thoughtbot
3 HN recommenders · recommended in 3 months, 2017–2021
32:07 · 228K views · Apr 30, 2015
George Brocklehurst of thoughtbot demonstrates Vim's built-in completion mechanisms, from word, line and block completion to ctags. The aim is to type less and make fewer typos.
HN users say it made Vim's completion system click for them.
3 comments from Hacker News
I've only used vim for three years and it's been a fantastic experience. Every time I'm in a normal editor I long for vim. I think the most important video I watched about vim was about text completion in a thoughtbot meetup [0]. There I learned about ctags, the jumplist and ways to complete words, sentences, lines and blocks of code. [0]: this video
There's a lot of engineering in Vim as well. E.g., Vim's completion system is actually real cool once you learn it (it "clicked" for me after watching this video: this video ). Vim regex, folding, and spellcheck also have useful features that you won't find anywhere else. More generally, I agree with you. If it were up to me I would prefer to use Emacs as a baseline. But it's not up to me, just like it wasn't up to Google to decide that Javascript wins. Ubiquity wins. Emacs lost. > for throwing everything and the kitchen sink into our editor. ... But with vim & neovim, people are building a complex operating environment That's not really true. The explicit goal of Nvim is to be embedded and focus on "peer to peer" nvim instances. That's the opposite of Emacs' constant reminder that there needs to be a single Emacs daemon controlling everything, and you "should never leave Emacs".
To go to the reverse route, I'm a SublimeText and Vim user that's debating going back to pure vim. Much of the functionality that I used ST for I found Vim could do naturally, with no plugins. This presentation taught me alot ( this video ), such as basic command completion. There is some stuff that Sublime can still do that I don't think Vim can (multi-cursor editing comes to mind, and that's still really handy when I'm making edits to HTML). Other stuff can be done by both but I happen to like ST's better (the awesome GitHub package comes to mind). And finally, I did pay $70 for an ST license, so I imagine I'll keep using it for another few years or so. But given that I do alot of remote administration on RHEL/CentOS boxes where vim is the only thing I can safely assume to be installed, it doesn't hurt to stay fluent in vim for such a day.