This video was released a bit early for patrons and youtube members (Tier 2 and above). I also do a patron exclusive podcast for all levels each week. patreon.com/thelinuxcast
Quick fun story: one time at a job interview I was asked a joke question: "how to quit Vim", which I of course answered immediately, and the follow-up question was "how do you quit Vim in easy mode?" I have never even heard of that mode before that, to which I admitted but asked to let me try it anyway, which they allowed with a reasonable "no Google" request. Didn't even take me 5 minutes. Vim is awesome and pretty reasonably logical once you know the very basic controls.
Whoah, I thought that this was some extension for people to install and modify their Vims, but its a flag in the base package? I never would have seen that coming.
I actually know about this easy mode. I discovered it long time ago. It's called "-y" option, because it's pronounced "why". At least this is the only logical explanation I can make up. And BTW vim -y starts the graphical user interface gvim if you have it installed.
I actually use easy mode as a note scratchpad sometimes. Lighted I alias "vim -y" to "note" and it's temporary at best, I usually don't save doing this. Mostly because I never thought to see that Ctrl+q to actually work.
Agreed, it's strange. I've never liked it because when I use it it brings up gvim instead of opening in the terminal and I hate having to hit ctrl-o to enter commands and whatnot. I didn't know about ctrl-L, so thank you for that.
Lol, I have the gvim build installed on Arch, in my case it opens the GTK version of Vim, which normally doesn't happen when typing vim instead of gvim. Fun thing is that I am still getting the relative line numbers that I enabled. To get "back" to Insert mode after pressing Ctrl L, it seems to be the Escape key that does this for you, opposite of the normal way.
i've always found it strange why a text editor would make it difficult to actually edit text. this could actually be a vim client a normie like me could use
Because it isn't more difficult, really. Vim is certainly more _complex_ than your average editor, and it has a _steep_ learning curve, but with great complexity comes great power. When you know what you are doing, and have it configured to your liking, you gain the ability to fly through text, making amazing and sweeping edits with little effort. You just need to put in the time and effort to learn it. That said, I am not a raging vim fanboy or anything. It _is_ more geared toward code production than prose, and there are situations where its mode-based workflow can be more of a hindrance than a benefit (e.g. fixing many small, random, typos scattered over a block of text-jump, insert, change, escape, jump, insert, change, escape, jump...). And sometimes the mental mode-switching required slows you down more than the physical. In those cases I usually switch to a more traditional gui editor like Kate. But for the most part vim works exceptionally well as an editor. I mean, there obviously must be _some_ reason it remains one of the most popular text editors around, some 30 years after it first came out (close to 50 including it's vi predecessor).
@@davidh.4944 You just need to learn more of it and you'll love it more. For random scattered typos, say a single letter, "teh" to "the", you could put the cursor on the e and hit `xp` real quick. For say "foo" to "foe", hit `ere`, first `e` to get to the end of the word, then `r` to replace a single letter then `e` to replace the o. Let's say you've got a whole word you just don't like, `cdw"new word"` works fine. If you've got updates you need to make across the whole file, `:%s/foo/bar/gc` to replace all foo with bar but ask before each change. You should try the vim tutor, you might have fun.
@@anon_y_mousse I have been using Vim for over twenty years. Don't tell me I have to "Learn it more". I know _all about_ everything you wrote and much more. Vimtutor, indeed... It's not about the individual edits, it's about the process as a whole. In Vim, every change requires typing in some kind of search or movement string, then once you've homed in on the string you want, typing some kind of edit string. Every one you do needs just that little bit more time, effort, and thinking to accomplish, especially when each change itself is short, has to be done just a bit differently than the others, and requires multiple mode-switches and awkward-to-use keys. In a gui editor, however, I can usually just click-highlight-type. I don't need to struggle with it as much, I just put the cursror straight on what needs to be changed and change it. In any case, I was just to give a simple example that didn't require too much explanation. The reality is that it is extremely situational, and hard to describe succinctly. In _most_ cases Vim is as easy or easier to use than any other editor, but the reality is that there are just some combinations of conditions that require extra mental and physical effort, and can be done more efficiently in a graphical editor, and no amount of practice or fancy plug-ins will help.
Caps Lock as Esc is so good. Just 'setxkbmap -layout us -option caps:escape &' in your .xprofile. Thx for the video man. Maybe it is good if you ssh in a server and you dont know how to Vim but now i dont know how to quit vim again.
Great to hear you are better now! This easy mode is really strange, I just cannot think of a good purpose for this. I have never heard of it and before watching your video I thought it would maybe offer some context-sensitive help to ease new Vim users in. But as it is it is pretty useless. I would advocate removing this mode from Vim and save a tiny bit of disk space.
People actually figured out how to use vim? that's the part that should freak you out. 🤣 kidding aside, it's cool that easy mode exists. it's nice to have a notepad actually behave like a notepad is expected to. most of the time the vim commands don't even work for me, so I did the reasonable thing and just retreated back to nano after trying to fight with it to do very basic things for a few days. I can't be issuing the same command over and over again several times before actually starts working. It's just not for me.
There are multiple ways. In the video he mentioned ctrl-q or you could hit ctrl-o then :q or :q! if you've made changes you don't want to save, or ctrl-L and then :q or :q!
So basically this is Vim for those that don't know how to use Vim but want to say they use Vim. I like Vim, but not like this. I'd think if I wanted an easier Vim, I'd use Micro.