My wife was unimpressed by Vim

LinearArray@programming.dev to Programmer Humor@programming.dev – 932 points –
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Honestly those things just don't sound like common enough actions to be worth shaving 0.5 seconds off. How often do you know exactly how many lines to move a line by? And how often do you even need to move a line that far?

I still don't buy it.

Relative lines means each line except the one your cursor is on is relative to your current line. Like this:

5 5k jumps here

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6 your cursor is here

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8 8j jumps here

The main reason I like it is I don't like mouse ergonomics. Keeping my hands on the keyboard just feels better

Yes I understood that. My point is how often do you know you need to move a line exactly 17 lines? Do you count them? Clearly much slower than doing it interactively by holding down ctrl-shift-down for a bit.

I just look at the line number. If the code I want to edit is 17 lines up there's a 17 next to it. My ide window looks like my comment. Normally an ide would look like this

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As a vim user myself, I don't understand why you need relative lines either. I can just as easily type :23 to go to line 23.

Mostly a matter of taste I think. One benefit is one less key press since relative keys shouldn't need to press enter at the end of the command. I mostly use it because it came default with LazyVim.

Thoose are line numbers in IDE. You don't count them, you see them

Line numbers are absolute, not relative (normally anyway; I think some editors allow showing relative line numbers). Anyway I think holding down (page) up/down is going to be just as fast.

There are both modes for absolute and relative line numbers in vim. Holding up/down might be intuitive nd easy to remember, but saving 1 second everytime you need to do this can add up pretty fast

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Not "move the current line of code", but instead "jump the cursor a number of lines"

Oh so like page up/down then? Not exactly showing the raw power of Vim when you can use an existing key press! 😄

I can't tell if you're trolling; Page up and page down are different from "I need to jump 10 lines down" with 10j. Or 11 lines with 11j. Or "Delete the line I'm on and the six below it" with d6j.

They're not significantly different. Maybe it takes you 1s and me 2s. Not worth the effort of learning. Especially because Vim comes with significant downsides compared to full IDEs that will make you slower overall.

Name a downside, I'll tell you how you're probably wrong

You can't have a full integrated debug session with a watch window, locals (with an expandable tree for objects), stack, breakpoint list all visible at once. I.e. something comparable to this.

You can get pretty close to the same experience with https://github.com/mfussenegger/nvim-dap, any others?

If you consider that "pretty close" then I think you're going to dismiss anything else I say as insignificant anyway.

I do; you're only dismissing it because it's formatted differently from the exact workflow you're describing, but it's certainly just as powerful if not more so

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