I guess being annoyed by Kubernetes developers setting wrap width to 80 columns has turned out to be a good thing. Developers today have no sense of gutter and line numbering at all. After all, I’d bet 90% are using a graphic code editor on a Mac with some sort of shitty tab completion that makes 30 character identifiers somehow seem “not that bad.” Most of these script-kiddies just plain suck at good code design and style. It’s fucking frustrating. But …
I’ve been experimenting with something I would not have expected to turn out as it has: no line numbers at all. I know that seems crazy at first, but it has really made me a better vim user and, frankly, been a lot more pleasant on the eyes. I’ve always been one for minimalism and seeing too much on the screen often distracts with the unnecessary clutter.
“What about cutting and pasting?”
Well, there are still line numbers on the screen in the bottom left, and
frankly they are better because they also provide the column which is
often cited in coding error messages. It is better to train my eyes to
go there for such things. And I’ve never been one to select by line
number. I use yaf and family to match the entire current function or
paragraph, which is always faster than moving to the end and doing
something with the line number in it.
#vim #rants #linenumbers