[toyota86]

Cringe. The copy and paste buffer is inspired by vi btw. Do you have a problem with vi in addition to tmux?

That is to say, it's dead simple once it's explained to you. The issue is with documentation, not the keyboard shortcuts themselves.

Sublime Text and Jetbrains are also vi-inspired. For where Jetbrains doesn't go far enough there is a vim mode plugin. I would say these are strong indicators of vi's dominance among keyboard shortcut layouts.

[blux]

I read the documentation; and the shortcut is explained in the documentation. I've been using it for years already. I think that maybe the problem is partly that people just do not bother to read the documentation, and expect the tool to take them by their hand. Do we expect that from the tools we use? Is that good software?

[alpaca128]

I use Vim every day and love it. And I found tmux' configuration style and controls so confusing that I gave it up completely.

You want Vim-like controls? Use dvtm. It lets you open the content of any terminal in Vim, and from that point you can do anything from selecting/copying text up to saving a snippet in a file with a simple ":w foo".

All that aside, clipboard copy-pasting in Vim is absolutely horrible out of the box.

> Jetbrains are also vi-inspired

Not sure about that. The tab management and window splitting alone feel near unusable to me, because like many other modern apps they are convinced I only want to switch tabs in a seemingly random order(instead of, you know, the order that's literally shown on screen), and none actually have Vim's tabbing where a tab can contain multiple buffers, not the other way around. And guess what, no Vim plugin I know ever touched tabs. Probably because people not using Vim think the UX is all just in some arcane keybindings.

[ufmace]

I use Vim for basically everything too. I do find it a bit irritating that most GUI editors do tabs within splits, instead of splits within tabs as Vim does it. I guess the behavior of tabs within splits is baked into most GUI APIs and frameworks so deeply that it would be virtually impossible to change at this point though. Oh well.

I'm more irritated though that Vim has nice keybindings for any sort of changes you might want to make to your tab and split setup. I don't think any of the GUI tools support keyboard commands for any of that. Or at least if they do, I haven't been able to figure out what they are, and am probably honestly too lazy to try to develop muscle memory for how they work.

[alpaca128]

> I guess the behavior of tabs within splits is baked into most GUI APIs and frameworks

Yes, that is probably a common assumption. On the other hand it may not be that hard to just do the tab bar and split containers separately and handwire them together via input events. At least web UIs aren't exactly famous for their adherence to any standard.

So the more likely reason is that most developers just don't have a reason to do it. Because in the end Vim's approach is just more an exception and as far as I know Vim tabs weren't even originally intended for the same purpose - and I can confirm buffer switching within a tab can be pleasingly fast and precise thanks to the tab completion.

[mrighele]

> because like many other modern apps they are convinced I only want to switch tabs in a seemingly random order(instead of, you know, the order that's literally shown on screen),

If you mean the behavior of Ctrl-Tab, yes, that's confusing for me too. But you can switch using the order shown on screen though, by using Alt-Left / Alt-Right.

[alpaca128]

> But you can switch using the order shown on screen though, by using Alt-Left / Alt-Right.

Can I also press a button to swap those keybindings back to the old behaviour so I don't have to work against my own muscle memory?

Or better, can I tell it to switch tabs on Spacebar-l and Spacebar-h like I have it setup in Vim? I often wonder if it's too demanding to expect keybinding flexibility that was available decades ago. I get that it's a niche use, but then again it's marketed towards professionals and power users.

[opan]

Last I checked, tmux binds are all emacs-like until you change your config. I remember the copying stuff suddenly being easy once I toggled the vi-like keys. Maybe you haven't used an unconfigured tmux in a while.

[ianthehenry]

tmux actually tries to be clever here and guess if you're a vim user or not: if your $EDITOR contains the string "vi", you get vi-style keybindings by default. If it doesn't, you get emacs.

But unfortunately it doesn't look at $VISUAL, so... yeah, you usually have to set it explicitly.

[bobmaxup]

How is "Jetbrains" vi inspired?

[jalk]

The ‘file’ hotkeys in Idea are Norton Commander: F4 edit, F5 copy, F6 move. Iirc early versions of Idea had a two-pane file ‘commander’ built in