Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

SoylentNews is powered by your submissions, so send in your scoop. Only 18 submissions in the queue.

Vim Creator Bram Moolenaar Discusses Developing the Popular Text Editor, How He Uses It

posted by Fnord666 on Sunday December 25 2016, @11:38PM   Printer-friendly
from the interview-was-done-via-emacs dept.

Phoenix666 writes:

Early developers were struggling. They loved the landmark text editor vi but needed something that was available on more than just Unix.

They needed something more tailored to programmers, something that supported syntax highlighting for various languages and remote editing via SSH. They needed to fine-tune their development environments with plugins to maximize their efficiency.

Dutch programmer Bram Moolenaar created his own solution and shared it for free, eventually asking only that users make a donation to a charity caring for children and families in Uganda.
...

Proponents of Vim commonly point out the same features as reasons why they use the program:

  1. Light and portable: Commonly used as a command line interface, Vim can be launched with a terminal, run through a GUI, or used remotely through an SSH connection. Vim is widely used on Windows, Linux, and macOS.
  2. Highly customizable and full of plugins: As with so many other open-source platforms, users have run amok with creating custom configurations, features, and plugins. ...
  3. Modality and no mouse functionality: It seems frustrating, but your fingers never need to leave your keyboard. Maximize productivity and coding time by using keystrokes to switch among normal, insert, command line, and visual modes. Keys have different commands based on which mode you’re in.
  4. Registers: Think of these as multiple clipboards. You can store copied text and macros, which record keystrokes for playback, in different registers. Registers, which persist between uses of Vim, help you save time by executing certain text in a fraction of the time.
  5. Motions and text-objects: Arguably our team’s favorite facets of Vim, motions and text-objects serve as the verbs and adjectives of the Vim language, allowing you to write your code über-productively. Motions allow you to tack on an action to built-in commands, so you can, say, delete from the current cursor position until the next occurrence of a letter. Meanwhile, text-objects are used in the context of motions, allowing you to declare commands inside or around words, paragraphs, HTML tags, and even current function blocks.

This submission prepared using the Firefox vim plugin, Vimperator.

Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Vim Creator Bram Moolenaar Discusses Developing the Popular Text Editor, How He Uses It | Log In/Create an Account | Top | 52 comments | Search Discussion
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 26 2016, @02:53AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 26 2016, @02:53AM (#445942)

    ... that now that I've gotten used to it, I keep trying to use vim-like keyboard shortcuts in other programs, such as MS-Word. VimFX for Firefox helps a lot, or Vimium in Chrome. Now I just need a similar plugin for every other piece of software that I use.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 26 2016, @04:41AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 26 2016, @04:41AM (#445966)

    Too bad you didn't train your fingers for Emacs commands, then you could load Vbacs into MS-Word
        http://www.rath.ca/Misc/VBacs/ [www.rath.ca]
    I've been using this for 10+ years (basically at the time my work forced me to start using MS-Word). Vbacs works fairly well (not perfect), learned Emacs commands while Getes was still a student.