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Comment by 29athrowaway | Hacker News Reader

Many decades ago, you had to resort to abbreviations so that you could use memory in the most efficient way possible. Computer hardware at that time was more expensive than labor. People having to adapt to how computers worked was the doctrine at that time.

But in 2022, this is no longer true. Even the most limited platform you can think of can comfortably run vim. A $5 Raspberry Pi Zero is overkill for vim. And now, labor is more far more expensive than hardware.

So, economically, having commands like "set ek" are objectively a waste of resources. Make commands self-explanatory, drop the abbreviations, and just add autocomplete and suggestions to compensate for the verbosity.

It's time to evolve. The reason this page exists, is because vim is unintuitive. But it doesn't have to.

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Quite apart from the fact that many (most?) vim short forms have long form equivalents, and vim has autocomplete - this argument feels misguided to me, mostly because I don't see why it would be limited to just vim. It seems natural, if you hold such a position, to also advocate abandoning CLIs like `ls`, `cd`, `jq`, `aws`, et al? - and I would despise having to put up with stuff like:

    $ change-directory foo/bar
    $ amazon-web-services elastic-compute-cloud describe-instances
    $ javascript-object-notation-query ...

Not to mention short parameters: `ls -AF`, `grep -v`, `curl -H`, ...

One of my most valuable resources is time. I would rather invest it in learning each tool's vocabulary than spend so much time typing (a prefix longer than the existing name, tab, then pick the answer) in an "everything is spelt out in full, acronyms and abbreviations are banned" world.

Looks just like Powershell.

which interestingly enough can also have things abbreviated, ie Invoke-Web-Request can be used as iwr.

Yes, but they all have shorthand aliases.

When writing a script or documenting you use the long form, when using a shell you use short form.

Welcome to the cargo cult hell that descriptively named all the things.

It’s just me but I think it’s still worth knowing the abbreviations just in case you want to type them.

Personally I try to avoid mappings as much as makes sense.

So I’d use

  :noh

to clear highlighting instead of making a nohighlight mapping for it.

Simply because it’s still quick to type from muscle memory and more portable. I also find them easier to remember than custom mappings.

> Make commands self-explanatory, drop the abbreviations, and just add autocomplete and suggestions to compensate for the verbosity.

Vim has autocomplete. That said, while I support long commands, I like having short commands because it's less typing, and I use vim on awkward keyboards where it matters. Also, any changes need to leave the old way or you break people's muscle memory (so again, just add the friendlier versions in addition, not as replacements, and I'm probably on board).

Autocomplete doesn't cut it. You end up hitting "tab" more times than it takes to just type out a two or three character command.

Why did you write "2022" instead of "two thousand twenty two", and "$5" instead of "five dollars"?

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