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Why I Still Use Vim

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Re: Why I Still Use Vim

#161
post #135

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…

Yeah, vim with a standard querty layout is just painful. I have a few configs floating about that swap esc & tilde, turn caps into another control. Using Vim with anything else is a quick way to destroying my pinky. A few years ago I started rebinding my window controls to be more Vim like (alt-j/k instead of cmd-tab and the like) and noticed less strain. Eventually installed Vimium in Chrome so I could browse using…

> Oh god now I've installed Xmonad and the vi bindings are everywhere

Tell me about it :|

Re: Why I Still Use Vim

#162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How much RAM does the average developer have? I’ve got 16GB in both my 7 year old iMac and 4 year old MacBook Pro. I’ll probably get a new computer next year with 32GB of RAM. I don’t think an editor using 1G-2G matters to me. I don’t currently use Atom but if they innovate faster and eventually build a better editor, many devs will choose it.

We moved from 4GB to 6/8GB in the past five years.

Re: Why I Still Use Vim

#163
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…

You are trying to simultaneously make the case that Atom consuming a surprisingly high amount of memory is absolutely fine, but trying to use it to open a document which is 0.6% of its memory footprint is an unreasonable scenario.

You can make one case or another, but not both at the same time.

>Yes, I know, 6MB isn't "big", but for an editor which is designed to only work on source files which are AT MOST a MB, it's big.

Notepad.exe also fails to open huge documents and you have to kill it. The explanation is quite simple: it's crap and everyone agrees.

Notepad++ easily handles large documents without issues: it's widely considered not to be crap. Its memory footprint is nothing like Atom, (of course it has nowhere near the same capabilities) - but that's sufficient evidence to decouple size and quality. Even other Electron-based editors (e.g. VS code) disprove the "necessity" of devouring so much memory, yet they handle longer files.

Re: Why I Still Use Vim

#164
post #15
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…

>which many of it's target demographic use So true, I almost posted a joke as a comment, only to delete it before actually commmiting a crime. >Vim won't show me 4 panes with ES2016 in one... I'm pretty sure most of this is doable though (not a Vim user)

If remember

:vsp will open up/down and :sp will open left/right

Re: Why I Still Use Vim

#165

Being in 2 slack teams use up as much memory as the entire visual studio 2017 does on my machine. It is electron that is the root cause here and it is the same for all electron based apps.

Has anyone published a memory-map - a breakdown of what exactly is in the process' memory space - of these cases where Electron-based applications use orders-of-magnitude more memory than the native programs we used before? Previously I've remarked that high memory usage in web-browsers in itself is not a cause for alarm, and is mostly a good thing because it means the browser is aggressively caching assets so future…

There's a new native desktop app for Slack, Skype, WhatsApp, etc:

https://eul.im/slack

It's only 4 MB and can handle tens of thousands of messages in one chat without lag.

Re: Why I Still Use Vim

#166
post #134

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. 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 di…

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

Likewise for tools that imbue the user with a blind eye and patronizing tone.

Re: Why I Still Use Vim

#167
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…

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Re: Why I Still Use Vim

#168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

I really feel I described why I think that pretty well. If you are more productive doing things another way, that's fantastic! I use IDEA when i'm working in Java code, I use Atom when i'm working with web stuff, I use tail/grep when searching through log files, I use CLI tools as much as possible for everything else as they integrate with things like editors and IDE's very easily. Everything is a tradeoff, and nothi…

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Re: Why I Still Use Vim

#169
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…

JS devs are just plain evil people

Re: Why I Still Use Vim

#170
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…

>using it outside its intended purpose.

Examples of this would be:

- Playing three Ultra-HD (4k) video streams somehow

- Running a Virtual Machine with 64 GB of virtual RAM

- Acting as a server and servicing 1,000,000 concurrent HTTP connections

- Brute-forcing an automated theorem proof of an open problem, using full first-order logic built equational calculus

Not outside its intended purposes:

- opening a fucking text file

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