First of all. This is not another “how do I exit vim?” shitpost.
I’ve been using (neo)vim for about two years and I started to notice, that I,m basically unable to use non-vim editors. I do not code a lot, but I write a lot of markown. I’d like to use dedicated tools for this, but their vim emulators are so bad. So I’m now stuck with my customized neovim, devoid of any hope of abandoning this strange addiction.
Any help or advice?
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Switch to emacs with evil-mode https://github.com/emacs-evil/evil. You get best of both: nice operating system with build in vim.
I considered heresy and switching churches, but Lisp and rumours of multiple bugs kept me on the vim side
I always would recommend people to switch to emacs. It is truly a wonderfully transformative experience. But in your case, the question is why do you want to quit using (n)vim?
The only reasonable choice!
I switched to (Doom)-Emacs from a ~7yr old homegrown Vim config last week and honestly the configuration is less bad than it seems. If you’re mainly writing markdown you’ll probably get 99% of the way there by just enabling the dedicated module
As someone who is currently learning emacs, I gotta say, this comment has the energy of someone offering heroin to someone struggling to moderate their cannabis usage (given OP indicated that custom config if a thing they’re finding burdensome in a way)
10% how to exit vim
80% wow vim is great! I love it!
10% how to exit vimThis doesn’t really seem like a meme (note: the name of this community).
Since you posted in multiple communities I’ll add my same reply as the others here:
Take vim with you to something with a lot more features! I use vscode with vim plugin/key bindings lol
Vim is extremely feature-rich, and people that think otherwise don’t really know how to use vim. Saying vim doesn’t have a lot of features is just a meme that isn’t true.
Also, the vim plugin for vscode is kind of a joke compared to what vim can do. It’s very “surface-level” with minor emulation of some of the common keybinds.
Saying that Vim isn’t feature-rich is like saying that a terminal isn’t feature-rich. The features are right there, you just have to find them.
Also, the vim plugin for vscode is kind of a joke compared to what vim can do.
Dang. Hot take! I don’t think I’ve heard anyone else say that.
You clearly actually completed VimTutor.
I have several complaints about the VSVim plugin, but it’s easily the most feature complete Vim-like plugin I’ve ever encountered.
I’m trying to pay you a compliment, but I am doing it poorly.
As a legend among my Vim using peers, I can see how VSVim can be frustrating, to someone who truly leverages Vim.
Your annoyance with VSVim outs you as one of the true power users.
Yeah it sounds like you’re trying to mock me but it mostly just comes across as confusing. Maybe it’s just sarcasm? Hard to tell.
Anyway, it’s pretty well-known in the vim community that VSVim is pretty lackluster vim emulation. There are much better examples of vim emulation out there, such as evil for emacs.
It honestly has nothing to do with being a “power user”. It’s simply false to claim that vscode has more features than vim (which is what the parent comment was claiming), and this should be evident to anyone with more than the most basic, surface-level understanding of vim (more than vimtutor, basically). Vim is a lot more than HJKL and
ciw
.I’m not annoyed with VsVim really since I honestly don’t really think about it as it’s not all that relevant. I do find it a bit irksome when people make false or misleading claims about vim from a place of ignorance about what it actually is.
It’s a strange phenomenon with vim in particular, where many people are exposed to it at their periphery, read some reductive claim about it online, and parrot said claim all over the place as though it were fact. Perhaps the nature of being a tool that most are exposed to but few actually learn.
It’s simply false to claim that vscode has more features than vim
Holy shit. I would never claim that. Lol.
And I was expanding on my original comment, which was not replying to you, so there you have it.
Makes sense. I only really replied there to help anyone reading along.
Not sarcasm. I’m genuinely satisfied with VSCode’s Vim emulation, and you’re the first person I have heard say otherwise.
I just meant - that means you’re using features that most of us aren’t.
Fair point about evil mode for Emacs being better, but that requires using Emacs, which I have found un-usable, so far.
There’s many very basic features of vim that VsVim does not have (like… almost all command line commands), basic features which regular vim users use all the time.
You seem to think that people using vim emulation is the norm and using vim itself is the exception and unusual… Which is very much not the case. The opposite is true, with VsVim users being a minority. It’s relatively novel among vscode users (most just use a mouse and maybe a small handful of built-in shortcuts), whereas vim itself is quite ubiquitous in the Unix world, with many Linux machines even providing it as the default editor. I know many vim and emacs users (including lots that I work with), and maybe 1 VsVim user (honestly not even sure if they do).
There’s many very basic features of vim that VsVim does not have (like… almost all command line commands), basic features which regular vim users use all the time.
!
is supported:https://github.com/VsVim/VsVim/blob/master/Documentation/Supported Features.md
It sounds like you haven’t tried VsVim in a long be time, or had an unusually bad experience with it.
(Edit: My responses to your other points were my old man energy, and not worth anyone’s time, so I removed them.)
! is supported
Vim’s command line, i.e, commands starting with
:
. The vanishingly few it does support are, again, only the most basic, surface-level commands (and some commands aren’t even related to their vim counterparts, like:cwindow
, which doesn’t open the quick fix list since the extension doesn’t support that feature).Your experience is out of date.
The last commit to the supported features doc was 5 years ago, so no, it isn’t. Seriously, you can’t possibly look at that doc and tell me that encompasses even 20% of vim’s features. Where’s the quick fix list? The location list? The args list? The change list? The jump list? Buffers? Vim-style window management (including vim’s tabs)? Tags? Autocommands (no, what it has does not count)? Ftplugins?
ins-completion
? The undo tree? Where’s:edit
,:find
,:read [!]
, and:write !
?:cdo
,:argdo
,:bufdo
,:windo
?Compared to what vim can do, it is absolutely a joke.
Install windows XP and start practicing using notepad, after some years ctrl+c and ctrl+v will be second nature.
When you are comfortable with that then install visual studio 6.0 and practice using it, now you are finally ready for VS Code
Need more info.
The answer will still and always be, just use nvim.
What features do these dedicated tools have that make you want to use something other than nvim?
First thing is decent tables editor and the second is katex previewer.
Something like vim-table-mode work as an improvement? You got me there though, tables can be a real pain in a terminal.
For the second, I setup an on save hook or watch script to build a PDF and open it. Its been a minute, but I think I had to find a PDF viewer that would refresh if already open and keep the current position on subsequent opens.
Best of luck finding something that works for you!
I use a different tool, visidata. It’s especially nice when used as a
psql
pager.A text editor isn’t the right tool for editing tabular data, imo.
As for KaTeX, what I would do is have a preview process running outside of vim that watches for changes in source files and re-renders. That’s the Unix way of doing things.
Some editors can embed neovim, for example: vscode-neovim. Not sure how well that works though as I never tried it.
Cold Turkey
Force yourself to use another editor like Zed, don’t use vim keybinds and get reintegrated into pleb life
Emacs evil mode
:q! while you are ahead
Switch to Doom Emacs?
You write it in vim and then copy paste it once you are done.
BTW, why do you need a markdown editor?
learn kakoune or helix, become even more entrenched.
i vastly prefer the object-verb keybinds to vim’s verb-object, but now i can’t even find bindings for other editors so i’m permanently stuck now