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Why I Still Use Vim

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Re: Why I Still Use Vim

#91
post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> better productivity

than what ? wtf is worse than atom. Even notepad++ is better.

Re: Why I Still Use Vim

#92
I would love to use atom, but every time I install it, I find it slow and buggy (on my 6GB Linux machine). The code completion doesn't seem to work properly either, and that's the deal breaker. I reluctantly uninstall, and go back to eclipse or geany.

Re: Why I Still Use Vim

#93
post #69

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 does (to the op) and the op explains how. Performance is not always the speed of the editor.

Re: Why I Still Use Vim

#94
post #76

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!

Discord too. A lot of people elsewhere in this thread are talking about how Slack is eating a ton of RAM and things like that, but (anecdotally, of course) Discord seems to be a lot better while using a lot less RAM. Personally, I can be in ~80 Discord "servers" that total to a few hundred thousand people and it's still using <500MB of RAM, so clearly it's possible to do a good job of resource management.

Re: Why I Still Use Vim

#95
post #83

I recall the Turbo Pascal text-mode IDE that left enough space to actually run the programs you were developing. The machines had 640KB RAM, and I think the IDE was using perhaps as much as 100KB. I recall using fully-featured GUI IDEs like VB, VC++ etc on machines with whopping 64MB RAM, and having enough space left to actually run the programs you were developing. I have a laptop now with 16GB RAM. The other day I…

Great comment for historical perspective. But just out of curiosity, why did you need to edit a log file?

just going to do fancy find replace. Sometimes when you have to actually read log files its easier in a text editor than on the command line.

Re: Why I Still Use Vim

#96
post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I think any discussion with you is pointless. You just love this editor, and whatever things you need to sacrifice to use it are file. This includes buying a new laptop each year, using only small files, buying more ram etc.

I'm just too old for flame wars with their-own-church believers. I just need to write code, so I switch tools to appropriate ones. It's just a tool. I'm sure that some hammer-loving guys do all things with hammers, even if that's terribly hard.

If you really think that Atom has "extreme performance", you really don't know other tools that are on the market.

Good luck, the hardware industry will love you even more.

Re: Why I Still Use Vim

#97

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.

Excellent point, and now that WSL exists, vim/nano/emacs are available on every modern platform one would wish to use for development.

Re: Why I Still Use Vim

#98
post #14

> I’ve primarily stuck with [vim] because it’s an extensible editor that doesn’t hog all the resources and kill my machines. Exactly, BUT ... Vim has a non-mainstream shortcut interface, which I've always thought is an unfortunate caveat. So over the years I've actually managed to massage Vim into behaving like a 'normal' editor. It fits into a plugin if you're interested: https://github.com/tombh/novim-mode

Just use nano if you don't want its shortcuts or even emacs. You don't have to use any predefined shortcuts in emacs. Everything is reconfigurable. The main selling point of vim is its shortcuts and modal editing. If it is not for you there dozens of great text editors that do a good job of just editing text compared to Atom.

Re: Why I Still Use Vim

#99

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…

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 pe…

I'm not blaming the file, i'm saying that using a hammer as a drill is silly, and that it's not the screw nor the hammer's fault, it's the user's.

Atom was designed as an editor for web developers. They took some trade offs when building it, and because of that opening large files is difficult for it. When I need to open large files, I use tail, or ed, or notepad++, or just grep or something else.

It's not that the Atom programmers couldn't implement it properly (FFS they built github, i'm sure they know how to open a file without using 1GB of memory...), just that it didn't make sense to for the usecase atom was meant for.

But it doesn't seem like i'm going to convince you, so I guess we can agree to disagree!

Re: Why I Still Use Vim

#100
post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> Atom's "extreme performance" for me is in my productivity

Yet there are lots of people who are extremely productive with vim. So I don't think you can pit subjective metrics (productivity) against objective (RAM usage) here.

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