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I thought a bit about how to title this. On the one hand, I'm talking about successfully switching to vim. On the other hand, the thrust of my argument is that I got very bad advice repeatedly over several years on the topic.

Apologies if the title wasn't as reflective of the content as I had hoped.



I suggest you consider two rules from journalism:

Firstly, that your title should align with the broad story "I like Vim now / Vim is pretty good" as well as the specific story "The usual advice on how to switch is wrong". Your title strongly implies that Vim is not worth learning and that you should ignore people who suggest you try it.

Secondly, that you should start with your conclusion and slowly expand on it. This is because you don't know how much of your article any given reader will read before giving up or getting distracted.

These are both a non-trivial effort. How do you, for example, convey the entire meaning of the article in the title while still making people want to click and read? How do you hit them with the key argument of your story without building up the foundation?


For the eight years I've been using vim, I have never known about ci". I feel both stupid and in awe.


'i' and 'a' (mnemonic: the 'a' grabs all of something (and its white space) as opposed to 'i' which grabs the inner part) as modifiers for 'c', 'd', 'y', and 'v' can be very useful, but I don't see them talked about much in most tutorials.

See :help motion.txt - they're in section 6. Text Object Selection. Also, just play around with them a little. For example:

   <p>This is a tes|t. Do not be alarmed.</p>
If that's your text, and the cursor is at the pipe:

    ciw  # remove all of 'test', enter insert mode
    caw  # remove the word 'test' and preceding space, enter insert mode
    vit  # visually select all the text within the <p> tags
    vat  # visually select the whole <p> element


and diw and daw delete the whole word, gUiw uppercases the whole word, and ...

The composability of vim motion commands is what keeps me using it.


Hmm for some reason my motions don't work with [ { ( or b/B. I can't seem to find a reason for this. " works though.

Edit: seems actual jump selection can be finicky.


Check out this: http://blog.interlinked.org/tutorials/vim_tutorial.html (text-objects section in particular).


You can use other characters too: like ', {, [, (, t (HTML tag).

Even better, you can use b instead of ( and B instead of {, because it's easier to type.


same here, though i quite religiously use df" and d%.


Any reason why vim instead of emacs? I use textmate and might give vim/emacs a try again. Quite similar to your old experience.


Emacs is a better IDE than vim, but vim is a better editor than emacs.

Emacs is far easier to script and plays nicer with other programs so there are more, more useful extensions for working in various languages. On the other hand, I find vim's modal interface faster and easier on my hands than emac's chording interface. viper-mode in emacs might be ideal.


as a textmate to vim to emacs user, I'd say that vim is to textmate as emacs is to vim. Vim is awesome, but it's still just an editor. Emacs is an operating system that's built around editing text. You start with a powerful editing paradigm and then apply it to pretty much anything you need to do as a programmer...it's about the best editing experience I've ever had. My shell, source control, organiser, messaging, documentation, directory browsing, irc, document viewing etc is all done from within my text editor with all the awesome editing capability that 23 versions brings with it...also you can run vim from within emacs...


Vim uses a similar paradigm of leveraging an operating system for editing. But it leverages Unix instead of coming up with its own half-baked OS.

(Disclaimer: I do use Emacs, mostly.)


Exactly. Emacs didn't start on Unix IIRC and seems to prefer to have everything built in. vi was created by Bill Joy on Unix and wanted to work with the rich language of shell commands from the start, as ed(1) did, so it concentrated on editing text well and integrating with Unix well. To see some Emacs users you wonder why they're even bothering to run on Unix. ;-)


Emacs has VIPER mode, which uses the Vim keybindings in Emacs.

Haven't tried learning the keybindings yet myself, and I've heard VIPER isn't the complete Vim.


If you want something closer to Vim keybindings in Emacs, try vimpulse:

http://www.assembla.com/wiki/show/vimpulse


> Emacs is an operating system that's built around editing text.

It amuses me that people actually think that's just a joke.


it's a joke because it's almost true.


Avid emacs user here.

Ergonomics. There's an emacs key chord for everything, but many of them involve two or three modifier keys.

i.e. search and replace is Alt+Shift+5, indent block is Ctrl+Alt+\

These require some finger contortions. I haven't used vim, but the impression I get is that similar commands in vim are all closer to home row so you don't have to contort your hands as much.


Yup. I'm an avid vim user, but I tried emacs for a few weeks, and my hands were always sore.

search & replace is % indent is > (auto-indent is =)

Emacs seems really neat, and I'd like to try out some other editors, but none of them compare to the ease of vim's modal style.


I use emacs for most of my text editing. I hate using vim because I find all the mode switching to be really annoying. I like how keys always mean one thing in emacs, even if it results in the occasional bit of emacs pinky.


You can always re-map. I use Tab for indent-region, instead of bothering with indent-block.


Fwiw I liked the title. As someone ramping up on vim, it definitely caught my attention, and was cleverly related to the rest of the article.


Totally ineffective. May you enjoy your vim days.




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