Why I Still Use Vim

Unless you use Python and Saas. In which case indentation is always perfect.

Did he just basically copy Joe Allen's Text Editor Performance Comparison[1] (which is already somewhat obsolete) without attribution? Wow.

1: https://github.com/jhallen/joes-sandbox/tree/master/editor-p...

---- EDIT: I'm sorry, there's a mention at the end of the article. Either I didn't noticed it before or he added it after this comment.

I am a fan of VIM but I find the whole discussion around Electron rather amusing - almost as if we need to justify our need for regular punishment by reinventing the wheel. It is fun to do things from scratch but it will not get you there fast.

Yes, Electron apps are a bloat considering that each one of them brings its entire runtime like games, and you know that most games will exceed several Gs of disc space and memory. The actual app that runs under electron is probably a few KB up to several megabytes of packed JS. Now consider statically linking the entire Cococa framework and other supporting frameworks in your app. Why would you do that when the OS is doing all the heavy lifting for you? Well, Electron is not part of your OS so if you develop with it you need to absorb the cost. The cost of disk space and memory - don't forget that. The OS does a lot of clever stuff to minimize your memory footprint. For example, DLL code is actually shared across all processes and mapped into each process/thread virtual memory space. This alone is a lot of optimisation taken for granted.

Ignoring decades of progress for the sake premature optimisation is stupid. The web is a reality and there is a lot of investment behind it. What needs to happen is for browser and OS vendors to offer means to execute web apps as part of the OS with all the optimisations needed for it to happen. Windows is able to run web apps (HTA) under the context of an isolated IE using COM but no other mainstream OS does as far as I know. Do you think that having in kernel virtual machine crazy? This feature already exists in all major kernels and your GPU drivers as well. You just don't see it because it is abstracted for away for most development tasks.

So yes, vim is nice and Electron is a bloat. But that only stands if you ignore the fact that the modern browser is effectively a modern OS. So think of Electron apps in the same way you think of docker containers. It is a snapshot of executable code - all the code you will need to run your app and it is portable across OS-es. That is a huge order to fill and it is done almost effortlessly.

It's there at the end.

For me, the most awesome part is the debugging experience out of the box. If you're programming for NodeJs (or other supported languages, with a bit of configuration), you can click on the side to add a breakpoint and hit F5 to run, step over your code and hover variable names to see what they hold, evaluate expressions to change things and stuff like that. Still in the JS world, VS Code uses the TypeScript engine to infer variable types and detect type errors, which by itself catches a lot of bugs.

These features aren't unique to the JS language though. Extentions do have access to the APIs that implement these features, so you already have them available for most languages (with different levels of quality/completeness).