Why I Still Use Vim • Hacker News Board

Re: Why I Still Use Vim

#71

Post by nnq » Wed, Aug 23, 2017, 11:25 AM UTC

Klathmon wrote: post #6

These kinds of comparisons always seemed a bit silly to me. It's like complaining that opening a 6MB file in windows took over 3GB on my system! (ignoring that most of that is the OS getting ready to do other things, and enabling the OS to do things other than opening and reading a 6MB file). Yes, Atom isn't the most resource friendly editor out there, and nobody is claiming it is. But it is one of the more capable e…

Being electron/browser based is not and excuse for such horrific resource usage...

Visual Studio Code is also electron based and it's extremely lightweight (ram) and responsive on even the most underpowered machines I've ran it on.

The problem is getting people that only have experience writing web apps to develop what is practically an IDE... The good part is that this will teach frontend web developers a lot of tricks for speeding up their web apps. The bad part is for the users of the IDE/editor... Really, if you're a web frontend developer, go ahead and use Atom and tinker with it, but for everyone else who's not working on a gaming-grade monster workstation all day long, using it seems pure masochism :)

Re: Why I Still Use Vim

#72

Post by kowdermeister » Wed, Aug 23, 2017, 11:25 AM UTC

FlyingSnake wrote: post #28

I really wish developers stop using the JS editors and switch to platform specific editors. It's 2017 and all platforms have great native text editors, like Notepad++, GEdit, and if you need cross-platform, Sublime text. I don't see the point I using these electron based editors which waste tons of CPU cycles, and provide nothing of value.

Code is the best FREE editor that comes with advanced Node debugging out of the box. For TypeScript projects it's also great.

Not to mention the shitloa*s of plugins that comes with its ecosystem.

Re: Why I Still Use Vim

#73

Post by sovok » Wed, Aug 23, 2017, 11:26 AM UTC

kristopolous wrote: post #5

A good thing to learn is gnu ed. You can navigate around, replace text, append, prepend and delete lines on a 1GB file using a few KB of memory.

It's the standard editor after all https://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/ed-msg.html

Re: Why I Still Use Vim

#74

Post by bigato » Wed, Aug 23, 2017, 11:26 AM UTC

Klathmon wrote: post #27

xchip wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That'd be a fair comment if atom was using 12Mb, but 3GB???

It's ~850MB, and it's only at that level when using it outside it's intended purpose. Atom was not designed to open 6MB XML files. If that makes it worthless for you, that's okay, but for some of us it doesn't matter. I'm never going to open a 6MB XML file, I might open a 1MB JS file, but that is extremely rare. Earlier in the article, it shows that opening a 60 byte file only used 250MB, and that's more than reasona…

> Earlier in the article, it shows that opening a 60 byte file only used 250MB, and that's more than reasonable to me.

Reading that this early in the morning made me feel like I woke up in a parallel universe.

Re: Why I Still Use Vim

#75

Post by ceronman » Wed, Aug 23, 2017, 11:26 AM UTC

> Code requires a whopping 349 megabytes in order to open a 60 byte file. Atom comes in at 256 megabytes. Where Vim “only” needs 5 megabytes, which is still kind of high, but representative of an average configuration

These numbers seem off. I just tested it and my VS Code uses 39MB of memory for loading a bunch of Python files and having a few plugins activated. Where are these numbers coming from? How was this test done?

I switched from Vim to Sublime a while ago. For me Sublime feels much faster and user friendly. I'm now trying VS Code for Python, Go and Clojure. I know is not as fast as Sublime or Vim but it's really user friendly and I'm impress of how quickly the developers have been able to provide awesome functionality into their editor. That for me sounds like a fair tradeoff given that computers these days have several Gigabytes of memory.

Re: Why I Still Use Vim

#76

Post by nnq » Wed, Aug 23, 2017, 11:27 AM UTC

One question bugs me: how the hell did VSCode developers manage to get so incredibly much better performance (both low memory usage and responsiveness), using such a similar technical platform (also Node/js/Electron)?!

There are surely lots of tricks to be learned from such a comparison, so if someone would dissect and compare Atom vs VSCode I'd even pay to read such an article!

Re: Why I Still Use Vim

#77

Post by ge96 » Wed, Aug 23, 2017, 11:27 AM UTC

smokeyj wrote: post #54

pleasecalllater wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is ridiculous. I just should not complain that some program is useless and terribly resource hungry? What will be next? "Stop complaining that the browser uses 10GB of ram to show a page, as it is bigger than standard page"? This is just ridiculous. For showing the html I just use multiple browsers. My page must look good in multiple browsers, not in my editor. For the whole environment I just consoles with full…

Why complain and not just use another program? There's many options. But if you like using Atom and also like complaining - then you're like a helpless baby crying for attention. Submit a PR and be done with it! Viva la open source revolución!

VS Code, I switched from Atom I have peasant-grade computing

Edit: can't remember off hand the reason I switched, idle ram usage or latency possibly

Re: Why I Still Use Vim

#78

Post by Klathmon » Wed, Aug 23, 2017, 11:29 AM UTC

geodel wrote: post #69

Klathmon wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't need to like Atom, but to claim it's a "bad editor" for everyone is silly. You can use multiple browsers to preview, I prefer to have it in the editor which makes it easier to switch between (same argument for code tabs vs windows). I still test and work in multiple browsers to ensure compatibility, but being able to get the rough parts laid out in the editor itself and fix/develop on things that are the sa…

> I don't need a car that goes 200MPH but that doesn't mean every F1 car is entirely useless, just that it's designed for a different purpose. Those cars use huge resources for extreme performance. I don't think Atom provides extreme performance even after using extreme resources.

It depends on what you consider "performance".

An F1 car is going to be the worst tow truck in existence. It's "towing performance" is basically a 0/100.

Atom's "extreme performance" for me is in my productivity. the 2GB of ram that my atom windows are currently using is a very very small price to pay for better productivity.

Even if Atom were so resource hungry that I needed to buy a new laptop every other year for $5000 (which I don't), if it makes me more than 2% more productive, it's paid for itself.

Re: Why I Still Use Vim

#79

Post by dodo » Wed, Aug 23, 2017, 11:29 AM UTC

Time waste to read. Nonsense article comparing pears and apples and he is believing he knows everything. It is not worth to discuss it.

Re: Why I Still Use Vim

#80

Post by pleasecalllater » Wed, Aug 23, 2017, 11:32 AM UTC

Klathmon wrote: post #56

pleasecalllater wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is ridiculous. I just should not complain that some program is useless and terribly resource hungry? What will be next? "Stop complaining that the browser uses 10GB of ram to show a page, as it is bigger than standard page"? This is just ridiculous. For showing the html I just use multiple browsers. My page must look good in multiple browsers, not in my editor. For the whole environment I just consoles with full…

You don't need to like Atom, but to claim it's a "bad editor" for everyone is silly. You can use multiple browsers to preview, I prefer to have it in the editor which makes it easier to switch between (same argument for code tabs vs windows). I still test and work in multiple browsers to ensure compatibility, but being able to get the rough parts laid out in the editor itself and fix/develop on things that are the sa…

It's much simpler:

If Atom is so resource hungry, and I have alternatives which are not = IMHO the editor is a bad editor.

Use whatever you like, but it looks like the most important thing is that you like it, not that it's resource hungry.

> Not to mention that a 6MB file is pretty fucking big for something like atom.

This it the most funny part of your comment. I want my editor to open my files as they are. Some people could be happy with editors allowing for max. 20 lines per file, and I'm sure they would also claim that longer files are bad, so it's fine that an editor doesn't support that.

Use whatever you like, but don't claim that using 3GB of ram to open 6MB file is fine, because programmers couldn't implement that properly. It's not the file's fault that it cannot be opened normally. Really don't blame the file.