What editor do you use?

[Solar]

Ignoring the first half, unconstructive. Second half, of course it's my fault that I am unable to use Vim. I cannot for the life of me fathom its context and usage, I feel like I'm wrangling an octopus just to type a single character. Maybe you could take your own advice. Unsubscribing, was nice conversation while it lasted.

Geez, that's a reaction and a half... well... ok...

[fgnj]

I switched back and forth between emacs and vi throughout most of my upper-level courses in college, and honestly I never want to go back. Granted, I never bothered to learn any plugins or macros, so I probably can't complain too much, but switching between files and copy-pasting was such a nightmare, especially when you were working remotely. On the school's actual linux machines, the version of emacs was slightly better, but project management was still such a pain. I honestly have no idea how people managed before GUI.

I like notepad++ a lot to be honest. It's pretty easy to download syntax packages or roll your own if you need to do something like use some weird assembly instruction set (Sublime seems to really over-complicate this). Visual Studio Code has also grown on me a lot. There isn't too much bloat if you're fairly conservative with plugins, and the built-in SSH is nice when I want to work on Raspberry Pi stuff.

[Solar]

I honestly have no idea how people managed before GUI.

Vim was created as a vi clone on the Amiga; very much post-GUI. Apparently Bram M. saw the need for it.

But the whole idea (and, IMHO, advantage) of ex/vi/Vim is that you do everything without your hands ever leaving the typing position. Even the ubiquitous escape key -- on the machine where Ex/Vi were created, "Esc" resided roughly where modern keyboards have their Caps-Lock. (One common hack is to re-map Caps-Lock to Esc, another is to get used to Ctrl-[ instead, which -- on the US keyboard -- is easy enough to reach.) And you get to "talk" to it with commands that have strong mnemonics, instead of clicking some GUI item that might change looks and/or position in the next version.

The downside is, of course, that you don't get to fully embrace that workflow until you got somewhat acquainted with Vim's idosyncracies.

Once you do, you can work multiple files in buffers (open as "vim file1.txt file2.txt", switch with ":bn" / ":bp"). Or multiple windows (open as "vim -o file1.txt file2.txt", switch with "Ctrl-w Ctrl-w" for the beginning and learn all the other window-manipulating commands later). Or multiple tabs (open as "vim -p file1.txt file2.txt", switch with ":tabn" / ":tabp"). Or a combination of all of those.

And once you got the setup you liked for any given project, save it with ":mksession session.vim", and pick things up again with "vim -S session.vim".

And so it goes on. You try to use Vim like Notepad "with some quirks", it's a pain in the backside. (And believe me, I've been there, and remained there for many a year before seeing the light.) You need to fully embrace it being different to get the benefits.

I fully agree, though, that things become more difficult once you want to Copy & Paste to / from somewhere outside of Vim:

• " for access a register
• * for the global register / clipboard
• y for copy ("yank"), p for paste

So "*y for copy, "*p for paste. You could map those to Ctrl-C and Ctrl-P, but I strongly advise against it. For one, things get funny around Ctrl-C (which you might want later on for, e.g., stop a running macro). For another, you never get to the point of asking "what do you mean, global clipboard?", which would then bring us to what you can do with the two dozen other clipboards that can be accessed by the alphabetic keys. After which we would go on to each key being able to hold a macro as well, and a jump mark...

[PavelChekov]

Mainly vi (it doesn't really exist anymore; I emulate it through a really stripped down version of vim), but I am migrating to elvis.

[rnd0]

Mainly vi (it doesn't really exist anymore; I emulate it through a really stripped down version of vim), but I am migrating to elvis.

Have you tried nvi -the BSD vi? The first thing I do when I reinstall any kind of Linux is replace vim with nvi.

[PavelChekov]

Mainly vi (it doesn't really exist anymore; I emulate it through a really stripped down version of vim), but I am migrating to elvis.

Have you tried nvi -the BSD vi? The first thing I do when I reinstall any kind of Linux is replace vim with nvi.

I have an Open machine, so I've used it, but vim and elvis have a few features that aren't in nvi, so I just live with them.

[eekee]

Mainly vi (it doesn't really exist anymore; I emulate it through a really stripped down version of vim), but I am migrating to elvis.

Have you tried nvi -the BSD vi? The first thing I do when I reinstall any kind of Linux is replace vim with nvi.

There's also a vi in the ex-traditional package. To quote:

This port of vi has generally preserved the original style, terminal control, and feature set. It adds support for international character sets, including multibyte encodings such as UTF-8, and some minor enhancements that were not present in BSD vi 3.7, but had been included in later vi versions for System V or in POSIX.2.

I've used a variety of minimalist Unix software in the past. I used this one a little; it was all right, but there were some minor terminal oddities. I probably used it on a system without terminfo so it used its internal database or something. (The last thing I really tried to do with Linux was build an *extremely* minimalist system. It was interesting, but not exactly worthwhile.)

[rdos]

My first editor was AEDIT. A (German) guy wrote a clone of it that is called MBEDIT. I've ported MBEDIT to my OS. It's my favorite command-line editor. Nowadays, I use notepad a lot, or OpenWatcom's IDE editor. Notepad allows me to easily embed UTF-8 into the code, which neither MBEDIT nor the OpenWatcom editor supports.

I don't like the Unix/Linux command line editors a lot, and I particularly dislike vi and vim. The Linux GUI editors are decent though.

[eekee]

I might have taken to MBEDIT, it's interesting to see a moded editor which is not VI. I didn't because it doesn't work right under FreeDOS, discouraging experimentation. The entire text area blinks, and FreeDOS lacks the appropriate fix.

[devc1]

My brain is stuck in a spinloop, nerve damage and burned transistors, the fans can't keep up with the heat and the thermal past is vaporasing -_ - Why some people are always attached to old software ? Just use VS Code : )

BanRight notice :
This is just an opinion, if you want to start a fight then go to an MMA organization and fight as you want.

[nexos]

Just use VS Code

I'd honestly love to switch away from VS Code. I love it in a lot of ways, its just so slow on my laptop.

Emacs is what I am going to switch to some day.

[nullplan]

Emacs is what I am going to switch to some day.

What's stopping you? At work, we are supposed to be using whatever IDE was on the mind of the lead developer at the time of project start, and I still use vim for everything.

[nexos]

What's stopping you?

Good question. TBH, it's solely time constraints. Time I can spend on programming is at a premium, I don't want to learn a new editor and take a lot of time on it. I mean, I know the basics of Emacs, but I have settings changes I need in order to use it but don't want to learn a new language (Emacs Lisp), especially when I've never typed a line of FP code in my life.

But I am going to switch eventually.

[AndrewAPrice]

I use Sublime. One day, it might be worth making my own, but not today.

[AndrewAPrice]

I was able to get my custom build system to generate .clang_complete files at the root of each source/include directory, and automatically update them when I update dependencies.

I'm happy to say that EasyClangComplete works great out of the box with no configuration and it's surprisingly very good.