Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by kylec 4373 days ago
I don't know, when it comes to navigating and manipulating a single document I can see vim's advantages, but having spend a few days recently trying to learn vim I didn't find any replacements for things like jumping to a file by name or recursive regex searching, things that I've come to rely on in Sublime. Feel free to point out if I missed them, but it seems based on my initial experience with vim that there's not really a concept of a "project" or a "codebase", just the collection of buffers you happen to have open at the moment.
1 comments

Much of what you're looking for is provided by plugins (eg. command-T).

There's no question that vim requires a lot of messing around with initially to get it configured the way you want it. But that rapidly fades away and it's not such a big investment of time for something as important as an editor.

I think there are two kinds of programmers, those that love tweakability and configurability and spend lots of time customizing and perfecting their setup, and those that just want to use stock software with as few modifications as possible. I'm in the latter camp.

I'd like my skills in using a piece of software to be transferrable - I'd like to know that if I'm using vim or whatever on my personal machine or on another machine with no customization, that the experience is the same between both. For the most part, Sublime provides that.

However, I'm willing to give vim another shot, do you have links to the plugins that you mentioned?

I actually don't typically like endlessly tweaking my software either. I was prepared to do this with vim only because a text editor is such a key tool for a developer that it justifies the outlay of time. In addition, I wanted an editor that was available on any platform, and in a shell. It's true that vim under someone else's login will behave differently, but that's not a common case for me.

Command-T can be found here:

https://github.com/wincent/Command-T

Not really, there's vimgrep plus regular grep on the command line.