this post was submitted on 09 Feb 2024
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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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I like VIM as a casual user.
I barely know any of the fancy shortcuts, never successfully used a macro in my life, can't remember how to open more than one edit buffer and have to look it up every single time, and I still constantly wrongfoot copy and paste regularly to the point where I consider it a waste of my time to try and I just type things out the long way. I totally get why people feel very defeated by this editor.
But I do feel very slick darting around with
hjkl, occasionally throwing in aggor aGor a$to leap around. Yeah, there are faster ways to get where I want if I'd only learn them, and I may some day, but this gets me around. If you can build up just the basic movements, that's enough to at least begin to appreciate the editor.Not having to touch my mouse to edit text is a massive game changer that is worth it on its own. Not that vim is the only one that offers this benefit, of course. But what it does well that I haven't experienced in editors I've tried is how beautifully it flows if you happen to already know how to touch-type. Y'know, hands on the homerow, certain fingers hit certain keys, building up the muscle memory so you don't have to look at the keyboard to type, all that. It's why vim uses
hjklto move the cursor--it's where the right hand rests in a touch-typist position.If you don't use keyboards this way, vim will probably ruin you. I know a lot of people who are proficient typists who never learned standard touch typing, instead home-rolling their own cursed setup that works for them, and god bless them, but they would be hard-pressed to negotiate vim. If this is you, vim may not be the editor for you.
What do you mean by this?
I can never reliably cut/copy and paste what I want in Vim. I'm always either picking up or leaving behind stray characters at the edges of my visual selection, because I find the end cursor so counterintuitive.
Especially true when newlines are involved, it's always a mystery how many newlines I'll paste into my document when I hit
pto put.This is not Vim's fault, it's just skill issue.
Oh, and it's also a mystery whether the system clipboard will work properly with Vim out of the box or not. There's some voodoo setting you have to tweak if it doesn't.
I see. Yeah, the end cursor can take some getting used to.
The thing that always messed me up when starting out was how deleting any text overwrites the clipboard. It was an odd quirk at first but I kind of like it now.
Yeah, the notion that "cut" and "delete" are the same operation was an interesting hurdle. It's quite elegant, honestly.
The only thing it disrupts is the situation where you want to copy something, delete a second thing, then paste the first thing. Oops! Too bad! It's gone now!
I'm aware we do have access to multiple registers in Vim, effectively giving us many clipboards to bypass this, but I don't know the commands to utilize them. Without that knowledge, this little quirk remains an occasional irritation. Just not irritating enough to motivate me enough to knuckle down and learn it.