Murray Steele

Well, I’ve given it about a month, but I don’t think I can deal with how unfinished zed is as a daily editor. Gonna have to find something else. Is now the time for me to finally get into vim or emacs ?

(Probably not, I do like a desktop UI and use the mouse a lot)

Feb 20 at 3:38pmWeb
Show threadJames Feb 20
@hlame Let me know if you find something!
Show threadJamie WhiteFeb 20
@hlame have you given Nova a try?
Show threadMurray SteeleFeb 20
@jgwhite I have not! Is it good? How’s the ecosystem of plugins and language support etc? Or, is it good enough out of the box for a Ruby dev?
Show threadJamie WhiteFeb 20
@hlame I haven’t tried it but I’ve always been curious.
Show threadJoel ChippindaleFeb 20

@hlame Or helix editor. I find it much nicer to work with than vim. Of course it's still keyboard focussed.

This article is good on what is different about it https://phaazon.net/blog/more-hindsight-vim-helix-kakoune

strongly-typed-thoughts.net

Show threadMurray SteeleFeb 20
@joel I’d discounted it as being vim, but weird. And given I already thought vim was weird I thought it might be too much. Were you a vim user before you became a helix user?
Show threadJoel ChippindaleFeb 20
@hlame I was. Yes. But I think it is less weird than vim.
Show threadTom StuartFeb 20
@hlame Treat yourself to a copy of Practical Vim and don’t look back. Vim has mouse support!
Show threadMurray SteeleFeb 20
@tom I might just have to, no-one seems to recommend any non-text-based editors 🤷
Show threadJon RoweFeb 20
@hlame @tom I mean, a +1 for vim (I prefer neovim myself), but there are a couple of "GUI" versions, e.g macvim and several gui neovim varients that might bridge the gap a bit for you?
Show threadJames JefferiesFeb 20
@hlame I use Sublime Text, pretty solid these days, an a bit of vim - you can even use vim key commands with sublime…
Show threadbenFeb 20
@hlame both vim/neovim and emacs have non-terminal versions and mouse support, if that helps.
Show threadMurray SteeleFeb 20
@benjamineskola it might! Is there a ui version of either you prefer? Or a resource you recommend for exploring them?
Show threadbenFeb 23

@hlame I think the default UIs are probably the best choices (for original Vim and for Emacs). For neovim there's no built in GUI, but there are a couple of different options: vimr and neovide, possibly others — I'm not sure if there's much to choose between them (other than maybe platform support).

Resources-wise I'm not sure what to recommend. They both have builtin tutorials for the basic movement/editing/etc controls. Beyond that personally I just learned incrementally when something seemed worth improving or whatever.

There are a few 'starter kits' (Doom Emacs, Spacemacs, Lazyvim, maybe a couple of others), which mostly I've avoided personally because it's a bit sheltered from the default experience; but they might also be closer to what you want if configuring your editor isn't a hobby of yours.

Show threadfglc2Feb 20
@hlame I’ve been meaning to try zed for a while - you’ve probably saved me some time!
Show threadMurray SteeleFeb 20
@fglc2 when it works it’s quite nice, but I found I spend far too much time fiddling with it and asking it why today it has decided to not run rubocop or open a folder when asked when it was all working yesterday. Maybe I’ll give it another go in a year or so. YMMV obvs
Show threadNat BuckleyFeb 21
@hlame I switched to vim years ago, and use it without a mouse. At first it was very strange and slow, but now feels natural and much faster than mousing around. And I only know just a few basic keybindings so I’m sure my experience can be even further improved. In other editors I miss the keybindings when they’re not available, and I miss the vim plugins I use. Stuff to do with editing HTML genuinely feels like magic https://stackoverflow.com/questions/6768930/theres-cit-dit-yit-change-delete-yank-inside-tag-on-vim-is-there-somet
There's cit, dit, yit (change, delete, yank inside tag) on vim... is there something like pit (paste inside tag?)

Using vim I'm used to motion command like cit, dit, yit when editing html/xml files. I like . even more after using this commands because I can repeat what I did with just one keystroke. I would l...

Stack Overflow
Show threadNat BuckleyFeb 21
@hlame also I like that most computers, past and future, are likely to already have vim, it’s like the basic food staple of editing text, so I’ll always have my fave
Show threadMurray SteeleFeb 21
@natbuckley that is a concern for sure. The reason I’m even looking to change is that textmate is finally creaking after years of no development
Show threadPaulFeb 21
@natbuckley @hlame I need you to teach me this HTML magic, because that's the place I usually feel like I'm fighting against vim: it's always indenting things automatically but wrongly!
Show threadJames AdamFeb 23

@natbuckley @hlame If you do want to try a vim/vim-a-lie, I recommend use a distribution to begin with, particularly one that supports discovery of features (i.e.hitting 'space' and then it showing functions after a delay).

I'm pretty happy here with Doom Emacs and a few customisations; enough like vim to bring most the benefits, but also very easy to "explore", feature-wise, and extend (I've written my own test runner).

Happy to demo it.

Show threadPointlessOne Feb 22

@hlame zed itself is quite stable in my experience. The few missing features are already in the issue tracker and in a few past months some even got resolved. All the instability issues I had were coming from LSPs. This is not an excuse but the very same issues will crop up in other editors.

If you want GUI you’re probably gonna get better luck with emacs. Its capabilities are limited (compared to native) but are much richer than vim. Vim GII is basically a standalone terminal with GUI tabs and splits if you’re lucky. The rest is text.

That said, learning even the basics of vim to use it without mouse is a great boost.