HN is degrading quickly thanks to comments like this. I've used vim for a long time, have worked in high-level engineering positions (lead, principal, similar roles) for decades with huge companies you've no doubt heard of as well as the US government. I've published articles and software going back to the 90s. Based on the content of your comment I think it's likely I was programming in vi(m) before you were born.I have never read the manual for vim, nor for most software that I use. I'm a "learn by doing" type - optimal methods of learning vary and is subjective. There are plenty of people who because of ADHD or another reason simply don't learn best from manuals.
The vitriol belongs on reddit.
kazinator|2 years ago
It's not all in a single file: it's chopped up into files like usr_01.txt, usr_02.txt. That limits the scope of searching.
A web search for "Vim manual all in one page" turns up nothing. (Contrast with GNU programs which have HTML manuals that are both in separate nodes linked together, or all in one HTML page.)
Completion is not at all mentioned in the topic headings at the top of :help; literally, the word does not appear anywhere in that table of contents. That's in spite of there being a section of the TOC headed "REFERENCE MANUAL: These files explain every detail of Vim.".
None of the linked files have a description blurb mentioning completion.
Or sessions, for that matter. I used Vim for about 25 years before starting to make use of sessions.
What is in the manual is not all useful; if you were to read that whole thing, you'd be wading through furlongs of "meh" to find an inch of "wow, useful". And at the end, you would still be installing extensions. E.g. the built-in switching among buffers is pretty poor; Vim benefits from an extension for that.
You can't always imagine what a feature is like to use from the way it's described. (Push these buttons to get this effect.) You sometimes have to experiment with it to get it.
johncoltrane|2 years ago
> I have never read the manual for vim, nor for most software that I use.
Good for you, bad for your employers/clients/teammates.
> optimal methods of learning vary and is subjective
No. _Prefered_ methods do.
> There are plenty of people who because of ADHD or another reason simply don't learn best from manuals.
Picking up bits here and bits there, is not learning. It is just being lazy and clumsy.
neuroticfish|2 years ago
This is at best a lack of understanding of how attention disorders work, at worst a lack of empathy.
Some people are only able to commit things to memory after putting it into practice many times over. Engineering roles nowadays often require you to be intimately familiar with a few languages, frameworks, CI pipelines, databases, cloud offerings, many protocols, and more. This job has grown well beyond the days when your sole responsibility was a small set of modules and a narrow cross section of technology.
The bandwidth for reading a manual just to lose the ability to recall it a week after changing context is just not there for a lot of people, and to be indignant about the learning mechanisms others use to get around these obstacles just seems silly. Yeah I probably would have googled “vim autocomplete” after some time, but modern tech sensory overload would likely have me googling something else.
keepamovin|2 years ago
dieselgate|2 years ago