhere couse stunningly powerful. But i agree its wierd im avoided it for 10 yers because of its wierdness. But now i dont want to use anything else

[@tgmbrett]

Sell out

[@Asdayasman]

PTVS > vim vim/emacs is for nerds.

[@DerUnbekannteFlo]

Asdayasman The problem here is visual studio and the platform it has to be used on

[@Asdayasman]

DerUnbekannteFlo That meme stopped being funny around XP's launch.

[@DerUnbekannteFlo]

Asdayasman I'm being serious here

[@colbycheeze]

DerUnbekannteFlo Visual Studio recently went open source and is available on all platforms. It may be something to look at over the next year, but I have no experience with it personally.

[@Asdayasman]

DerUnbekannteFlo You're being stupid here actually.

[@alexandervogtsanchez7522]

There is no reason to keep using this shitty editors , the only reason Is time wasting . Visual studio is by far the greatest ide in the world , best debugger and best product in general vs all the other ones I,ve tested .

[@bonermeister8191]

lets meet in 27 years from now and discuss that (vim was created in 1991)... There is a reason why vim is still out there in an area where IDEs have the lifespan of a fruit fly.

[@skaruts]

@@bonermeister8191 From what I've been seeing, one of the reasons is purism or elitism. The other reason is that Vim is actually a pretty solid editor. I've yet to see a good reason for me to replace Sublime with it, though. The reason why other editors may have a shorter lifespan is because there's a lot of competition and innovation. There's not really any competition in CLI editors shortening their lifespans. There's just Nano, Emacs and Vim. Still, I'm not sure you could enumerate many editors that died out in the last 20 years. Even notepad++ is still pretty alive today.

[@Ace-gw4uk]

Vim is useless. Use atom or sublime and use the damn ctrl+arrow keys.

[@kolobcanyon8920]

Do you know a shortcut for going up more than one line at a time in Sublime? Still trying to figure that one out

[@abcdef-gt1qw]

Yes sure Ill continue to use bloated shitware for coding. well hell naw

[@hellowill]

atom lol. I'd rather code in ms word

[@swiftrealm]

Atom is trash. Good luck waiting an eternity for it to open any file above 10 MB. If you want a great editor use VS Code.

[@redstoneisawesome9336]

Well, with atom you can move to different files without having about ten tabs open