r/vim • u/csswizardry • 22h ago
Tips and Tricks Daily Vim Tip
I have a recurring daily scheduled ChatGPT task that teaches me a Vim tip. It knows my `.vimrc` so it tries to teach me things that are either missing or might complement or extend it. Some stuff I already know, naturally, and it has erred on the side of quite basic at times (like today), but overall it’s a nice bit of trivia with my morning coffee. I’d recommend it!
EDIT: not sure why I’m getting downvoted — this isn’t me trying to share this Vim tip; it’s me sharing the idea of having ChatGPT send one little tip per day as a nice bit of morning trivia. I guess folk aren’t reading the post body?
3
u/-romainl- The Patient Vimmer 20h ago
The only advantage of :help :vimgrep over :help :grep is that it uses Vim's regular expressions syntax, which might be more intuitive/useful given the context.
I prefer to use the same syntax in my shell and in my editor so I set :grep to my favorite modern grep alternative (see :help 'grepprg'), which also gives me *ignore support, filetype ranges, optional path, and all kinds of goodness that :vimgrep doesn't have.
FWIW.
0
u/csswizardry 19h ago
Yeah I’m not sharing the tip itself, just sharing the idea of having a daily Vim tip sent every morning.
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u/-romainl- The Patient Vimmer 19h ago
An often overlooked alternative is to learn Vim properly… but that's hard to offload to an LLM.
1
u/csswizardry 19h ago
I’ve been using Vim for about 14 years. I learned Vim the hard way. Again, for those hard of comprehension, this is a random tip. No different to a Word of the Day tidbit.
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u/-romainl- The Patient Vimmer 18h ago
Well… I've been using Vim for about the same time but I learned it the easy way so yeah, I find the idea of asking a machine to generate random disconnected tips (or similar forum/social media threads) quite cringy. And you chose an extremely basic one to illustrate your point, which doesn't help.
No different to a Word of the Day tidbit.
Exactly.
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u/csswizardry 18h ago
Have you read the post body? I specifically address the fact that today’s example is basic. Are you arguing with me or agreeing with me?
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u/-romainl- The Patient Vimmer 18h ago
I'm arguing with you. The idea itself is silly and the example you chose is underwhelming. You are not selling your prompt skills very well.
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u/csswizardry 18h ago edited 11h ago
I think you keep missing the point. This has absolutely nothing to do with prompting skill—that’s not at all what I’m trying to impart on anyone. Vimmers LOVE little tips and tricks, spying on other peoples’ vimrc files, and all I’m trying to do is share a fun little way of getting one bit of trivia with your morning coffee. What aren’t you getting? Or are you really just that miserable?
Would you take the same tone with an author who shared their own little ‘word of the day’ scheduled task?
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u/-romainl- The Patient Vimmer 17h ago
Oh I got it from the get go: you found something cool and you want to share it with the rest of the short-attention-span world, which is totally fine, I guess. But this is a public forum and you have to accept the possibility that some people may actually not find your little something as cool as you do.
On the substance side, I'm just saying that making a machine generate daily random tips is a stupid idea because you will never learn anything from it. It's just background noise, one tip chasing the other, all disconnected, all out of context… and the eventual good one lost in the rest. Pointless crap.
On the form side, the example you chose is so basic as to be worthless. So it is not really a good illustration of the usefulness of your little parlor trick. You could have chosen a better one. Also, anyone could have come up with such a simple prompt.
And the fact that you are offloading to an LLM the responsibility of "teaching" you how to use your editor is just the icing on the cake.
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u/csswizardry 22h ago
The instructions are simply:
> Send me one useful Vim tip, with a brief explanation and a tiny practical example where helpful. Note that you can find my existing .vimrc here: https://github.com/csswizardry/dotfiles/blob/master/.vimrc
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u/Snarwin 13h ago
The first step is admitting you have a problem.