#editor-wars

Whenever you're within some text in TextMate you can see the urls properly underlined. Today I finally (and accidentally) discovered how to open those urls in the browser.

The command is ⌅ and on my macbook can be reached by using together fn and ⏎.

Will is one of my colleague at iMarc, and an avid Sublime Text 2 user. He's written a number of plugins for it now, and every once in a while vintage mode comes up.

Vintage mode is an 'official' plugin that's bundled with ST2 itself which tries to add many vi behaviors to ST2. The first couple times I tried it, I found short comings within 2-3 minutes and this time it took 5, so it's slowly getting better. Anyone who had used vi or vim (or gvim/macvim) for a while will probably notice these.

These are all command mode or visual mode commands, as that's all Vintage mode claims to affect. There's certainly a number of ex and insert commands which I would sorely miss as well.

The lists below are by no means exhaustive, just commands that I use fairly often and recalled from memory.

Vim Left-Right Motions

h, l (left and right) - already found differences. h and l don't 'wrap' around the beginning and the end of the line in vim, and in Sublime, they do. If you think this is an irrelevant difference, think of using multi-selections to edit a bunch of lines at once. vim is very mindful of what commands will cause line changes and which ones won't, and I think this ties into making sure that macros are more robust or degrade more smoothly.

0, ^, $ (first character, first non-blank character, last  character) - these all seem to be consistent.

g^, g$ (first character of the visual line, last character of the visual line) - these don't seem to exist. It's interesting that Sublime implemented the 'true' line operations here and didn't implement the visual line operations, whereas in other places, Jon did the opposite.

f{char}, F{char}, t{char}, T{char} (go to the next/previous character, go up to the next/previous character) - these all seem to be working correctly.

; and , (repeat last f, F, t, or T command) - all seem to work.

{column}| (goes to column {column} in the current line) - not implemented.

Line Motions

j, k (up and down) - in vim, j and k do their best to move to the same column in the previous line. In Sublime, j and k move to the same visual column and may only change visual lines. The 'visual line down' and 'visual line up' commands do exist in vim too, they're just gj and gk respectively.

gg, G (first line and last line) - seem to work.

+, - (goes to first character of next/previous line) - don't exist.

Word Motions

w, W, b, B - these all seem consistent. For those that don't know, w moves your caret to the next first character of a word (like ctrl-right/cmd-right.) Similarly, b moves your caret to the previous first character of a word. W/B are nearly the same, but they work on WORDs instead of words, where a WORD in vim is a string of any non-whitespace characters.

e, E, ge, gE - these are very similar to w/W/b/B, but instead of going to the first character, they go to the last character of a word or WORD. e/E seem to work fine, but it looks like Sublime is lacking ge or gE entirely.

cw/cW - this is an inconsistency in vim (maybe even a bug originally), where cw should have included the space(s) after the current word, but instead, cw and cW were changed to behave identically to ce and cE. All things considered, its extremely rare that anyone would have actually wanted the correct behavior, but it is still a little strange, as similar commands like dw and vw do not behave the same as de and vw. Still, Sublime decided to implement this to be consistent with vim, so all is well.

Text Selection

viw,vaw,vaW,viW (select word/WORD without or with whitespace) - these seem to work.

vit, vat (select inside tag, inside tag and tag) - these don't seem to be implemented.

vi', va', vi", va" (select inside single/double quotes without or wite whitespace) - these seem to work.

So, after comparing emacs and vim for a couple weeks, I seem to have settled on the vim side of things. The core conceptual different between vim and emacs seems to fairly simple; chording versus modes.

Emacs makes an enormous number of actions available all the time by heavily using modifier keys; I bet a really fancy Emacs configuration may make heavy use of control, alt, meta (the windows/max key), control-alt, control-shift, etc. This technique is known as chording; holding down multiple keys to send one 'keystroke.' When you do access an action that isn't accessed directly (for example, closing emacs), its a very brief sequence of these chords (control-x, control-c.) This means that you have access to a large amount of functionality with very few actual 'keystrokes.'

Oh, and before I go much further, just so everyone knows, the way I'm going to right keyboard shortcuts is as follows (as examples):

^f = control-f

F = shift-f

<F1> = f1 key

<Del> = delete key

<Space> = space key

C-<Space> = control-space; only when used with the <> notation

S-<Space> = Shift-Space; only used with the <> notation

^F = control-shift-f

M-f = meta-f (win-f or command-f, between if you're on Windows or a Mac)

A-f = alt-f

^x^c = control-x followed by control-c

^y, = control-y followed by ,

CA-<Backspace> = control-alt-backspace

Vim on the other hand, makes use of modes. The two most common, command and insert, can have entirely different sets of key shortcuts. For example, in insert mode, 'viBd' enters that string of characters, but in command mode, that'll delete all the lines in between the current set of {} braces (the body of a method or class or block statement, depending on where the cursor is.) This means that you don't have to hold down multiple keys at the same time anywhere near as much as you do in Emacs or even in windows-style notepad applications (like Gedit/TextMate/Eclipse) and some of the most popular actions are easily accessible. For example, you can start select a selection just by tapping 'v' instead of holding down shift.

Here's a picture of what it looks like outside:

Just with a lot less snow, no tree and more roads and buildings. We just got a dusting, but enough to make things look white outside, so I'm heading out a little sooner than normal tonight. Christmas is coming right up, and while I'm waiting on a project or two, for the most part, I'm good to go.

My current projects include tweaking gvim to see if it can serve as my IDE after using Eclipse for so long. I'm also working through learning the basics of emacs, as if I'm going to take the time to master one of them, I had better pick the right one. I've used vim/vi since I first encountered them, and only had a very brief phase where I used pico instead. I probably would have used nano/pico longer, but I never figured out how to turn on most of the nice features in them (like syntax highlighting, spell checking, and regex find and replace) so I stepped up to vim fairly early on. However, I do know a lot of people who are hard in the emacs camp, so before I master a handful of vim plugins for things like file exploring (NERD Tree Explorer) and quick file opening Textmate style (FuzzyFinder) I'd like to convince myself better that emacs doesn't have a way of meeting my requirements that either requires less complicated configuration/plugins and/or works better. So far, my requirements are

svn update, revert, and commit without using the mouse

upload/rsync on the current file to a saved external, ssh destination

some kind of autocompletition/suggestion that includes previously used keywords and the well known language-specific keywords; bonus points if it provides the ability to see the signatures

syntax color/highlighting

ability to split windows (see two at once) vertically and horizontally

So far, I've begun to assemble a script or two that works in conjunction with vim to upload stuff, and can call into the command line subversion client from vim as well. I'm also learning how to better navigate windows concepts of panes/buffers, but that isn't a fast process as of yet. Vim has great syntax highlighting, but I still haven't gotten it to reliably complete PHP/JavaScript/HTML/CSS keywords. Also, once upon a time I got the ability to type / to have it automatically close the matching xml tag, but we'll see if I can't get that working again.