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Helping a Million Developers Exit Vim

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Re: Helping a Million Developers Exit Vim

#411

Post by diegoprzl »

rebootthesystem wrote: post #404
linkmotif wrote: post #374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why doesn't it make sense today?

In all of the discussions on HN about vi/m this is probably the most intelligent question I've received after posting my opinion. I've been coding for 16 hours straight and have at least another four in front of me (have to deliver tomorrow AM) so I don't have a ton of time to answer this. I'll use today as my example of how irrelevant (and counterproductive) vi/m can be. I'm working on a large Django project and cra…

I think you're right. Nowadays I only use Emacs+evil for Org-Mode and languages that don't have strong tooling yet.

For me the main advantage of vi/vim is that I don't have to learn new editing keybindings each time I change editor/IDE. Vim mode is probably there and the rest I can rebind.

Another advantage for Vim/Emacs, especially Emacs, is that they are very extensible so you can actually have features that are more cutting-edge than what commercial IDEs have yet. Still I do think that the IDE package is more productive.

Re: Helping a Million Developers Exit Vim

#412

Post by h1d »

rebootthesystem wrote: post #404
linkmotif wrote: post #374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why doesn't it make sense today?

In all of the discussions on HN about vi/m this is probably the most intelligent question I've received after posting my opinion. I've been coding for 16 hours straight and have at least another four in front of me (have to deliver tomorrow AM) so I don't have a ton of time to answer this. I'll use today as my example of how irrelevant (and counterproductive) vi/m can be. I'm working on a large Django project and cra…

Surprising you type focused, which I agree with the content well, after 16 hours of work but it would be nice to see your table setup in picture.

Re: Helping a Million Developers Exit Vim

#413

Post by bobwaycott »

rebootthesystem wrote: post #404
linkmotif wrote: post #374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why doesn't it make sense today?

In all of the discussions on HN about vi/m this is probably the most intelligent question I've received after posting my opinion. I've been coding for 16 hours straight and have at least another four in front of me (have to deliver tomorrow AM) so I don't have a ton of time to answer this. I'll use today as my example of how irrelevant (and counterproductive) vi/m can be. I'm working on a large Django project and cra…

Everyone always makes fun of my thumb-operated trackball.

Re: Helping a Million Developers Exit Vim

#414

Post by Kiro »

burkaman wrote: post #7

The most viewed question is even more relatable: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/927358/how-to-undo-last-... You can get the top viewed questions here: http://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/53109/ques...

Why such a complicated top answer? There should be one command for this without involving esoteric stuff like HEAD, ~ and ...

Re: Helping a Million Developers Exit Vim

#415

Post by doktrin »

omni wrote: post #318
doktrin wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> (kill-emacs) C-x C-e > Pretty straightforward If this is a joke, it's totally whooshing over my head right now

C-x C-e evaluates the Emacs Lisp expression before the point. This gives the same result as the much more obvious M-x kill-emacs, but with the added fun of writing and executing Lisp directly in whatever buffer you're in. So to close the editor, we've written some code in a weird ancient language into some random text file, fired up an interpreter that's probably so portable you can run it on a 1980s toaster, and exe…

No don't feel bad! It's a good joke I was just sleepy when I responded :)

Re: Helping a Million Developers Exit Vim

#417

Post by a_lieb »

Assuming it takes an average of 1 minute for someone to look up the answer and quit Vim, the readers of this question alone spent a total of 2 years looking up how to quit Vim. Whether or not it was a good design choice, it goes to show how much of people's time and energy is at stake when you make software at enormous scale.

Re: Helping a Million Developers Exit Vim

#418

Post by diminish »

chpmrc wrote: post #316
drewg123 wrote: post #305

I met my wife because she was stuck in VI. I was a unix sysadmin in the early 90s, and she was a grad student. She came to me for help (like most of the 1st years did) because she couldn't get out of vi. However, to be fair, this was not her fault per-say. She actually knew how to use vi, but just couldn't find the ESC key. Does anybody remember the DEC keyboards where there was no traditional ESC key, but it was F11…

THIS is the "How I met your mother" we want.

And I met mine, while she needed help trying to copy paste in emacs.

IDE users, you're doomed to stay single!

Re: Helping a Million Developers Exit Vim

#419

Post by PhasmaFelis »

cryptonector wrote: post #382
rebootthesystem wrote: post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most people have no idea why vi made sense way back when (and, in my opinion, does not today). I used VT100 terminals for years on both mainframe and CP/M systems. Keyboards were not very standardized before then, the mouse did not exist and most text editors had to use all sorts of convoluted commands to allow you to do anything. http://www.vintagecomputer.net/digital/VT100/DEC_VT100_SYSBO... I ran the first version…

It is the only editing system that makes sense to me. That's because modal editing means fewer modifier-key combinations are needed, and no mouse is needed. Compare with.. any other editor, where the only thing that might save you from RSI is enabling sticky keys, and even then, if it isn't emacs you still have to heavily use a mouse. For a great number of tasks, being a vim or emacs pro means doing things faster tha…

To me, using "no mouse is needed" as a positive is like building a car that uses extra pedals to steer and saying "no steering wheel is needed". Mice are great. I want to use mice.

Re: Helping a Million Developers Exit Vim

#420

Post by jakub_g »

VLM wrote: post #288
jakub_g wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work for a reservation systems company (a GDS) that is used by thousands of travel agencies. Of course, since the system was created 30 years ago, you were only able to create reservation with a text-based interface at the time, with short commands, inconsistent and complex flows to do some non-trivial things etc. So it's despised by newcomers because learning curve is steep. However, the company has been building…

"inconsistent and complex flows to do some non-trivial things" Note that's a characteristic of bad design, not a characteristic of CLIs, where constraining the UI to GUI, will merely result in a hard to use GUI, instead of a hard to use CLI. Note that in an email or printed page I can provide any CLI walkthru and anyone can follow with minimal training ("Which key is the any key?"), but some purely graphical GUIs are…

> "inconsistent and complex flows to do some non-trivial things"

> Note that's a characteristic of bad design, not a characteristic of CLIs

That's a characteristic of hundreds of developers creating features over dozens of years, and those features interacting with each other in subtle ways.

In my experience, even in small projects and codebases things get notoriously inconsistent very fast. It's a hard thing to keep, as it requires conscious effort and most developers don't care that much. And once something goes to production (or far enough in non-regression phase), it's a game over.

On top of that, AFAIU, in legacy systems, storage space was severely limited. Hence PNRs had a rigid structure that was not very extensible. That's another fact due to which implementing new features in a backward-compatible way might have been cumbersome.

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