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Why I Still Use Vim

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Re: Why I Still Use Vim

#131

Post by Klathmon »

amelius wrote: post #119
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…

I'd like to see some numbers on how memory usage relates to file size. E.g. memory usage for a 1k file, 10k, 100k, 1M, 10M, 100M, 1G.

It's so variable simply because of the modular nature of the editor.

If you use a 60 byte javascript file, you are going to see more resource usage in Atom than you would with the 60 byte C file, that's because by default atom includes more "javascript oriented" plugins, so it will be analyzing the file more.

I currently have 83 (holy shit I didn't know I even amassed that many!) plugins in my atom editor. If I open a JS file it's doing a LOT to that file. Linting, formatting, searching for symbols to autocomplete, searching for paths to autocomplete, looking for things that look like color hex codes to highlight in that color, trying anything that looks like a link to see if it can show a hover-preview for them, etc...

If I open a C file in Atom, it's going to syntax highlight it, and nothing else.

Then it's further made harder because some of those plugins will stop working on files of specific sizes (ex my intelligent autocomplete package will stop working somewhere around 1mb I believe), so you might even see it drop in memory usage after that.

Re: Why I Still Use Vim

#132

Post by thesmallestcat »

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!

Why would I put in all that hard work when I could shame the maintainers on HN into fixing my issues?

Re: Why I Still Use Vim

#133

Post by icebraining »

vbezhenar wrote: post #120
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…

A lot of people have similar complaints about Idea. So your complaint is only different because Atom happens to eat a bit more memory. Do you know that Emacs means "Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping"? See, it's wasn't different 30 years ago. One can easily build a workstation with 128 GB memory if he's making money with it, it's not very expensive, so 1 GB of RAM would be less than 1%. I don't see much issues,…

One can easily build a workstation with 128 GB memory if he's making money with it

That's a very narrow perception of the profession. There are developers making money all over the world, and hardware prices don't scale down according to national salary levels. Even in Western Europe, that's more than a month's salary for a medium-level developer in some countries.

Re: Why I Still Use Vim

#134

Post by castis »

Klathmon wrote: post #99
pleasecalllater wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 A…

> 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.

No one is claiming the opposite. An appropriate argument is that some nails are bigger than others and this hammer in particular chokes on big nails.

> When I need to open large files, I use tail, or ed, or notepad++, or just grep or something else.

Breaking your workflow in the name of progress seems counterintuitive.

> I'm sure they know how to open a file without using 1GB of memory.

The realities of Atom prove otherwise.

Re: Why I Still Use Vim

#135

Post by cdevs »

I didn't realize why I hated some of the concepts behind vim until I saw a recent article that explained the creator of vi was using the older style keyboard with esc and control keys in more convenient places as well as arrow graphics where movement keys are in vi. I know I would have loved it back then but I also know that if it were created today decisions would be very different and could be better right from the start with out me having to mod the hell out of it. I'm not good at keeping config files for my personal setups from matchine to machine and I wipe operating systems and try new ones all the time, just doesn't click with me. I'm sure if I stuck with it and these things were second nature I would love it.

Re: Why I Still Use Vim

#136

Post by charrondev »

kuschku wrote: post #63
tracker1 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Frankly, VS Code is WAY better in terms of plugin and configuration than any of the editors you mention.. from git integration, search, integrated terminal, integrated debugging with ui driven break points, etc, not even counting plugins. None of the editors you mention support those features. It's not wasting CPU cycles, and frankly even if it is, it's better than wasting my cycles having to switch between several t…

Then try out the JetBrains IDEs, and report back. All the features, none of the slowdown. I can't believe a Java IDE is actually faster than the new default editors.

I do most of my work in PHP, JavaScript, and sass. VSCode is far faster and much more responsive than PHPStorm or WebStorm on my 2014 MacBook. It's missing refactoring support for PHP so I can't use it for everything, but for my day to day it's the best editor I've ever used by a mile.

Re: Why I Still Use Vim

#137

Post by Klathmon »

nnq wrote: post #127
Klathmon wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

JetBrains tools are the gold standard for Java, and I use them as well when i'm in that world. But for Python, JS, go, and a handful of smaller langs Atom is treating me well. And while it's true that the browser-based nature of Atom won't help with refactoring tools, they do allow you to easily integrate any CLI tools with it (or I should say, they make it easy for ME to do!). I'm not trying to claim Atom is the bes…

What would be the "gold standard" Python plugin for Atom? Looking at https://atom.io/packages/python-tools I see "Show usages: [...] Currently only supports detection of symbols within the same file. This will be extended to support usages outside the current file in the future.". That's kind of useless. VSCode or Sublime may fail at refactor, but such a feature like browsing usage of a symbol (across multiple files,…

To be honest my Python usage is much less than it was a few years ago. I generally only work in small standalone scripts and some contributions to larger projects every now and again... So I wouldn't be able to help all that much with that.

But for your GUI that you want to build, you will have a significantly easier time doing that in Atom than in VS Code. I don't know much about writing plugins for VS Code, but I hear it's much more restrictive compared to Atom in terms of what you can and can't do.

I believe that a plugin that can generate a "visual language" is going to be difficult or impossible to do with the tools provided by VS Code, they mostly have specific APIs for dealing with editor windows as text.

With atom you could roll your own display stuff but you have the whole power of the browser to do any styling/layout/display you want. You'd basically just need to "render" your UI to a web page, then embed that as a pane in the editor.

With some of the others like Sublime and VIM I know even less about their plugin abilities, but I have a feeling it's going to be difficult to do in either of them.

Re: Why I Still Use Vim

#138

Post by Klathmon »

castis wrote: post #134
Klathmon wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 A…

> 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. No one is claiming the opposite. An appropriate argument is that some nails are bigger than others and this hammer in particular chokes on big nails. > When I need to open large files, I use tail, or ed, or notepad++, or just grep or something else. Breaking your workflo…

>Breaking your workflow in the name of progress seems counterintuitive.

Using another editor where opening large files doesn't break my workflow, but needing to alt-tab over to the browser to see how my changes look does is much worse for me. I look at log files every few days at most, and generally while they are on another system.

I look at the results of my development on my app hundreds of times a day.

If it's different for you, then Atom might not be the best tool for you!

Re: Why I Still Use Vim

#139

Post by bigato »

willvarfar wrote: post #95
bigato wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Were you on windows? Because I can't imagine fancier find and replace than grep, awk, sed, cut and friends. Or maybe 'less' if you want to page and do simple searches. But maybe that's just because I'm used to these tools.

Re: Why I Still Use Vim

#140

Post by kowdermeister »

makapuf wrote: post #109
kowdermeister wrote: post #68

Something seems off, I just opened a 8.7MB file with Code and it still uses 264MB memory. (Win10) "> Conclusion Learn Vim." It's like saying "getting tired of long commuting?" Buy a Ferrari.

Except everyone can learn vim in a few days whereas not everyone can buy a Ferrari in a few days.

I've heard multiple people stating that it took months of using it (and configuring it) until they kinda get used to vim.

Not hard data, but interesting to read also: https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/66wnd/how_long...

When it takes reading tutorials to set up mouse + clipboard support, then I feel it's just simply not for me.

It just irks me that someone finds editors bad that sacrifices resource handling in order to gain extreme flexibility and the he then concludes that the best thing to do is to learn something he spent probably a lots of time mastering. I skip tips from the ivory tower.

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