Vim is often said to be the "best" text editor for speed and usability, but is this actually a viable solution? I suspect that there is a silent majority that uses VSCode or some other easier-to-use GUI product.
Ask HN: How many people actually use Vim?
1–10 of 14 posts
Re: Ask HN: How many people actually use Vim?
#2I use it for quick edits or when I need to use macros. Although many Vim evangelists claim it‘s the best editor for coding, I have made the experience that VS Code is better. Vim is an extensible text editor, not an IDE. Sure, you can tweak it by adding all sorts of plugins like CoC for autocompletion, syntax highlighters etc. However, the tweaking often takes a lot of time, with the result rarely being better than an IDE.
Re: Ask HN: How many people actually use Vim?
#3I use Neovim for most editing. If I feel like I need some extensions that VSCode has, I use vscode with vim bindings enabled. I even have vim bindings enabled in Obsidian. So it's not necessarily vim specifically, but the modal keybindings that I like about vim.
Re: Ask HN: How many people actually use Vim?
#4For development, I use IdeaVim (a plugin for JetBrains' IDEs).
vim for shell scripts and configuring servers, firewall, nginx.conf, etc.
`set -o vi` for my shell.
MacVim or GVim to export code snippets for my blog using Syntax -> Convert to HTML
Re: Ask HN: How many people actually use Vim?
#5[deleted]
Re: Ask HN: How many people actually use Vim?
#6I use neovim on servers, and locally if I'm just editing a file. For work i use vs codium with the vim keybindings enabled. People do use it, and once you get used to it, going back to the normal way of doing things seems really slow and annoying
Re: Ask HN: How many people actually use Vim?
#7I do and I work at
http://www.github.com/odoo/odoo
It is viable.
I hate VSCode.
Search @ThePrimeagen on Twitch, he's great and works at Netflix.
Re: Ask HN: How many people actually use Vim?
#8I use vim for all my editing tasks.
But that being said, the people behind Go do a survey once a year where they ask about what editors people use https://go.dev/blog/survey2020-results
> VS Code remains the most preferred editor (41%), with GoLand a strong second (35%). Together these editors made up 76% of responses, and other preferences did not continue to decrease as they had in previous years.
Vim is at 14%
Re: Ask HN: How many people actually use Vim?
#9I’m good at vim and it will be probably what I use if I’m editing a script or some other project that does not require extensive tooling. But typing and navigating files are the least of my concerns these days. I’ll use whatever IDE is most suitable for the task in hands. XCode for Swift/Apple Programming, IDEA for Java/Kotlin, Android Studio for Android, VSCode for TypeScript,… But I will enable whatever VIM subset plugin/mode they have.
Re: Ask HN: How many people actually use Vim?
#10I use Vim everyday for Typescript development. I've turned it into an entire IDE with Plugins so it is equal to VSCode but faster for everything, and I can pack it all up and move it to a new computer instantly by transferring two files.