7 Habits For Effective Text Editing 2.0
Why Hacker News recommends it
HN recommends it as a lasting philosophy for improving your editing process incrementally, and it was widely remembered after Moolenaar's death.
What it is
Vim creator Bram Moolenaar's 2007 Google Tech Talk on habits for efficient text editing. He explains how to spot repetition and inefficiency, then use editor features to fix it.
Recommended by 5 HN commenters across 6 different months, 2013 to 2023.
What Hacker News said
Strong rec Monkeyget · 2014-07 · on “Master Emacs in one year”
It takes a year because you learn it over time. Learning a tool progressively is the best way to go. There is a wonderful presentation called '7 Habits For Effective Text Editing 2.0' [1] explaining this philosophy. The idea is to get the basics down upfront and then get more proficient gradually over time. When you use the tool you stay aware of what you are doing. When you find an inefficiency in the way you use the tool, find a quicker way and make it an habit. This is the most efficient. If you only care about the code you have to type right now and never read the editor's documentation nor learn new commands you'll keep using only basics commands and never will gain proficiency. Not eff
Strong rec tzhenghao · 2023-08 · on “Bram Moolenaar Passed Away”
Loved his "7 Habits For Effective Text Editing 2.0" (2007) talk and humor [1] "How many of you are mostly using Emacs?" a bunch of raised hands "Okay, we'll try to convert some people today!" RIP, Bram Moolenaar [1] - [this video]
Strong rec 1-2-3-5-8 · 2023-08 · on “Vim Boss”
Thank you Bram for everything. Your talk, 7 Habits For Effective Text Editing 2.0 inspired me and it started my Vim journey. Using Vim all these years has been a complete joy. You will not be forgotten. Link to the talk: [this video]
Recommends adem · 2014-04 · on “A Quick Guide to Sublime Text”
The only thing you need to read about Vim to get started is here: [LINK] , the rest is learned pretty much by the following principle: 1. Detect inefficiency for a particular task 2. Find a faster way to do it 3. Make it a habit You can learn more about this approach in this video: [this video]
Recommends e12e · 2015-08 · on “Speed matters: Why working quickly is more important than it seems”
Reminds me of Mjoolnar's (author of vim) talk on 7 habits of effective editing 2.0; the core idea is essentially (my current interpretation): awareness: look for repetition - they are candidates for automation and/or being more effective. Rule of three: If you do something (anything) 3 times - figure out if it can be done more efficiently. In vim (or any other editor) an example might be shifting the indendation of code: maybe you only remember how to do it a line at a time; figure out how to work on blocks of code; figure out how to do it on a file - a whole project. [this video]
Recommends e12e · 2016-04 · on “Vim 8.0 is coming”
Personally, I find vim's modal editing to be very efficient. When starting from a clean slate, it doesn't really matter much -- but when changing/ editing existing text/code, I find it feels much more natural. It also works well without using the mouse, which is important to me because of carpal tunnel syndrome (and also helps when working without a proper mouse, such as on laptops). I've only toyed with emacs, but based on that, I don't think emacs' idea of keyboard "chords" is as good a fit as vi(m). With standard keybindings, it also puts a strain on my wrists. Modal editing and the "edit language"[1] (verbs, nouns, modifiers (and motions), like dw=delete word, dd/dl=delete line, d$=delet
Recommends e12e · 2016-05 · on “New GNU Emacs website”
> indexes everything So should your text editor (and/or it's companion programs) > and provides superior auto-completion. See above. Superior is a bold claim, superior out of the box for "strongly" supported languages, perhaps? (Eg: one way of working with java in vim is to use eclipse for extracting some information about a project[1]) Personally I'm more familiar with vim, than with Emacs -- arguably the main difference is that Emacs has one standard and sane scripting language (lisp), while vim doesn't (I'm very happy a lot of masochists work tirelessly to provide vim plugins for everything I need (and a great deal I don't) -- but I think it's hard to argue that vimscript is a "good" lang
Cites oelmekki · 2013-03 · on “Just Use Sublime Text”
In the next article : "Buy a lot of software and don't learn programming. It's hard, and after four years, I still can't write anything someone else didn't do better !" Not only I can confirm that after 7 years of vim, I feel really more productive than when I use any "intuitive" editor, but now I've remap all my window management (either X or tmux) to similar mapping. One point I can agree, though : vimscript is a real pain in the ass, which defeats what Bram Moolenaar say should be our process - detect repetition and automatize it seamlessly. [1] It will only be empowered when we'll have a full featured language to do so. [1] [this video]