Ask Experienced Devs

1064 readers

1 users here now

Icon base by Delapouite under CC BY 3.0 with modifications to add a gradient

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

Users of Vim and similars, what exactly makes it useful compared to other text editors? How much time do you suppose you save when working with it? (programming.dev)

submitted 4 months ago by ICastFist@programming.dev to c/ask_experienced_devs@programming.dev

72 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I'd like actual examples instead of "I work faster", something like "I can move straight to the middle of the file with 7mv" or "I can keep 4 different text snippets in memory and paste each with a number+pt, like 2pt", things that you actually use somewhat frequently instead of what you can do, but probably only did once.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] Balinares@pawb.social 7 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Multiple cursors are fantastic for certain use cases, but will not help you when each line needs a different input -- if you're swapping arguments in function calls, if you're replacing one bracket type with another around contents of arbitrary length, etc.

Mind you, if your objective here is to not learn a new thing, then you can just go ahead and do that, you don't need an excuse.

[–] sukhmel@programming.dev 3 points 4 months ago

Yeah, I usually do that with regexp replacement in other editors, but sometimes it's too hard to express as a regular expression