Conceptually the reasons the author give for this (syntax highlighting and other features of vim outclass other terminal-based editors) make total sense.
That said there's something absolutely defiling about this. It's like installing a V8 in a Tesla, or replacing the pumpkin in pumpkin pie.
I love that it will make VIM more accessible for more people, but I hate how they do it. Kudos to the author.
Not sure about where you’re from but where I’m from, you don’t make pumpkin pie from a can. You make it with pumpkin purée. From scratch. Get out of here with your non-pumpkin pumpkin pie propaganda.
Some pumpkin, blended into a paste, some brown sugar, an egg or two, some heavy cream and some cinnamon and crushed cloves and you have your pie filling.
To be fair - coffee cake in the US is cake to have with coffee and doesn’t normally contain any coffee.
In the UK and EU, coffee cake is cake with coffee.
Likewise tea cakes in the US are cakes made with tea and tea cakes in UK and EU are cakes to have with tea. So…
Not a lie, just a Spider-Man meets Spider-Man moment when you learn you can actually make coffee cakes with coffee (or espresso) and you can make tea cakes with tea (I prefer oolong).
Yes, and pumpkins are squashes (Cucurbita) but pumpkin originates in New England USA where it refers to the orange squash gourd used to make Halloween carvings and decorations. Being that I'm from the US, this is "pumpkin". Not to downplay squash-based pastries or pies but there's only one pie that I will eat, day or night, no matter what - the beautiful, delicious, pumpkin pie. Plain, with whipped cream, with ice cream, with chocolate drizzle, with caramel.
I've tried it and my experience is the exact opposite. I have good results with for example "Crown Prince" variety pumpkins, which I find far sweeter and tastier than butternut.
I freely acknowledge that you can make a delicious “pumpkin” pie with butternut squash, but a real sugar pie pumpkin (use Halloween leftovers and their mealy starchy flesh at your peril) remains superior in my opinion. Sweet potato pie, though, can be absolutely delightful with no squash in sight. Just don’t call it pumpkin pie. ;)
Some areas have different ingredients depending on what’s available. Here in the United States, real pumpkin is preferred. You can use any gourd to make a pie but for the true pumpkin pie aficionados like myself, I can tell the difference when someone uses real pumpkin vs butternut squash vs sweet potato vs just creme, eggs, and brown sugar and some flour (I’m looking at you, Wegmans).
In the southeast coast of US, if you make a “pumpkin pie” with squash, you won’t be invited back next year.
For those curious another common major percentage of “pumpkin pie” blends (such as from Libby’s) is Dickinson squash/pumpkin which is a subspecies of Cucurbita Moschata like butternut squash. These can be found as heirloom seeds. https://www.thespruceeats.com/what-are-dickinson-pumpkins-52...
Here in the Willamette Valley of Oregon, we grow a lot of crops for seeds, of which various squashes are some. It’s amusing to see the first time, but squash grown for seed is typically just shredded in the field, with seeds collected and the flesh tossed out over the field. Results in a lot of “wtf are they doing” among those unfamiliar, because it looks exactly like pumpkins were grown just to immediately destroy them.
[I'll just add one more note, not mentioned in the article, which is that typical Jack-o'-lantern pumpkins are quite awful for cooking. Much worse than any canned pumpkin. If you want to cook with fresh pumpkin, research the varietals that are known for good texture and flavor. Don't grab a carving pumpkin from the pile.]
> As much of 90 percent of pumpkin sold in the U.S. (and 85 percent worldwide) is a proprietary cultivar known as a Dickinson pumpkin, which are less photogenic than the type of pumpkins commonly used for display purposes.
Ugh, they really are much less aesthetic than a nice plump orange one. This feels similar to the childhood realization that regardless of the name or the box color there's not really much strawberry juice in anything; it's all apple and pear.
In my household for the last 20 years, it is made from pumpkin. First from sweet pumpkins we would pick up every year at the Halloween pumpkin patch that we as a family tradition would take our daughter too. Now it is made from ones grown in our own garden. They are simple to grow. Pick them, roast them, purée them and freeze until needed. We also make a lovely spicy Indian style pumpkin soup from the purée. The pie is quite different from any store purchased pie and well worth it.
I've heard this claim various times, but it doesn't really make a lot of sense. Butternut squash has a carb:fiber ratio of about 6:1. Canned pumpkin is more like 3.5:1. Sure, the USDA might be lax on the precise definition of the word "pumpkin", but I don't expect them to go so easy on the nutrition data.
As Wikipedia notes:
>The term [pumpkin] is most commonly applied to round, orange-colored squash varieties, though it does not possess a scientific definition and may be used in reference to many different squashes of varied appearance.
If the article is simply intending to say that it does not usually come from squashes that are orange, oblate and ridged, then that's fair. But I don't think it's mostly butternut squash, and I don't see why manufacturers would try to hide using the most popular variety of squash.
> I was making the point that it's a North American thing
No you weren't. To use your style, if YOU want to play along and be pedantic, then your edit wasn't about North America, it was about just the U.S. and Canada.
But butternut squash is pretty similar to pumpkin. They are both winter squash, and the definition of pumpkin is a little fuzzy anyway. This would be more like replacing the pumpkin with apples.
Emacs runs in a terminal. Vim isn't installed everywhere, Vi is. If you're going to install an editor and a config you might as well just install Emacs.
I guess it's the end-goal then, though. If your goal is to become a rockstar and play the guitar in a band, GH is probably a very bad route to it. But if it is to "have fun" its perfect.
Same with this vim: if you just need an editor that is recognisable and "not weird" then this modeless vim might be useful; though why not just install nano, pico, gedit, notepad++ or even notepad.exe?
Seriously, it hurts. It makes sense, but it hurts. If only there were a more gentle path to editor modes. Maybe some simple graphical representation of the modes and commands that could be down in the corner? Like a dynamic vim infographic that clued a user into the most likely commands.
For me, the reason to learn vim is because if you know how to use it it's a really nice editor that's preinstalled on almost any system you shell into. I use VSCode on my home system and occasionally on a remote system, but I'll use neovim when doing a quick edit from the command line and vi when I happen to be o a remote system. In my ideal world, I would just use one editor everywhere, including if I'm hot-seating on a system that is not mine and without internet access: having vi already under my fingers is a nice approximation of great editor + everywhere.
If you learn Vim you’ll have access to Vi and Vi-like interfaces in lots of other software including terminals, database clients and everything that uses readline.
Curious what kind of interfaces you're thinking about? (Aside from vi, vim, nvim)
From my experience anything with "vi navigation" basically just means using the home row keys for navigation + modes. So I haven't come across many interfaces yet where the verb order differences between helix/vim come into play.
Then the question is readline. Not saying that vi or emacs deserve to win readline, but it’s up to you to describe how Helix mode would differ from vi mode.
Helix is wonderful. I did make one keybinding change: Switching in and out of Insert mode is CTRL-i so I don't have to wander off to the escape key so often.
>If only there were a more gentle path to editor modes. Maybe some simple graphical representation of the modes and commands that could be down in the corner?
I taught myself vim by setting the vim cheat sheet to be my terminal background, though I greyed it out slightly so it didn't obscure what I was typing. Once you have that there are only a few phrases you really need to know: "+p, "+y, "+d to access the system clipboard, :split and :vsplit, C-w w to switch windows, and g C-g for word/char count.
If I had a lot more free time, I've been noodling with some designs for a text editor with modes. It would start up by default in the equivalent of vim's insert mode where all the normal CUA keybindings (e.g. ctrl-c for copy) worked. But with many more. Then, if you go to the equivalent of normal mode you can just press X to do the same thing ctrl-X does in insert mode.
Also, like the author I have a shortcut to change themes (F9) and another to toggle invisible chars (F8), and I try to use the top of the screen as much as possible (I show the offset in hex, the row and column position etc).
I like how vim is modal, but some Windows shortcuts (like Control-C) just make too much sense to given them up on Linux: I have put `stty intr ^X` because using Shift-Control-C to copy from the terminal was way worse.
Having a few chording shortcuts give you the best of both worlds!
BTW, all of the other shortcuts proposed on this site make a lot of sense to me: I do expect Ctrl-F to search, and Ctrl-T to open tabs, I think I will copy a few :)
Super helpful for basically anything in a terminal. Stuff is going to flow by pretty quickly or at least keep bumping the terminal every couple seconds, usually when you _least_ want it to do so. Reading off whatever your program emitted while it's pushing the terminal up every half a second gets really annoying without Ctrl-S. It's probably the most used terminal shortcut after Ctrl-C for me.
That's why I think MacOS is superior: it actually uses the "meta" key for useful stuff. So, Cmd-W would close the tab, and Ctrl-W would probably still delete a word (can't check right now, but it has a lot of 80s-era keyboard shortcuts for text still working)
I also want to use Command (Super or Hyper?), which really improves keyboard shortcuts. Command + left/right = jump to beginning or end of line, Option + left/right = jump to beginning/end of word. I know you can do the same with Control + Shift, but some apps don't support it. Plus Cmd+c/x/v for copy/cut/paste works fine in terminals, I don't have to remember to "code switch" my shortcut "language". Cmd+Backspace deletes the whole line, etc etc.
I bound WindowsKey-C to run the command "xsel|xsel -b" which copies the active selection to the clipboard. It's a small step in the right direction; it's possible to get paste working as well, but that takes awareness of apps (or reconfiguring all GUI applications to use the same shortcut as the terminal).
You missed the point; Ctrl-C is never going to be "copy" in a terminal, since that shortcut is already in use. Cmd-C can work everywhere, but GUI applications on linux do not default to that.
> I like how vim is modal, but some Windows shortcuts (like Control-C) just make too much sense to given them up on Linux
Ctrl-C does work in the GUI. That said, one thing I like about Linux is being able to highlight text using the mouse and then pasting it by middle-clicking. I don't have to interact with the keyboard at all to copy and paste text that way.
"That said there is something absolutely defining about this."
Not expecting anyone to agree, but this is how I feel when using minimal shells that do not implement vi editing, e.g., set -V or set -o vi. Busybox/toybox is one example. In the aggregate, I actually do more editing on the command line than I do in vi. If the shell is permanently set to emacs-like keys and editing then I am constantly switching back and forth to "vi mode" everytime I edit a text file and return to the shell, i.e., nonstop.
In Jef Raskin’s ‘Humane Interface’, there’s a good justification to why modes are evil, mainly leading to excessive user errors, so it’s not that surprising.
That said there's something absolutely defiling about this. It's like installing a V8 in a Tesla, or replacing the pumpkin in pumpkin pie.
I love that it will make VIM more accessible for more people, but I hate how they do it. Kudos to the author.