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Comment by cabacon | Hacker News Reader

To seed a comment, here are some VIM links I have enjoyed recently: https://github.com/carlhuda/janus is an easy way to pick up some nice plugins. I found it overwhelming the first time I played with it, but I am back around to trying it again and liking it better this time.

A set of crazy tips that made me learn to love the g commands: http://www.rayninfo.co.uk/vimtips.html

I believe I went to that from http://vim.wikia.com/wiki/Vim_Tips_Wiki, which isn't as fun to navigate as I would like it to be.

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As tempting it is to not avoid janus, newcomers to vim should just stick with vanilla vim. If you just decide to install janus, you won't learn anything, you will have bunch of things installed that you will never use and it just is the wrong way of learning vim

If you want to actually learn vim, ditch janus and all the plugins when you start. Start by going to a shell and typing 'vimtutor'. That will get you started. Then build your own ~/.vimrc by scratch by adding some useful options such as:

set number

syntax on

filetype plugin indent on

For other options, you can search around the internet, particularily other people's dotfiles and see what they put in their own vimrc and you can freely take if you like what you see.

and then you can experiment with plugins. You will gain a much better understanding of how they work, what they do and you will be proud of yourself because it's your own personal vimrc and you know every single line that is in it.

This seems to be the perpetual back-and-forth that shows up; I searched "site:ycombinator.com janus" before I posted the link, and you'll find this exact same line in history.

For myself, I knew core-vim pretty well, and was coming back to it after taking textmate and sublime text for a spin. Janus was a fast way to bolt on the IDE-alikes I liked from ST2. It was, indeed, too much on a first go, and I uninstalled it. I am back to it, though, and appreciate that it brought together the "big guns" like fugitive, nerdtree, syntastic, &c. as well as things I'm not sure I would have found, like Tim Pope's excellent unimpaired plugin.

Doing things like vimtutor is great for a newbie, but I don't think I care as much whether they have Janus installed or not while they do it.

Yes, this back-and-forth is perpetual because there's always someone who advertises Janus and there's always a need for someone else to actually say that Janus (like SPF13 and friends) is a piece of crap and that new users should never install it if they are serious about learning Vim.

If you're going to take that point of view, I guess I'd like to hear more about why you think Janus is a piece of crap. I understand the POV of people who say that learning fundamentals is the place to start, rather than starting with the extensions, okay. But for someone who knows the editor but isn't that plugged in to the vimscript ecosystem, what's wrong with aggregating a number of useful and interesting plugins? I don't understand the vitriol.

I don't think I would have been as interested in reading this (interesting!) book if I hadn't seen the power of things like NERDTree and TagBar, and I wouldn't have seen those if I hadn't poked through Janus.

Janus and all the other distributions share the same issues so Janus is only one of many, and the most famous.

All those distributions started life as personal configurations. I honestly have no idea what happened that made their authors entertain the idea of turning them into so-called distributions but personal configs are what they are. Those configs are someone else's config: whatever is there may or may not fit your workflow or needs or cognitive capabilities or even physical ones. The plugins featured in those configs are chosen by complete strangers according to unknown criterias. The same goes with options and mappings.

When you use Janus, you basically are walking with someone else's shoes. You'll get used to it after a while but they will never be your shoes.

Do you really need Gundo? Gist? NrrwRgn? Do you really need to interact with Git from your text editor? Are you sure that SnipMate is the best choice for a snippet engine? Are you sure that SuperTab is the best choice for completion? Are you sure that you need NERDTree when you have netrw built-in? Are you absolutely certain that you need an Ack plugin? What do you think of a distribution that comes with two plugins with overlapping features and even provides custom mappings that overlap with both?

Another problem with distributions is that, due to their very nature, they have a crazy architecture with many .before and .after scripts and weird directory structures that make the whole thing hard to debug or customize. Not only you are walking with someone else's shoes but that someone is the only person able to fix them or tie your laces.

New users should steer away from Janus and friends because:

* those distributions actively hide many default features/options

* they teach you how to use CtrlP and not default commands

* they hook you to plugins

* they hook you to options you don't know shit about

* they force someone's preferences on your

* they actively prevent you from learning Vim

Experienced users should avoid them because:

* well, they already have their own config tailored to their needs so why bother using someone else's?

* they already know how to find plugins (vim.org)

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