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Bram Moolenaar
Personal blog · moolenaar.netprogrammingwriting
Bram Moolenaar's personal blog at moolenaar.net covers programming and writing. Since 2008, 37 different Hacker News readers have linked it 43 times, most often “Seven habits of effective text editing”. No feed was found, so read it on the site itself.
Most-linked posts?
- Seven habits of effective text editing18 people · 18 mentions · first linked 2008-06-20
- Vim: Seven habits of effective text editing (2000)3 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2021-12-18
- Seven habits of effective text editing (2000)2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2017-10-23
- Seven habits of effective text editing2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2022-03-29
- /habits_2007.pdf2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2023-08-05
- /bright.html2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2023-08-05
What Hacker News says?
Sure, and I do that when I can (e.g. not when I'm writing SQL), but the point of my quick examples isn't to show off my software engineering, but to illustrate what vim can do in the simplest way I can think of. I guess I'm failing to make the point, so I'll just refer to the articles that got me to try it in the first place. http://www.viemu.com/a-why-vi-vim.html http://www.moolenaar.net/habits.html
Comment linking /habits.html
on “Why Kakoune – The quest for a better code editor”Submitted Seven habits of effective text editing (2000) as a story · 323 points
HN discussionDon't do what this guy says! Or at least don't stay in phase 1 for longer than a day. I've had used vim for a few years as a pico replacement, whenever I was on a remote computer on ssh. I picked up some really bad habit, like staying in insert mode all the time and using the arrow, home and end keys. I actually had to deactivate the arrow keys in my vimrc. I would recommend going thought the tutorial, that comes wi…
Comment linking /habits.html
on “Learn Vim Progressively”Submitted Seven habits of effective text editing as a story · 132 points
HN discussionvimtutor is especially useful for beginners. Very interactive. Makes you want to learn more once you're done with it. I remember reading this beautiful essay Seven habits of effective text editing by Bram Moolenaar, the main author of Vim. http://www.moolenaar.net/habits.html
Comment linking /habits.html
on “Interactive Vim tutorial”Submitted Vim: Seven habits of effective text editing (2000) as a story · 55 points
HN discussion> indexes everything So should your text editor (and/or it's companion programs) > and provides superior auto-completion. See above. Superior is a bold claim, superior out of the box for "strongly" supported languages, perhaps? (Eg: one way of working with java in vim is to use eclipse for extracting some information about a project[1]) Personally I'm more familiar with vim, than with Emacs -- arguably the main diff…
Comment linking /habits.html
on “New GNU Emacs website”Submitted Vim: Seven habits of effective text editing (2000) as a story · 53 points
HN discussionAlmost everytime I read about someone finding LLMs useful for a programming task, the description of how the LLMs are used sounds like either the person is missing domain knowledge, don't use a capable editor, or are not familiar with reading docs. When I find myself missing domain knowledge, my first action is to seek it. Not to try random things that may have hidden edge cases that I can't foresee. The semantics o…
Comment linking /habits.html
on “The Software Engineering Identity Crisis”Submitted Seven habits of effective text editing as a story · 27 points
HN discussionWhat I found about Vim is that it requires a bit of mind shift, compared to other IDEs. I came to the game very late, but yeah, I've been editing with Vim for the past 6-7 years. My primary motivation when moving to Vim, was that I didn't like using mouse and then running back to the keyboard to write text. Now, it might not seem like much time is wasted during this shift, but imagine doing this many time during wor…
Comment linking /habits.html
on “Turning vim into an IDE through vim plugins”Submitted Vim: Seven habits of effective text editing as a story · 16 points
HN discussionIt took me a day to use it as "notepad with syntax highlighting", couple of weeks before I started preferring normal mode to insert mode, and from there on I slowly evolved my configuration and the tricks I use/learn. Nowadays when using vim I occasionally have people ask me "how did you do that?" and I won't even know what keys I typed. The keybindings are as natural as walking/grabbing things and require as much c…
Comment linking /habits.html
on “Vim's speed is not really the point (2013)”Submitted Seven habits of effective text editing as a story · 8 points
HN discussionYou might be right. Vim users seem to get by without it ( http://www.moolenaar.net/kopk.jpg ). TextMate users just need a soul patch. Hmm, does this mean there's a marketing opportunity for hipster-oriented Emacs screencasts?
Comment linking /kopk.jpg
on “The Programmer Dress Code ”Submitted Vim fortunes as a story · 6 points
HN discussionhttp://www.moolenaar.net/Charityware.html
Comment linking /Charityware.html
on “Chocolat 1.0 Released”Submitted Seven habits of effective VIM text editing as a story · 4 points
HN discussionHere is a word from horse mouth itself - Bram's tip on "Seven habits of effective text editing" - http://www.moolenaar.net/habits.html
Comment linking /habits.html
on “Ask HN: Suggestions for mastering vim?”Submitted Seven habits of effective text editing as a story · 3 points
HN discussionvimtutor is pretty good, actually. Outside of that, http://yanpritzker.com/2011/12/16/learn-to-speak-vim-verbs-n... has a nice explanation of the editing worldview, which ties in with Steve's quote in http://learnvimscriptthehardway.stevelosh.com/chapters/16.ht... , "The idea of operators and movements is one of the most important concepts in Vim, and it's one of the biggest reasons Vim is so efficient. We're going…
Comment linking /habits.html
on “Learn Vimscript the Hard Way”Submitted The Continuing Story of Vim (2000) [pdf] as a story · 3 points
HN discussionBecause it’s a power tool, not a beginner tool. The beginner tool is notepad and nano, where instructions are spelled out or follow some conventions. Expert tools are for the problems you face even after learning the in and outs of the beginner tools. Vim solve them by smashing convention in order to build a system of composable elements. Emacs solve it by building a vm and a user interface where everything in betwe…
Comment linking /habits.html
on “Mastering Vim Grammar”Submitted Seven habits of effective text editing (2000) as a story · 3 points
HN discussionWhile it was well written, and with best intentions, I don't think there is any real significant "tips" to increase "productivity". All things aside these are just some best practices sprinkled with some examples. This is similar to when your parents tell you to brush your teeth and floss daily. I haven't been programming a lot but here are some ideas that I've found, in similar vein to the parent article. 1. Watch…
Comment linking /habits.html
on “Productivity Tips for Programmers”Submitted Text editing tips from the creator of VIM as a story · 3 points
HN discussionI second taking notes as you go, here are mines (from 2 years ago, in french): https://github.com/romainl/dotvim/wiki/Notes Bram Moolenaar's seven habits has great insights about this subject: http://www.moolenaar.net/habits.html
Comment linking /habits.html
on “2013 Resolutions: a man page a day makes the newb go away”Submitted The Continuing Story of Vim (2000) [pdf] as a story · 2 points
HN discussionI've been using Vim for about 5 years now. I started because I needed an editor that supported syntax highlighting and auto-indent to work on the university servers over SSH. It took (still takes) a lot of time to learn Vim. At first I used it as notepad with syntax-highlighting with auto-indent. That is, I immediately entered insert-mode and kept in there for as long as I could. But slowly I've started to learn mys…
Comment linking /habits.pdf
on “Ask HN: I'm done with the IDE. What's a good alternative?”Submitted Vim: Seven habits of effective text editing (2000) as a story · 2 points
HN discussion
