Killer feature Vim
If you open a vim file, move the cursor to the right place and start typing, then anything will happen with the text on the screen, except what the user wanted to do. A short-term panic attack mixed with anger will pass quickly enough, because no one has saved the file yet, so you can just turn off the power, turn on the computer and google it.
Google, it turns out that to turn vima into a normal editor, press i . Just save the edited text is impossible, before that you need to press escape several times, and then type : w . And to close it, you need to press escape, and then type : q . The heavy legacy of the past. Well, Wim is everywhere.
But in one of the articles telling how to spend 5 minutes in vime and stay alive, it will be written that vim is the best text editor in the world. And it turns out that people are programming in it. That is, naturally, they write code. That is, in the courtyard of the 21st century, at any time you can download Visual Studio, Intellij Idea or, God forgive me, Eclipse, and they write the code in WIM. Voluntarily.
The IDE makes the work of the programmer so easy that you can abandon the use of the integrated development environment now only with very good reasons. And, since some refuse the IDE in favor of WIM, then there should be something cooler than automatic refactoring, cooler than integrated debugger, cooler import substitution and integration with version control systems.
I wonder what kind of features are in the vima that are not even in the IDE, not to mention the banal notepad ++?
It’s sad, but if you ask this question to the average wim-golf guru, he simply won’t understand it. You can be sure of this by reading the comments on Habré and generally climbing on the Internet. In response to a question about what’s good, they often write that you can delete a word there by typing diw , and if you don’t want to delete, but you want to select, then you type viw . Well, that is, in the first case at the beginning of d , in the second v , but then iw here and there , which means inside word . Well is not it cool! Exaggerate, of course, but very similar to the truth.
But how to program in it?
The questioner usually clarifies - Vim somehow copes with the tasks that the IDE usually solves. I wonder how? He is told that there are a lot of awesome plugins in the vima, only they need to be installed and configured.
Why these plugins are better than the opportunities provided by the IDE, as a rule, it is not possible to find out, occasionally it is possible to find out that the IDE is slow.
Everything becomes clear here, the person who wanted to know why vim is needed recommends the second side of the discussion to buy a computer quickly and is eliminated from the conversation.
Meanwhile, he should have posed the question directly.
For the sake of what features of vima, users are ready to endure such fatal flaws as several modes of operation, the need to remember a bunch of keys, and voluntarily refuse to use arrows?
After all, in fact, the opposite is true
This is not for the sake of the feature of vima, users are ready to endure the modes, but in order to continue to use the modes, users saw new features in the vima.
Yes exactly. What at first glance seems to be inherited by a bear is actually something that anyone needs a vim for.
You may think that there is nothing good in these modes and cannot be. Suppose even that it is so. Nevertheless, vim is used precisely because of them, everything else is secondary. Actually this is the main and only thought of the article.
Modes are not a fatal flaw, but a killer feature.
In a regular editor, in order to move the cursor to the end of a word, you need to hold down Control, and then, without releasing it, move your hand to the arrows and press the right key. In the editor better, you can press not to the right, but some key on the alphabetic part of the keyboard, for example d , but you still have to hold down Control. And in vima just press e . Vima users appreciate the ability to manipulate the cursor and text without having to hold down modifier keys or remove their hands from the home row. It's relaxing.
I’ll emphasize here - it’s not about the fact that using the modes you can do such things that you cannot do without them. We are not talking about the fact that with the use of modes everything turns out faster than without them. It is exclusively about the fact that using the modes, WIM users are more comfortable and pleasant to work with. Or at least they sincerely believe in it.
And, if you want to understand what is good in vima, you need to try to understand what is good in modes, and not figure out what features are in the plugins and, moreover, do not try to understand what these features are better than those that provide the IDE.
And, if you want to justify to someone that WIM is completely sucks, then you need to prove that the modes are completely sucks. For those who use vim, this is never really obvious.
The converse, by the way, is also true. If you want to explain to someone why you need a vim and why it is so wonderful, talking about plugins is useless. Plugins in the IDE are no worse. In addition, if you port plugins from vim to any IDE, you cannot use it instead of vim. To do this, it is necessary to transfer the main thing - the modes.
Instead of an afterword
Perhaps someone will say that writing an entire article for the sake of such a trifle has overstated it. I thought so too, but I have been observing the picture described above for several years.
Between lovers of Wim and the rest of the world there is some grandiose and at the same time completely stupid misunderstanding, and I hope that when I meet him next time, it will be enough for me to give a link to this article.
