I’m trying out Obsidian for taking notes, and this made me laugh.
Funny, but unironically a pretty good idea.
One of my first computer jobs was working in a student computer lab at my undergraduate university. This was back in the mid 90s-ish.
We had three types of computers - windows machines running 3.1 or whatever was current then, Macs who would all do a Wild Eep together when they rebooted en masse, and Sun X Windows dumb terminals that were basically just (obviously) unix machines for all intents and purposes. This was back when there were basically like 5 websites total, and people still hadn’t heard of Mosaic.
So everyone wanted the windows and Mac boxes, and only took the xterms when there was nothing else open. I was the primary support person for them since none of the other people wanted to learn Unix and I was the only CS major.
The X boxes suffered from two main learning hurdles. One was that backspaces were incorrectly mapped into some escape key sequence, and the other is that it would drop you from (I think) pine into emacs as a mail editor as soon as you hit it. 90% of my time was telling people how to exit emacs. It was that, putting more paper into the printers, and teaching myself more programming than I was learning in classes.
My god that brought back memories. The first commands when sitting at a new terminal was always, always:
stty sanestty erase '^H'It was well into the 2000s before Unix had useable defaults.
God, I remember the backspace thing. I hope whoever allowed a computer to be shipped in that condition got fired.
nano crew where you at
I like nano because it has worked any time I needed it. I don’t dislike nano because I’m not good enough at Linux to have ever run into its limitations
hopefully switching to micro
I made that switch a few months ago just so I could cut, copy and paste without having to lookup how to do it. it’s been great.
I never get the need to use vim and nano exists.
Vim really is an IDE, not a text editor. It’s usable as an editor but overkill.
Nano serves a difference purpose. It’s like telling someone on a bike that a mustang is better.
Vim is absolutely not an IDE. It has no integrations with any language. It’s just a powerful text editor. You can add language plugins and configure it to be an IDE.
It literally has a built in scripting language.
So it’s an IDE for vimscript…? No.
You’re not a normal text editor if you have a built in scripting language.
I’m not a text editor. But anyway, would you call a shell script that invokes
python.exe $1a Python IDE? Why would you? Vim isn’t designed to facilitate the use of vimscript, vimscript is just an extensibility feature of Vim.
No offense intended here - But why is this being upvoted?
vim absolutely is an IDE if that is how you want to use it. Syntax highlighting, linter, language specific autocomplete, integrated sed/regex. And much, much more.
You can’t run and debug things in vim, can you?
my car is absolutely a boat if you put a boat motor on the back of it and waterproof it
Syntax highlighting, linting, and language specific autocomplete are features supported by plugins and scripts. Plain, simple vim is a powerful extensible text editor. The extensibility makes it easy to turn into an IDE.
There’s syntax highlighting by default in vim though.
Yeah, there is a generic syntax highlighting scheme. I had forgotten because it’s not very good for some languages, I’d replaced it with a LSP-based implementation years ago.
Yea, vim really isn’t anything near how useful emacs is.
Emacs really is powerful, all it needs now is a decent text editor.
It has one. It’s called evil-mode.
So like Word vs Notepad?
Here!
I hate terminal-based text editors
Nano seems quite user/idiot friendly
If anyone needs the command: :q!
If you want the computer to ask if you’re sure: :q
If you want to save: :wq
You’re nullifying that safety measure by doing this you know
Some people just want to see the world burning
Nah, the safety measure is designed to make sure they can quit vim. Now they can quit vim.
I can quit vim any time I want. I just don’t want to.
It’s the opposite of nerd sniping.
:wqwill write even if you didn’t change anything;:xwon’t. (similar to:wvs:up)
Why would I want to exit vim?
It is much easier not to
It’s very easy to terminate vim. I just use the power button.
Uh… so u guys don’t change the PC each time that’s cool I would definitely try that …
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What if it’s a laptop?
Hold the power button for 10 seconds!
put it in the microwave
Disconnect the battery terminals obviously!
Or just wait a while
when you click enable vim it should just start nano
I hate when I use visudo and it opens in nano and I try to use vi controls
Gotta set your sudo editor environment variable
jjjjjjjjj
Great idea for when you start in IT! Always had trouble first year in my apprenticeship when i had accidentally opened vim. Ask for first time and after 2 months not used.
Did someone already open a pull request?
Tricky question, but I think I have a solution:
:!readlink /proc/$PPID/fd/* | grep “$(dirname %)/.$(basename %).sw” | xargs -I{} rm “{}” ; kill -9 $PPID
A lot of my personal dislike for VIM would be done away with if it just had a helpful common keys cheat sheet (basic cursor navigation, edit mode, exit with and without saving, etc) at the bottom of the editor window like Nano does.
Really, I’d just recommend using nano then. It’s installed basically anywhere you can find vim and works perfectly fine as a text editor! To use vim effectively it has a learning curve no matter what, so it’s not necessarily meant for everyone.
I understand where you’re coming from, but as a frequent user of vim I’d much rather have the additional line of text.
It should be default on, with a setting to turn it off for power users
They could even have one of the commands on the cheatsheet be to hide it, so anyone who doesn’t want it will immediately see how to turn it off.
I don’t mean to be all “BuT iT’s cLOseD SoURce” but you should give Logseq or Zettlr a try. They’re similar WYSIWYG markdown editors, but also FOSS. Zettlr also has vim keys.
Plus Obsidian is horrible at editing tables.
Also not a fan about the closed source thing, but I like about Obsidian that it’s all just markdown. If I ever need to ditch it, I can keep and use my existing files as they are.
Would this also be possible with Zettlr or Logseq?
Been using Logseq for six months, and yes. It’s all just .md and media files referenced by relative links.
This was an important factor the choice to use it. Having used several note taking applications / systems, getting your data ‘out’ in a painless fashion is the #1 concern.
That is just hilarious but also…
I just remembered that Bram Moolenaar, the author of vim has recently died…
He was a real good person. Back when he released his first vim for Amiga Computers I exchanged some emails with him and he handled even my less smart suggestions very professional.
I just take the chance to remind everyone to spend some money for his Uganda Charity.
