Editor


Dec. 14, 2022

Who is Emmet?

I knew there was some magical way of entering all the theboilerplate in Visual Studio Code as I’d seen it happen in several videos, and assumed is was some sort of macro expansion thing in the editor. Fast forward a few blog post readings and youtube viewings and I keep seeing tangential references to someone called Emmet. Turns out they’re the same thing, and it’s pretty cool.

It’s not a new idea to have functionality in code editors to insert snippets of code. Emmet goes a bit further than that - and like many tools made by programmers for programmers it goes way to technical to the point where you need to memorise ridiculous amounts of combos to to some awesome stuff (I’m looking at you whoever made it possible to use vi commands in VS Code). Nevertheless, Emmet is extremely handy even at my n00b level.

Aug. 10, 2022

Vim

I’ve been working through the Missing Semester lectures from MIT, and recently completed the lecture about the Vim editor . Vim is a test editor, called from the command line, and optimised for programming - in the sense that it assumes most of the use of the editor is navigating around a big text file making small changes rather than entering large amount of test.

It uses simple, short key presses (as opposed to mouse movements or using menus or toolbars) to achieve things. This makes it highly efficient for good typists who know all the commands, and slightly incomprehensible to those who do not. An additional level of complexity is the idea of modes. Vim has several modes, the main ones being:

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