Hacker News Reader

Comment by Fire-Dragon-DoL | Hacker News Reader

I don't remember all the ones, but the obvious edge case is the inability to bind all the keys I wanted. I had to do a combination of terminal emulator with full shortcuts support and then a mapping mechanism. That to me was extreme. I don't remember which hotkeys can't be used by default, but it was more than one

View on HN

There are limitations on which keys you can bind in certain terminals. Other than that most people can probably not at all corroborate what you said.

Isn't that exactly what I'm talking about? You can't bind certain keys in certain terminals.

A few that I clearly remember: ctrl + shift + enter. This can't be bound separately from ctrl + enter (or just enter at all?), because shift enter doesn't lead to a "capital case enter".

Same goes for shift + enter.

So what I did was using a separate terminal emulator (alacritty) and mapping those to a key I wouldn't use, such as F12 o, for example. However figuring out the character code to bind f12 is also another business.

Again, I solved that, but binding shortcuts to me is possibly the most essential feature of a text editor and the operation was highly unpleasant.

Did you try using leader keys? The issue with key binding in vim is that because it's a modal editor, custom shortcuts with the usual modifier keys (ctrl/shift) may conflict with existing shortcuts. But that's what the leader key is for, it allows you to bind an alternative key as a modifier, and use that for all your shortcuts!

I did, but there are some things that I use too often, so I'd rather have them as shortcuts.

I used AstroNVIM which comes with space as leader key by default (really nice!)

If you want to use it like a GUI app maybe you should use a GUI version of vim, which doesn't have that limitation. But if that was really was broke the camels back here's the result of a 10 second search on google with solutions for urxvt, kitty, alacritty and iterm2, as well as a note that GVim doesn't have that limitation.

I'm sure that's not the real reason why you couldn't get used to neovim. People have different preferences after all. Otherwise we'd all still be using notepad.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/16359878/how-to-map-shif...

I used Astronvim with alacritty, I still found the setup incredibly convoluted, but you are right that wasn't what broke the camels back, that was the last straw.

In the end, I'm happy where I landed. I like the idea of vim, I don't think the editor is where I would like it to be. I think neovim will get there since it allows normal GUI editors to be built on top of it, which is amazing, but the documentation right now is a "disaster": you need to know VIMscript + LUA to be able to configure it, for someone coming straight to neovim, that was really annoying. But if you go to normal vim, then there is no language server, which is a problem on its own.

Either way, as I said, I'm happy where I landed. I'm not saying "no", I'm saying I'd rather use my time toward something else. I even use VSCode in a weird way, like I don't use the integrated terminal at all and I like "full screen view" when I'm typing code.

My only gripe with vscode is the terrible fuzzy finder for files. I do miss FZF, but I can do `code CTRL+T` in my terminal for a similar result

Reply on news.ycombinator.com