Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

Not being a Pythonista or Rubyist myself (but a PHP/JavaScripter) I found Vimscript quite easy to get into.

Those things we always hear about Vimscript sucking are mostly cargo culting by people with no experience with Vimscript in the first place. I personally hate the syntax of Ruby or Objective-C but I don't go around mocking those languages.

Anyway, your comment on shortening commands is very true. Case in point, the great CtrlP plugin:

https://github.com/kien/ctrlp.vim/blob/master/autoload/ctrlp...

It's an awful read but, once you replace all the shorthands with full names, the code is very readable and straightforward. To me, it looks pretty much like a PHP/JS without braces.



CtrlP was exactly my mental case in point when I commented on that. I needed to add some stuff to it, which I did begrudgingly after seeing the source, but now I'm considering forking it and rewriting in Lua both for speed (it's slow) and for readability. And as a pet project in Lua, of course.


I hear you. Good luck finding users with Vim compiled with lua support, though.




Consider applying for YC's Summer 2026 batch! Applications are open till May 4

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: