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Ask HN? From Vim to Sublime 2

3 points by dlikhten ↗ HN
I've been using non-vi editors all my career. Last 3 months I started using VI and find it really hard to switch to another editor. I love the customizations that VI has, love the macros, I don't think of editing as movement of the cursor, its now like writing except the first writing tells you how to edit the actual words.

So I noticed people lovin' on Sublime 2. So my question is: has anyone made the switch of VI -> ST2 or have people just liked the shiny interface but disliked the actual editing itself?

3 comments

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ohgodthecat3
Well if you like modal editing you can use sublime text 2's built in vi emulation. So if you donwload sublime text 2 (you can try it without buying it) and in the user settings have

    {
        "ignored_packages": []
    }
You can use vi style modal editing with most if not all of your usually vi commands.
dlikhten
not happy there, its too quirky compared to real VI. That's the first thing I tried.

I really do miss using custom macros that do ',.' to swap between unit tests and production code. It feels forced.

ohgodthecat3
Yeah I never found it very good either though the regular sublime has a lot of good stuff in it it is just hard to find and get used to. (Kind of like when you start using vi you don't do stuff the fastest way but the way you learned that can approximate it using x+i rather than c)

The best way I found to do it is to use the ctrl+shift+p (may be cmd+shift+p on mac) menu which has keybindings next to the names so you can find the keybinding if you forget it

You can do custom macros as well but those aren't seen in the menu but if you look for tutorials they are there, not quite the same as vi but workable.