I have said it before here when people have discussed packaging up Vim stuff, and I stick by it: I really don't see this taking off.
Switching to using this does not appeal to me, an existing Vim user, and I think I am not an exception. If this does something new that I like I'll gladly throw that part into my setup, but there really isn't any reason at all that I can see for wanting to use this.
I don't think this is good for new Vim users either. If you are new to Vim there already is no shortage of things to learn (I think GVim steps up in this role nicely). Throwing more things into the mix isn't going to help a thing. And as you (slowly) pick up more and more of stock Vim, you are going to naturally build up your own setup. Before you know it you'll be at the same point that I think existing users are generally at.
This all said, I'm also a zsh user who cannot fathom why oh-my-zsh is popular...
For my part, I used Vim for maybe a decade before switching to SublimeText 2 approx. four to six months ago. It was pretty close to impossible for me to get all the plugins and functionality I wanted set up correctly in Vim. Conversely ST2 ships with everything I want and with approximately zero config, so I jumped on it.
I don't have much intention of going back, but it's still useful to have an editor I can run in a terminal, so I installed UVD. We'll see how it goes, but I like the idea of a curated setup where I just drop in my custom crap from my old vimrc and call it good.
That said, I agree with the larger point that it's hard to see whether it will take off. But if it's easy for them to maintain it and they're scratching their own itch, it seems like a net win.
Here here. The only vim-related thing new users need to know about is vimtutor.
These tools are designed to be complex so as to not limit the user. If you throw everything at them at once there's no way to understand how everything fits together.
I see the same problem in suggesting that people start learning zsh by installing oh-my-zsh.
Sort of related: I only use Emacs today because of the Emacs starter kit.
Maybe it's particular to Emacs, but I've found that the defaults are often terrible, and half of all tutorials I see for _anything_ are about changing the default case.
I think I agree to an extent. I am glad that I pieced my vim setup together because I know exactly what each part of it does, but the fact is I selected a lot of the parts because they were included in a distribution I read about or a blog article I read. Still, I did not add them until I knew I wanted them and I learned them one at a time.
Interesting you mention oh-my-zsh. I DO use that, but that distribution I think encourages you to turn on and learn the plugins as you actually need them - they are not turned on by default. So I've gone through a very similar process with them.
I download oh-my-zsh(or the fork Prezto), pick a theme, tweak 1-3 settings, load my custom PATH, and I'm in excellent shape. I have a shell that works great with little work.
Similarly with vim, I don't know most of the whizbang vim command combinations and don't use it much outside of short console edits, but gvim with its syntax highlighting + splits(created and selected with a mouse) + lots of plugins (mostly installed with pathogen):minibuffexplorer + ctags + tagbar is a fairly useful combination without much custom configuration.
In term sof new stuff that's true, but there are a lot of things that modern plugins provide that obsolete the traditional way of doing things. For instance, people using EasyMotion never have to worry about counting how many words ahead they're moving and then typing c69w or whatever. And likewise, there are some things that everybody should have in their .vimrc, like incremental search, and it doesn't make sense to learn to use the old way first.
There can absolutely be improvement on some default Vim settings. 'hlsearch' should definetly be the default, and I think it is a crime that 'hidden' isn't. There are easily dozens of other examples.
However I think these should be made defaults in Vim itself, not in some grabbag of stuff we hand new users on their way in. I think it is important that every Vim user knows exactly what ways their setup differs from the default, and this is only feasible if every difference from the default (the real default) is made by the user.
Not really. I often use (incremental) search just to move around, and I don't want the highlight to distract me, especially with a really common pattern. I would consider using it if the highlight disappeared immediately after the search is over, but as far as I know there is no such setting, so I only enable it from time to time.
This just proves that it's really hard to agree on defaults.
Well, the highlighting doesn't start until the search is over (you've pressed enter). I use this to clear the highlighted results when I am done with them:
nmap <C-h> :noh<CR>
Maybe there is a way to make it automatically do that after searching with some sort of timeout. Not sure.
I'd agree with you on hidden but... the Vim defaults are (generally) the most vi-like settings, which makes some amount of sense. At the very least it keeps people from squabbling about what should be the default.
OTOH, the default vimrc has a bunch of stuff turned on and tweaked depending on your platform. So that could be a good venue for turning on some of these new, Vim-only features. That may sound like splitting hairs, but I think there's at least a bit of difference between "on by default" and "set to on in the config mkvimrc creates".
Eh, my thought is that 'vi'/'vim -C' should remain conservative but that just 'vim' by itself should turn on the sensible stuff. Certainly 'hidden', if not the more cosmetic searching stuff ;).
Some of the defaults are just plain harmful to people trying to get started. 'nohidden' is awful if you try to use buffers without knowing about it, and I don't think I've ever met anyone who wasn't infuriated by 'backspace' defaulting to "".
I'm not so much a fan of the platform tweaks, since you can't expect each platform to make the same ones. If you learn on one and just assume those settings will be the same everywhere, it can be very annoying when you switch to another system only to discover that your .vimrc isn't getting you the same behavior. 'backspace' is a particularly egregious setting this happens for often I find. It would be better if all systems left backspace="", so that everyone knew to add it to their .vimrc's.
In case it isn't clear, prezto is a fork of oh-my-zsh which has basically been rewritten bit by bit to make everything much cleaner and saner. I highly recommend it. The history-substring-search and syntax-highlighting modules are brilliant. You will be the envy of all your friends and neighbours.
I've been using oh-my-zsh and the startup is really slow. I hear prezto solves this. How do i upgrade from oh-my to prezto? No one seems to answer that ?
I've just made the switch after finding out about prezto from this thread. The reason the upgrade process isn't documented is that, unfortunately, there isn't one. You just have to remove oh-my-zsh and install prezto, then move over any modifications you've made manually.
That said, it wasn't much work, and I've been using it for the past couple hours and I really like it!
Switching to using this does not appeal to me, an existing Vim user, and I think I am not an exception. If this does something new that I like I'll gladly throw that part into my setup, but there really isn't any reason at all that I can see for wanting to use this.
I don't think this is good for new Vim users either. If you are new to Vim there already is no shortage of things to learn (I think GVim steps up in this role nicely). Throwing more things into the mix isn't going to help a thing. And as you (slowly) pick up more and more of stock Vim, you are going to naturally build up your own setup. Before you know it you'll be at the same point that I think existing users are generally at.
This all said, I'm also a zsh user who cannot fathom why oh-my-zsh is popular...