u/rojoditin r/vim • Recommends
Believe it or not, YouTube has Vim keybindings. Use L to advance a video and J to rewind.
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#vim#brammoolenaar#textediting
7 Habits For Effective Text Editing 2.0
GoogleTalksArchive
21K subscribers • 7 videos on Hallway
- Recommended by 7 people: 5 on Hacker News, 1 on Lobsters and 1 in engineering communities.
- A classic. People kept recommending it from 2012 to 2023.
- Presented by Bram Moolenaar, creator of Vim
Beginner. No background in the topic needed.
126K views14 years ago7 recommendations
Tools and practiceVim, Emacs and editorsDeveloper productivityThe shell and command line
Vim creator Bram Moolenaar shares practical habits for identifying repetitive editing tasks and using editor features to automate them.
Google Tech Talks February 13, 2007 ABSTRACT A large percentage of time behind the computer screen is spent on editing text. Investing a little time in learning more efficient ways to use a text editor pays itself back fairly quickly. This presentation will give an overview of the large number of ways of using Vim in a smart way to edit programs, structured text and documentation. Examples will be used to make clear how learning a limited number of habits will avoid wasting time and lower the number of mistakes. Bram Moolenaar is mostly known for being the benevolent dictator of the text editor Vim. His roots are in electrical engineering and for a long time he worked on inventing image processing algorithms and software for big photo copying machines. At some point his work on Open-Source software became more important, making the development of Vim his full time job. He also did the A-A-P project in between Vim version 6.0 and 7.0. Now he works for Google in Zurich, still improving Vim on the side. His home page is moolenaar.net. Google engEDU Speaker: Brian MoolenaarWhy it's here
7 people recommend thisWhat people say. Highly recommended as an inspiring talk that motivates developers to master their text editors and eliminate editing inefficiencies.
Monkeygeton Hacker News • Recommends
On “Master Emacs in one year”
…he code you have to type right now and never read the editor's documentation nor learn new commands you'll keep using only basics commands and never will gain proficiency. Not efficient. If on the other hand you try to learn every feature immediately you'll waste time learning things you won't use and forget most of them anyway. Not efficient. 1 link to this video…
tzhenghaoon Hacker News • Recommends
On “Bram Moolenaar Passed Away”
Loved his "7 Habits For Effective Text Editing 2.0" (2007) talk and humor 1 "How many of you are mostly using Emacs?" a bunch of raised hands "Okay, we'll try to convert some people today!" RIP, Bram Moolenaar 1 - link to this video
1-2-3-5-8on Hacker News • Recommends
On “Vim Boss”
Thank you Bram for everything. Your talk, 7 Habits For Effective Text Editing 2.0 inspired me and it started my Vim journey. Using Vim all these years has been a complete joy. You will not be forgotten. Link to the talk: link to this video
ademon Hacker News • Recommends
On “A Quick Guide to Sublime Text”
The only thing you need to read about Vim to get started is here: link , the rest is learned pretty much by the following principle: 1. Detect inefficiency for a particular task 2. Find a faster way to do it 3. Make it a habit You can learn more about this approach in this video: link to this video
e12eon Hacker News • Recommends
On “Speed matters: Why working quickly is more important than it seems”
Reminds me of Mjoolnar's (author of vim) talk on 7 habits of effective editing 2.0; the core idea is essentially (my current interpretation): awareness: look for repetition - they are candidates for automation and/or being more effective. Rule of three: If you do something (anything) 3 times - figure out if it can be done more efficiently. In vim (or any other editor) an example might be shifting the indendation of code: maybe you only remember how to do it a line at a time; figure out how to work on blocks of code; figure out how to do it on a file - a whole project. link to this video
e12eon Hacker News • Recommends
On “Vim 8.0 is coming”
Personally, I find vim's modal editing to be very efficient. When starting from a clean slate, it doesn't really matter much -- but when changing/ editing existing text/code, I find it feels much more natural. It also works well without using the mouse, which is important to me because of carpal tunnel syndrome (and also helps when working without a proper mouse, such as on laptops). I've only toyed with emacs, but based on that, I don't think emacs' idea of keyboard "chords" is as good a fit as vi(m). With standard keybindings, it also puts a strain on my wrists. Modal editing and the "edit language"1 (verbs, nouns, modifiers (and motions), like dw=delete word, dd/dl=delete line, d$=delet…
e12eon Hacker News • Recommends
On “New GNU Emacs website”
…n making it easy to automate transformation of text. Any kind of text. With any kind of automation, via commands. As such they empower a continued process of improving the process of writing and editing. I like Moolenaar's (vim's creator) short text and expanded talk on 7 habits of effective text editing: "7 Habits For Effective Text Editing 2.0": link to this video "Seven habits of effective text editing": link I often feel that modern IDEs with typical "modern" languages, tend to trap you in a certain way of working that is "with" the IDE, that tend to be counter-productive if that "one true (editing) process" doesn't fit. And they tend to provide only something like…
initialcommiton Lobsters • Recommends
7 Habits For Effective Text Editing 2.0 (2007)
oelmekkion Hacker News • Mentions
On “Just Use Sublime Text”
In the next article : "Buy a lot of software and don't learn programming. It's hard, and after four years, I still can't write anything someone else didn't do better !" Not only I can confirm that after 7 years of vim, I feel really more productive than when I use any "intuitive" editor, but now I've remap all my window management (either X or tmux) to similar mapping. One point I can agree, though : vimscript is a real pain in the ass, which defeats what Bram Moolenaar say should be our process - detect repetition and automatize it seamlessly. 1 It will only be empowered when we'll have a full featured language to do so. 1 link to this video
e12eon Hacker News • Mentions
On “Visual Studio Code 1.2 released”
> Sorry, I don't mean autocomplete. I mean other editors that do not rely on a large number of keyboard shortcuts. I have never seen someone use vim quickly. I'm not sure I follow. Have you seen people use vim slowly? Or have you not seen anyone use vim at all? Vim (from v7?) has built-in "omnicompletion", by default bound to ctrl-n -- that you can use for everything (by default it "tab completes" against words in the buffer/file). There are various plugins for eg: writing html, and ways to set up full autocompletion. In general though, typing isn't what limits productivity -- and I've seen some studies that indicate that even though people think they're faster using just the keyboard, most…