What was the name of the original Vim magic-auto-default setup project? I wish I could remember it! There used to be so many Vim questions on Stackoverflow from people who installed Vim ________ (?) and had no idea what it did. The advice was always: "Stop using that, and learn Vim." This project smells like that.
There are two types of Vim users:
1. "Stop trying to make Vim and IDE with all your fancy plugins, learn Vim!"
2. "Vim is so much more than a text editor, of course you can use it as an IDE."
These two Vim users are usually the same person.
You have to learn Vim's terrible, verbose, antiquated commands in depth in order to justify using Vim. If you don't use q: (q colon) and q/ (q forward slash) in Vim, for example, you probably don't know Vim well enough to justify the efficiency loss you have compared to you using a modern IDE with multiple cursors.
Aside: It blows my mind that there are still plugin managers being invented for Vim. That's a bad sign for an editor. This shouldn't exist in userland.
>You have to learn Vim's terrible, verbose, antiquated commands in depth in order to justify using Vim. If you don't use q: (q colon) and q/ (q forward slash) in Vim, for example, you probably don't know Vim well enough to justify the efficiency loss you have compared to you using a modern IDE with multiple cursors.
How is scrolling through your past commands and searches anything like having multiple cursors?
If I want to use the same command I just type `:` followed by the start of the command and press up and it automatically fills in the rest of that command and I can even go back and forward in that history. Same with searching.
Also how is any of this "efficiency loss". Whenever someone talks about efficiency loss or performance in their IDE it is usually some very niche thing that they have gotten good at, but often the house of cards crumbles when they try to do anything else.
> Aside: It blows my mind that there are still plugin managers being invented for Vim. That's a bad sign for an editor. This shouldn't exist in userland.
I'm not sure what you're talking about… the fact that plugin managers continue to be developed for Vim and Neovim tells us there are new use cases today that didn't exist 20 years ago. Neovim isn't your undergraduate Vi/Vim from back in the day.
What's amazing is the plugin managers continue to improve, especially for Neovim.
Lazy.vim [1] is amazingly good.
Refactoring eliminated 30% of Vim's legacy code and the choice of Lua for the scripting language has unleashed a stunning amount of creativity in Neovim/Vim community.
I would argue vim's cryptic commands like q/, gg, ciw, etc. are anything but verbose. Especially compared to gui editors where similar actions are achieved by clicking through menus.
Your example of commands is a bit odd; I've used many editors without knowing how to access search/command history without that being a detriment to my usability of the editor. If your argument is that one needs a high degree of understanding of vim for it to be useful (more so than IDEs), then I have to disagree. Vim motions alone skyrocket productivity. Anything you can do with multiple cursors, can be done with substitution, repeat motions, block select, macros, etc. Then there are always plugins, should the built in features not satisfy.
There are two types of Vim users:
1. "Stop trying to make Vim and IDE with all your fancy plugins, learn Vim!"
2. "Vim is so much more than a text editor, of course you can use it as an IDE."
These two Vim users are usually the same person.
You have to learn Vim's terrible, verbose, antiquated commands in depth in order to justify using Vim. If you don't use q: (q colon) and q/ (q forward slash) in Vim, for example, you probably don't know Vim well enough to justify the efficiency loss you have compared to you using a modern IDE with multiple cursors.
Aside: It blows my mind that there are still plugin managers being invented for Vim. That's a bad sign for an editor. This shouldn't exist in userland.