this post was submitted on 25 Oct 2023
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A lot of my personal dislike for VIM would be done away with if it just had a helpful common keys cheat sheet (basic cursor navigation, edit mode, exit with and without saving, etc) at the bottom of the editor window like Nano does.
I understand where you're coming from, but as a frequent user of vim I'd much rather have the additional line of text.
That makes sense, I mean your monitor can only fit like six lines of text.
It should be default on, with a setting to turn it off for power users
They could even have one of the commands on the cheatsheet be to hide it, so anyone who doesn't want it will immediately see how to turn it off.
one of my favorite things about helix is how easily you can check the keybinds for certain actions - just space-? and then you can see a list of every command available (by description) and their keybinds, if they have one
Not to forget the buit in popup showing the shortcuts, similar to which-key, but built in
Having the commands listed at the bottom by default is one thing i personally dislike about nano, because they take up space while being useless to someone knowing the commands (or at least knowing how to open the help in, which is what you can do in vim to achieve the cheat sheet). The alternative that vim uses, is to show the commands when starting the editor without opening a file.
is there not an option to turn them off??
This is the only reason I have any idea how to navigate nano.
Try nvim
Really, I'd just recommend using nano then. It's installed basically anywhere you can find vim and works perfectly fine as a text editor! To use vim effectively it has a learning curve no matter what, so it's not necessarily meant for everyone.