Hello vimmers,
I really feel that kouzennoki is someone sent by the emacs-use
mailing list, if there's one, because they're just jalous of how
wonderful is the modal command in vim.
I stopped going on usenet about 10 years ago, and I have to admit I
have never seen such a density of non-sense and wtf in such a long mail
that at first I thought WTF! tl;dr. But finally I did read it.
ok, that's it for the tl;dr. If you're bored, don't want to do
another project or just cannot find sleep, get on reading. Otherwise,
just *plonk* this whole thread. That's what I should have done, but too
late, I read too much, and now I'm feeding the troll. And that one eats
your fingers too, so beware.
On Sat, Jan 31, 2015 at 11:17:32PM +0100, kouzennoki@gmail.com wrote:
> On Sat, 31 Jan 2015, Erik Christiansen wrote:
[…]
> >and _practice_! ("Do, or do not; there is no try.")
> I'm sorry, but practice is a useless thing when it is required to have a
> meaningful experience AFTER the practice.
That sentence is just stupid. Reading, coding, and even *thinking*
is meaningful after the practice. You usually do not miss what you do
not have. And you can make a sense of something only after practicing
it.
> That whole mindset is just stupid. Learning in order to do something later
> on that you dislike doing.
Then don't do it, nobody forces you. If you don't like vim, use
emacs, nano, ed, cat!
> So normal learning takes place in the context of doing meaningful things.
> You want to do a certain thing, then you go and look up how to do it, or
> find out or discover how to do it. Then you do the thing, and on the next
> occassion of needing to do something, you repeat the process. In this way
> you work and you learn, and you learn as you work.
> And in this way you remember everything you learn, because every learning
> experience is meaningful and useful.
Indeed, and that's exactly the way I've been learning vim over the
last 10+ years. So here I'll talk about my very own experience: I first
read the tutorial, and understand some basic stuff. There are some I
agreed on, others less. I have never been a fan of the hjkl movements
(because this is so anti-dvorak layout), but I find myself using it
from time to time.
And over the last couple of years, I've discovered a group of people
that like to gather to drink, eat and troll happily, while showing off
new stuff discovered in our favorite editor. That group calls itself
tuppervim, and since then I made more progress than in the previous 10
years. And then I discover new movements like `}`, `]]` or `)`. And
if you don't know what it is? Just do :help it!
I'm not really a gamer, but they finally got me on doing some vim-
golf. And there I discovered the true beauty of the `t` and `f` motions.
I mean, I read about it in the manual, but thought how limited and
uninteresting they were. But, now I surprise myself using them daily.
Finally, I believe that vim, and more generally Vi, is a language,
and there's nothing natural about a language, it's something you do
learn. When you say that using the cursor and selecting etc‥ is "more
natural"/"easier", it's only because you've *learned* it first.
> But studying for 5 years on a university, just to get a diploma, or
> whatever... without doing really meaningful things with it. You forget
> everything, because it has never been relevant.
I spent 5 years on an university, and I feel the total opposite way,
I just never cared for the diploma, but was like a child in front of a
chocolate box picking his favorite chocolates each year.
I guess that if you havet hat point of view, you're lacking one of
the most important thing a human soul can have, it's curiosity!
> And asking someone to invest heavily in order to reap benefits in the far
> future (only to sacrifice your pleasure today) is just stupid. You could be
> spending that time achieving useful things, and not end up in some
> depressive or near or somewhat semi-depressive mood because you left the
> flow of having fun, and you are now studying boring stuff that you don't
> really need now.
Well, you're describing the way I feel when using inferior editors,
like emacs or sublime, I'm not even talking about notepad, or that thing
they call "text processor".
I'm using everyday vim, and using vim is a pleasure. I focus on what
I want to express or organize, and the editor is not getting in the way
whereas helping me to be faster at doing it.
So all in all, I guess that the real problem with vim is when you're
forced to use something else than vim that forces you to slow down and
care for trivial stuff like the font, the title, the alignment or what
else.
> >The basic problem was already evident in the prior post. ;-)
> The basic problem is that even Vim's help system is not user friendly.
whaaaaaaat? May be you'd prefer that:
http://www.pointsincase.com/files/u2/word-paper-clip.jpg
> >>So Vim is for me 80% frustration and 80% delight, if such a thing were
> >>possible :p.
> >Not only possible, but understandable - yet entirely self-created by
> >a learning laziness, as you show yourself at the first opportunity:
>
> Everything is self-created, but it is created out of a desire or perceived
> need to use a certain thing or tool at a certain time or moment or place or
> location. When you would be better off abandoning the tool, instead of
> forcing it through.
> And the frustration results from a mis-appreciation of what is required in
> that moment. In your exhaustion or tiredness you may try to get something
> working with a form of stubborn persistence when you would be better off
> choosing to do something else. And out of this the frustration comes. Of
> course it is self-created. But it is self-created out of a desire to GET
> THIS THING WORKING, not out of a laziness to learn.
Or it comes from your total lack of curiosity. Instead of asking
yourself what you can earn, what can that tool give to you in your
everyday life, you're just whining about the first challenge you're
facing. Poor you.
I actually learned to use a dvorak layout 15 years ago, and it took
me two painful week to reach the same comfort that I had with *erty
keyboard. Today, 15 days look pretty much nothing compared to 15 years
of dvorak being my everyday normality.
But then the frustrating effort of 15 days being handicaped of
typing less than a key each second, and slowly learning to type faster
by doing exercise, trolling on usenet (where speed does not count) or
IRC (where it does), helped me a lot to get up to speed.
And who knows, if I haven't done that then, I might have ended up
with a double carpal tunnel syndrom, and ended up coding that way:
http://www.looknohands.me/ (that girl is amazing, btw)
But luckily for me, I'm a dvorak user, and I like to think that not
only I've typed comfortably for more than 15 years, but I'm having my
hands in good wealth!
> Because there is no need to learn the fucking thing when you have no
> need to do that. Or to even use that. Like I said: learning something
> if you have a real good reason to do a thing is excellent, learning
> something if you had better spent your time elsewhere doing the same
> thing with less effort is pointless.
Because actually the whole point of learning vim, and being patient
to learn it little things at a time is to do things with less effort. I
know no other tool that do as many operations as vim in as few
keystrokes. For example, reformating the current paragraph or your quote
is just done by typing gqap. But I could delete the whole current
paragraph by typing dap. And paste it before the previous quote by doing
[[p.
Yes, it looks weird, it needs training and some effort. But that's
what computer scientists do: when there's a repetitive boring task, we
take some effort to make it never happen again. I'm not taking the mouse
again to shift select and then ^x to then click again and ^v. (thinking
about that makes my carpal canal hurt).
> Why on earth select a tool that requires more investment when you have
> alternatives available that cost less?
STOP USING YOUR COMPUTER! It needs you to do some investment, as you
got to actually type on a thing called keyboard to make it do something.
And then you may even have to think.
> The logical, rational and sensible choice is to ditch the expensive tool
> (for that moment, or situation, or time) and to use the thing that already
> works. Or works with less cost.
Yup, stop using it, and use a TV. It costs less, and it's easier to use.
> >The arrow keys work fine in vim, and there is no need to use HJKL.
> >If you have a terminal problem which miscodes those keys, so that they
> >are not recognised by vim, then why do you not:
> >
> >a) Fix it in the terminal config, or
> >b) Fix it in .vimrc, or
> >c) Google for a fix, or
> >d) Post a message for information, rather than just a moan.
>
> What if:
> - you have no time to look up details of the terminal config
> - you don't even have a good terminal at your disposal
> - you have no time to fix .vimrc while spending perhaps 2 hours getting the
> thing working because of your failing mental state
> - fixing a thing that requires more time to fix it (and then do it) than it
> does to work with the limitations is not a good spending of time, unless you
> have the intent to let it be an asset for the future. But if the limiting
> condition may well be gone within a week, such a thing would not apply, as
> you would be investing time in a solution that you can throw a way a few
> steps down the road.
and what if your display has the wrong brightness, and you miss half
the keys of the keyboards (oh, right, that's already your case), and you
do not have a mouse, and you do not have an Internet connection, and you
do not have electricity, and you actually don't even have a computer?
Then yes, you cannot use vim.
Vim has been designed to work with an environment, which includes
everything from your computer to the shell running it. If you're too
stupid to configure your tools, then don't use them, you might harm
yourself.
> - posting a message may also be too difficult or require more time than you
> have, seeing as that probably you want to do that thing now.
Well, your problem in the first place is that you did not want to
learn. If you've learned something, you might have actually not needed
to post a message. And by the way, you usually don't need to post a
message, as the answer is in the manual or in a simple search on your
favorite search engine.
Ah right, you don't know how to read, you miss half of your
keyboard, and right, you don't have a computer. That's not helping to
use vim.
> >Vim is powerful, but does demand a learning commitment, because of
> >that. If the failing mode awareness is due to ageing wetware (and
> >therefore more difficult to overcome), then one of many useful vim
> >configurations might help.
> People have no need to deal with hard-to-use tools when they have
> better things to do with their time. The tool is there for the user
> (it is a servant) not the other way around. There is no requirement
> whatsoever in life to keep up or be able to use a specific tool just
> for the sake of being able to use it.
indeed, and learning to drive a car is not useful, you can just jump
in and go where you want, because you've already done it in GTA? And you
might actually fly a plane as well, because learning to pilote it is
totally irrelevant, you used to throw paper planes at school (instead of
learning), how much harder would that be?
EVERY tool needs to be learned in order for someone to use it. A
human being does even need to learn to eat and to poop! That does not
mean the user is a servant of the tool. Every tool needs to be learned.
> But it all boils down to cost-benefit.
It takes more time to learn to fly a plane, but once you know it,
you can travel faster than by car. Using vim feels like flying on the
text edition, whereas other editors makes you slower.
> And sometimes, indeed, there is a gain in spending time with complaining
> when it is obvious that even though Vim may be perhaps lacking in certain
> important areas, there still might not be any tool that comes close to it,
> regardless.
Well, even though I'm part of the people that tend to cristicize
about vim from time to time, it's mostly because of the things that you
don't see, neither its interface or the experience. And those things are
being fixed (at least I hope) by neovim, and are because Bram started
working on vim while I was still playing on my Amstrad.
> And in that case investing effort in either improving the tool, or
> complaining to people that might improve it, or to break a mindset
> that the tool doesn't need improvement whatsoever, because the user is
> always to blame and never the tool, well.... perhaps then complaining
> is also a form of investment, instead of using a difficult help system
> it might be useful to complain about the difficulty of using it ;-)..
There I do not agree. The tool is very simple in its design, even
though it might be hard to learn. But once you understood the way it has
been designed, you can only be happy it is working that way and not
another.
> Such things are at the behest of the developer or maintainer or
> configurator. It should not be asked of every idividual user to improve the
> basic default user friendliness of an application.
that's choice/flexibility versus conveniency/ease of use. You have
as many vim configuration as there vim users. It's all customizable, and
if you like it, you can take it as is, if you don't you can change it. I
personally even configured emacs key moves in the insert mode (yes, I
dared!).
[…]
> And hence I have had years and years of being frustrated and not anyone to
> talk to it about, or about it. My apologies if that seems like unfair or
> anything, but still it is a good opportunity to get it out and also convey
> the sentiment that yes.
> Vim is not user friendly. Not the slightest.
> Or indeed, more positively described:
> Vim is user unfriendly. :p.
User friendliness is a very subjective thing. It is considered that
a terminal is not user friendly. You say vim is not userfriendly. But
this is non sense.
I find that the terminal is the best user experience ever, it feels
like talking to your computer, in a few keystrokes you can do hundreds
of actions that would need days to browse through all the menus, the
clicks and the panels a so called user friendly system would give.
All those systems, like Apple XCode that wants to do a lot of stuff
automagically for you, or the arduino IDE that compiles files all alone
without giving you any idea on the order of compilation? That's very
user-unfriendly to me, because it hides me essential part of how it's
working not giving me the ability to make it work the way I need it to
work.
Vim is not like that.
> And the help system itself is your enemy, not your friend. I will relate in
> the other email, if still allowed here ;-) :-/.
Like using any manual, it has its own conventions. Learn them and it
will be your best friend. Don't do that, and stay stupid.
> Hey I like this quote!!!
[…tl;dr]
> Entitled princess syndrome.
I may type fast in my editor, but it does not help reading faster.
Instead of writing down your life in a public mailing list, you'd better
go RTFM, talk with other users and learn how to better learn and love
vim! You were the one saying that you had better stuff to do in your
life than RTFM? But how compares talking about your life with RTFM to be
a better programmer and a smarter user of your editor, that will be four
favorite editor, but you don't know it yet?
BTW, I say you were talking about your life, but 320 lines that you
wrote *after* saying Bye in the discussion, in a mail that was already
320 lines… WTF?!
N.B.: This mail has been happily written with vim and using a dvorak
layout. And this has been a pleasure, and this is where the real poetry
is! (yeah, back on topic of the thread :-p)
my €.0002, sorry,
--
Guyzmo
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