

Ask HN: Replacement for VIM - toblender

Hi HN,<p>I&#x27;ve been using vim since university to do software development.  I love that it&#x27;s on virtually every platform and is fast.<p>I&#x27;m looking to upgrade.  Is there a replacement that allows me to split screens (vertical&#x2F;horizontal) and virtually never use the mouse?<p>I&#x27;ve tried Sublime in classic mode, not enough split screens for my workflow.<p>Intellij only support vertical split and the vim plugin is lacking.<p>Thanks!
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farresito
You have several options: like someone has already mentioned, vim + tmux works
amazingly well, and that's what I personally use. Not sure what you are using.
A second option is emacs + evil-mode, which, to be honest, is pretty good and
would definitely recommend it if you want to move away from vim but have the
biggest compatibility.

That said, what's the reason you want to move away from vim? Once you have the
right plugins, there's no editor that can beat it. I personally use vim + tmux
for pretty much everything except for clojure, for which I use emacs + evil-
mode (paredit is very very nice, and the vim equivalent didn't work well for
me).

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hashtag
Why not emacs + evil-mode full time over vim + tmux?

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farresito
Wooops. Didn't see your question, so answering now. I simply like vim way more
than emacs. evil doesn't work very well with a lot of the emacs extensions,
and there are a lot of vim extensions that do not exist (or are just a simpler
version) in emacs. vim + tmux is just too good. emacs syntax highlighting is
inferior in a lot of languages (at least the ones I mainly work with), too.
Sure, there are a lot of things in emacs that are way better than vim, but,
for me, vim wins by far (my vimrc is not short and I use a lot of plugins).

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T-R
If split screens are your thing, it might be worth it to try a Tiling Window
Manager. I agree with you that Sublime doesn't natively have enough split
screens, so I use XMonad, and split them and organize them as I please.

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therealidiot
I thought vim could already split both horizontally and vertically, with the
:split and :vsplit commands

~~~
farresito
Yes, vim definitely can. He probably is looking for an editor that support the
splitting like vim does and hasn't found one yet.

~~~
kazinator
If that is the right interpretation of the question, then the question lacks a
reason for wanting a replacement.

"I like Vim; it is fast, runs on many platforms and I've been using it for
development since university. I know that it can split windows horizontally
and vertically. But for some inexplicable reason, I want to replace it: is
there something else that can split windows horizontally and vertically?"

It kind of "does not compute", you see?

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300
Vim already can split window both horizontally and vertically. If that's not
good enough for you, you could maybe try different approach: keep Vim, and try
some of the tilling window managers (if you're using Linux), like i3 or
awesome.

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jarin
Install Janus and all your heart's desires will be fulfilled:

[https://github.com/carlhuda/janus](https://github.com/carlhuda/janus)

Bonus: plop this in your .vimrc.after for super easy movement around split
windows

    
    
        nnoremap <C-h> <C-w>h
        nnoremap <C-j> <C-w>j
        nnoremap <C-k> <C-w>k
        nnoremap <C-l> <C-w>l

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aylons
Emacs is the obvious answer: it allows keyboard-only operation, has a very
flexible frame splitting tool and you may leverage your VI experience by using
evil-mode.

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johncoltrane
What about telling us _what_ you want to upgrade?

Are you looking for a "better" looking interface ? Try Sublime Text, Atom or
Brackets.

Are you looking for better $LANGUAGE support? Try any $LANGUAGE-specific IDE.

Are you looking for better scriptability? Try Emacs, possibly with evil-mode.

Are you looking for a better editing experience? There's nowhere to look.

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notduncansmith
If you use a Mac, iTerm2 has nifty Cmd+D binding to split windows vertically,
and Cmd+Shift+D to split horizontally, then Cmd+[ and Cmd+] to move around. It
actually has an advantage over splitting Vim since you can actually split off
a whole shell.

You can achieve the same thing with tmux of course, this just feels very
natural and is available out of the box with no configuration required.

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eliben
What's the problem with splitting the screen in Vim? Or is this not the
problem you're trying to solve?

I regularly have Vim open split to 2-6 windows, depending on the screen. I
prefer in-vim splitting to out-of-vim splitting (tmux et al) because all
buffers are shared for quick jumping between them, completion, copy-pasting,
etc.

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rayiner
Uograde from VIM? Emacs.

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kbenson
I won't be able to offer much help, I'm still using VIM, but I'm curious as to
what is spurring you to change? Are you just exploring to see if there's
anything better and/or finding interesting features of other editors, or are
you finding something lacking?

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antubbs
I guess this is my concern as well. I'm not sure what the need is for the
shiny new object in this case; I've never felt limited by Vim, but perhaps
there are particular features or capabilities that the author is interested
in?

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webmaven
I'll note that you can upgrade Vim _itself_ via plugins. The easiest way I've
found so far is to use a 'distro' like spf-13:
[http://vim.spf13.com/](http://vim.spf13.com/)

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wbond
Not sure if splitting is your only real issue with Sublime, but the Origami
package may help:
[https://sublime.wbond.net/packages/Origami](https://sublime.wbond.net/packages/Origami)

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steveeq1
What's wrong with emacs?

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gfodor
for dynamic languages i always use vim with tmux. for Java/C# I use
IntelliJ/VS.NET with IdeaVIM or viemu since those IDEs allow easy refactoring
and navigation based on the type system. I don't program in any other
statically typed languages like Go or Scala so YMMV. I picked up tmux about
2-3 years ago and it was a major step forward, so I recommend you do that
first before abandoning vim.

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dustintran
You can split screens (and virtually never use the mouse) in Vim. What
particular feature are you looking for here?

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kazinator
There is no replacement of Vim; it is the best thing of its kind. I've been
using it since 1994 and wouldn't even think about replacing it.

The current region of the screen you're working in can be split horizontally
with Ctrl-W s, and vertically with Ctrl-W v.

Moving among the splits is done using Ctrl-W + movement keys, where movement
keys are arrows, or h, j, k, l. Plus undoubtedly in other ways.

There are ways to rotate and rearrange windows themselves, and perform actions
that open windows: many familiar actions can be prefixed with Ctrl-W so that
they open a new window, such as chasing a tag (Ctrl-]).

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ulisesrmzroche
Try Atom.io on Vim mode. Split screens with command + k + arrow key.

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toblender
Wow! Atom is pretty cool.

A bit different than vim (horizontal split): control + w + s

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slambam
tmux with vim

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midgetjones
This.

There's some good thoughtbot posts on the subject:
[http://robots.thoughtbot.com/a-tmux-crash-
course](http://robots.thoughtbot.com/a-tmux-crash-course)
[http://robots.thoughtbot.com/seamlessly-navigate-vim-and-
tmu...](http://robots.thoughtbot.com/seamlessly-navigate-vim-and-tmux-splits)
[http://robots.thoughtbot.com/love-hate-
tmux](http://robots.thoughtbot.com/love-hate-tmux)

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oneandoneis2
Wait for neovim?

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jballanc
Or don't wait...the neovim team is taking a very incremental approach so that
(at least for my fairly complex setup) everything still works as expected.

