Live data from Hacker News

Why I Still Use Vim

medium.com

21–30 of 112 posts

Re: Why I Still Use Vim

#21

I really wanted to like Atom, but it always felt unfinished and clunky with crashes/freezing/locking becoming more of a regular occurrence with the more plugins or extensions you use. It's one saving grace is that I thought Sublime was a bit bulky/memory hungry, but Atom gave me a new found appreciation for Sublime which I'm now back in love with!

Atom claims to have code folding, but (despite having syntax highlighting) the code folding function works naively off of indents, not syntax, so you're out of luck working on any codebase with less-than-meticulous indentation, zero-indent comments, etc.

Unfortunately, IIRC, Sublime does exactly the same thing. It's really frustrating. I haven't been able to find a good all-purpose Mac programmer's editor with working code folding.

Re: Why I Still Use Vim

#22
People can mount whatever defense they like of Electron, but the bottom line is, I think twice before I adopt any new Electron app. My daily drivers are a desktop replacement with 8gb of ram and an ultra-portable machine with 4gb.

On 4gb it only takes a couple of Electron apps to eat half of my ram or more. Factor in the OS and a browser or two and it's already swapping. These are often just chat apps or something, they may be good apps but they aren't doing anything fundamentally new and whatever they replaced probably needed It used to be that developers published minimum and recommended system requirements for their program. Maybe Electron developers need to start disclosing that 4gb ram is the minimum to use their apps and 8gb is recommended.

There don't seem to be many benefits I get from an Electron app that I couldn't be getting by just running Chrome in app mode with a dedicated profile (which consumes a lot less ram).

I would prefer to see developers release a web app first and then perhaps offer an Electron version if you've got ram to burn.

Re: Why I Still Use Vim

#23
This makes me nostalgic for the days when emacs was disparagingly said to be an acronym for Eight Megs And Constantly Swapping. Eight hundred megs for a code editor would have been unimaginable back then.

Re: Why I Still Use Vim

#24
I don't use Atom but I would say, if I did, that my development environment includes hardware that has 800MB available. This isn't to suggest I'm ok with bloat, I absolutely am not. But if the most important thing on my computer is using up resources then I don't mind that.

I'm more concerned about how much work I'm able to get done, and with Vim frustration eats up more of my time than with a modern GUI.

Re: Why I Still Use Vim

#25

People can mount whatever defense they like of Electron, but the bottom line is, I think twice before I adopt any new Electron app. My daily drivers are a desktop replacement with 8gb of ram and an ultra-portable machine with 4gb. On 4gb it only takes a couple of Electron apps to eat half of my ram or more. Factor in the OS and a browser or two and it's already swapping. These are often just chat apps or something, t…

I think Electron devs really need to step and try to address the performance problems but even if they do, I don't think it'll help much since they have to allow full web platform to run. Electron has brought so many apps to Linux that devs otherwise wouldn't even consider so I'm happy about that. On the other hand these apps have major performance problems. Especially the ones that I've to leave running in the background.

I think a better platform could be a highly stripped down version of web to the point where it is not even web anymore but still familiar and simple to use. Kind of like what Flutter did (Desktop support in flutter would be pretty great actually). Either that or a serious react native platform/framework that focused on Desktop computers.

Re: Why I Still Use Vim

#26

This makes me nostalgic for the days when emacs was disparagingly said to be an acronym for Eight Megs And Constantly Swapping. Eight hundred megs for a code editor would have been unimaginable back then.

Emacs is still available and constantly improving. I use it in parallel with VS Code and Vim and I must say that no other editor is better at manipulating text, vim included.

Re: Why I Still Use Vim

#27
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's shady about asking people to pay for content? It seems like it's pretty much out in the open so you can take it or leave it, not secret or covert or shady in any way.

It's shady if they're not giving out royalties to the writers. Not sure if they do

They do. See [1], heading "REWARD YOUR FAVORITE AUTHORS"

[1]: https://medium.com/membership

Re: Why I Still Use Vim

#28

I really wanted to like Atom, but it always felt unfinished and clunky with crashes/freezing/locking becoming more of a regular occurrence with the more plugins or extensions you use. It's one saving grace is that I thought Sublime was a bit bulky/memory hungry, but Atom gave me a new found appreciation for Sublime which I'm now back in love with!

Atom claims to have code folding, but (despite having syntax highlighting) the code folding function works naively off of indents, not syntax, so you're out of luck working on any codebase with less-than-meticulous indentation, zero-indent comments, etc. Unfortunately, IIRC, Sublime does exactly the same thing. It's really frustrating. I haven't been able to find a good all-purpose Mac programmer's editor with workin…

Atom is currently in the process of working on implementing a new source folding parser [0] based on something called 'tree-sitter' [1]. If you are interested in following that development, feel free to watch that PR.

[0] https://github.com/atom/atom/pull/16299

[1] https://github.com/tree-sitter/tree-sitter

Re: Why I Still Use Vim

#29
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's shady about asking people to pay for content? It seems like it's pretty much out in the open so you can take it or leave it, not secret or covert or shady in any way.

It's shady if they're not giving out royalties to the writers. Not sure if they do

They are. But, I’m having a hard time figuring out what percentage of the revenue.

Re: Why I Still Use Vim

#30

People can mount whatever defense they like of Electron, but the bottom line is, I think twice before I adopt any new Electron app. My daily drivers are a desktop replacement with 8gb of ram and an ultra-portable machine with 4gb. On 4gb it only takes a couple of Electron apps to eat half of my ram or more. Factor in the OS and a browser or two and it's already swapping. These are often just chat apps or something, t…

[deleted]
Post reply on HN