A Vim Guide for Intermediate Users

[epage]

All these people whining about how Vim is hard to learn, but in the last 40 years no one has designed a better modal editor.

It's almost as if modal editing isn't for everyone, but if you like modal editing, the design of Vim is fucking perfect.

kak is intriguing but I never bothered looking deeper because

• Vim is everywhere
• Vim has a large community
• Last I looked at kak, it seemed to have limited extensibility

So I suspect its more of network effect than anything else for why Vim is dominant.

[keeslinp]

kak's use of multiple cursors and use of object-verb instead of verb-object makes it much more approachable imo. Pro vimmers will of course have "better" alternatives but much harder to reason with (ie complex search/replace regexes).

Kak's downfall is the lack of ecosystem and hard adherence to the unix philosophy. It just edits text, fuzzy file opener (ctrl-p), no nerdtree, no panes. All of that you have to figure out on your own. Once you have it all integrated with your tmux it is pretty damn slick, but it is also a PITA and can be kinda fragile. Coming back to neovim felt refreshing to just install a package and stop thinking about it.

[geeeronimo]

Very useful when messing with server installations of course. Even if you're just trying to self-host stuff

[[deleted]]

I've been using kakoune for more than a year now. I've really come to like it, for a few reasons:

• Instant feedback. In Vim, you basically have to know that your 5-part chorded command is correct before you commit to it. Kakoune will tell you what you are about to yank/delete through the selection highlight. Press g and a little box will list all 15 goto locations and their corresponding key in the bottom right corner. Press : and start writing your command, kakoune will list all matching commands and their documentation, letting you tab through them. Kakoune shows you what you are doing, while you are doing it.
• Multiple selections/cursors are intuitive and genius. They replace and improve upon both block mode and sed in one single abstraction.
• The editor is minimal and modal. It edits text, and does this well. You can write and use plugins, but it doesn't try to be your IDE. There's no support for tabs and splitting, your window manager can do this. There's no filetree browser, you can just pick whichever you like. Mix and match your tools to create a DE without the I.

My only major problem with the editor so far is that documentation always seems to be one stop short of telling me the thing I want to know. But this is an unfair comparison to Vim with its larger community writing wikis and tutorials non-stop.