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Just watch the video of the page http://blog.extracheese.org/2010/11/screencast-custom-vim-re... to get the gist of "entire blocks of code with the flick of a finger".


I'm pretty sure that "re-factoring" could've been accomplished equally fast with the mouse. In most editors, you can double-click to select a token and triple-click to select a line. So the mouse version would be: double-click 10, copy, double-click ten, paste, triple click the line you want to delete, press delete. Pretty fast, really; especially if you're using a laptop where the cost of moving your hand to the mouse is negligible.

I tried Vim for several months and got reasonably competent. But then I timed myself doing the Vim tutorial with Vim and Gedit, and Gedit won handily. For this reason I'm convinced that Vim is only popular because using it gives you hacker cred.

I'm open to changing my mind based on solid experimental evidence, but for now I only use Vim occasionally, for the macros.


Your first paragraph ignores the central point of the screencast: How would you record those mouse interactions as a general, reprogrammable macro? He signs off the video with an important statement which hints at the 'zen' of using Vim for a long time: "It's a nice thing to aspire to, to automate all of your interactions with the code in this way".


Thanks for posting that. I'm a bit of a VIM noob. I learned * and '' from that. Most useful. So much awesome yet to discover.


Wow. That guy's VimFu is crazy. I wish I was half as fast as he is.


Gary Bernhardt (guy doing that screencast) also does [Destroy All Software][1]. Lot of useful Ruby/Rails videos, done with vim. He's just as fast as this video, if not faster, and he doesn't slow down.

[1]: http://destroyallsoftware.com/


Ah, I thought the voice was familiar. I like the fact that he types fast but mostly acts smooth. Very easy to follow.

side note, everyone has to watch his https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/wat/ talk


Great screencast, and thanks for including it - but man, that guy really should get a quieter keyboard.


I love my clickety-clack IBM Model M, and they'll take it away when they pry my cold, dead fingers from it.




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