This is Your Brain on Vim | Hacker News Reader

This is Your Brain on Vim

kevinw.github.com

46 pointskilowatt9 comments

In case you are planning on reading this and haven't done so yet, be warned there is a lack of any form of meaningful information in this article

I found it informative.. in an anthropological sense...

Sorry, i'm probably weird, but I could see my vim experience described quite accurately in this post. It was funny and disturbing at the same time.

I particularly enjoyed:

"hjkl movement becomes natural. you mysteriously lose the ability to ice skate"

"oh balls. my .vimrc isn’t on the mainframez so all my cool shit is gone when I ssh to edit some configs."

"publishes obligatory blog post about how special and unique setup is"

Yes, it's mostly for entertainment value.

However, I didn't previously know about the commmand-t plugin. It made the read worthwhile, independent of entertainment.

Aaagh!

I finished reading that in Firefox, instinctively hit <esc>1w to go back to the top, swore, and found myself typing :prev.

I'm clearly doomed.

Get Pentadactyl! (a fork of Vimperator) It adds vim-like navigation to Firefox. Granted, 1w won't work, but a good deal of other shortcuts do. There's a handy shortcut to edit any textbox in Vim also, but I can't recall what it is. I seriously cannot recommend this addon enough; it completely changed my browsing experience.

http://dactyl.sourceforge.net/pentadactyl/

Edit: Fixed spelling, added link.

I tried switching vimperator for pentadactyl today and found some unpleasant buggy behaviour. Will try again when not so many tabs open and uninstalled it.

Turns out what I use most is 'd' to close tabs and 'u' to unclose them. Most of the rest of vimperator passes me by except when I fight the modal/passthrough/where the hell are my keypresses going moments.

Wow, another article about identifying with a text editor. It's almost completely devoid of useful information, at that.

Flagged.

I'd like to see an article on using vi's ex mode to its fullest potential - there's a lot of power there, and many people seem completely unaware it exists.

If "the road to nowhere" was an article, it would be this article.

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