Why oh why did I defend VIM last week?

Miscellaneous Topics
#1

The ****ing thing just deleted half an article I’d written, and I can’t rewrite it (It contained a load of sites / resources etc I’d spent ages looking up but not bookmarked and aren’t in my cache, plus all the carefully worded paras I can’t redo :frowning: ).

I hit “u” to undo, but the redo function is broken. For a start, it’s not “r”, so it fails the most core laws of UI design: never do unobvious stuff, never damage the user’s document unless you provide an obvious way out, etc. Secondly, when I looked it up online, all the commands didn’t work.

Maybe I’m old-fashioned, but in my world you do NOT release a text editor with a broken REDO function! Bastards. Well, that’s one less article that will be appearing on JGF :(. (unless someone else ends up writing something similar)

#2

Feel stressed? Can I suggests getting very very drunk :slight_smile:

What was the article about?

Kev

#3

It’s Ctrl-r. The “r” key already has a binding in classic vi. Vim kicks ass, and to this very day, I haven’t found it worth my time to trade in the vim/ant combo for any ide, and I’ve tried eclipse, netbeans, intellij, and jbuilder.

As a side note, I’ve had the power go out several times on me, and the swapfile feature has saved my butt each time. Thank goodness for “recover”.

God bless,
-Toby Reyelts

#4

Good point. For a long time, vi(m) was much better than the majority of text editors. Although…nowadays it’s pretty much standard to use two-phase editing (and even 2-phase saves, so that if the write fails partway you don’t corrupt a previously-working file).

#5

Blah, seriously, if you’re not comfortable with using Vim, don’t use it! Like any uber-powerful bit of software, it’ll blow your leg off if you start hitting random characters.

Just to tease us, what was the article about anyway?

Toby: Eclipse has a vi keybinding, which works pretty well. However, if you do prefer to use the full Vim (who doesn’t?) you can easily tell it to launch that when opening files. No need to lose Vim at all, and all the benefits of a slick build system! (BTW, I expect NetBeans can do this as well.)

#6

I’ve used vim loads by now. It was even my IDE for a couple of years (not just for masochistic pleasure - I had to develop across 3 unix systems at one job, and then had problems getting mainstream IDE’s like JEdit working (they just kept crashing) so I started programming commands etc) , it’s just that occasionally it does some serious hurting like this :(.

Article wasn’t that exciting or I’d be more inclined to start again from scratch. Just a collection of methods and tricks with java, not necessarily games-specific. Stuff like using inner classes creatively etc.