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Where Vim Came From

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Re: Where Vim Came From

#81

Post by ahoka »

j0e1 wrote: post #38

> While Emacs certainly still has a following, some people think that the Editor Wars are over and that Vim won.16 The 2018 Stack Overflow Developer Survey suggests that this is true; only 4.1% of respondents used Emacs. I'm an Emacs user for years now and love the editor. But I'm curious about this claim of its poor popularity. The article refers to a piece from http://www.linux-magazine.com/Online/Blogs/Off-the-Bea…

The majority of "vim users" are painful to watch using it solely in visual mode with arrow keys and pressing backspace like crazy when they want to delete something.

Re: Where Vim Came From

#82

Post by steve1977 »

nextlevelwizard wrote: post #57
tmalsburg2 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Selection bias: the crowd on /r/linux is likely not representative.

Why not? Do Emacs users usually use other OS than Linux?

I mainly use macOS for example. At least on the systems where I use Emacs. I use Linux for servers, but I rarely do much editing directly on those systems.

Re: Where Vim Came From

#83

Post by copperx »

keithnz wrote: post #8
gmiller123456 wrote: post #2

>As far as I can gather, Intel HEX files are meant to make binary images less opaque I know this is getting away from the main point of the article, but they're purpose is more to have a standard format that compilers can generate and eprom/device programmers could read without being concerned with the machine's endianness. Pretty much any embedded compiler can produce a .hex file, and pretty much any programmer will…

It amused me that the hex file was described as esoteric given how prolific they are in the embeded world.

That brought back memories.

When I was a kid I liked to poke around executables in the MS-DOS world. Hex editors were limited in the sense that they wouldn't let me insert bytes into the file, just edit existing ones. Because I didn't have access to an disassembler or an assembler (they were sold at stores but they were too expensive for me), I wrote a simple program that would convert a binary file into a text file full of hex codes, then I could edit that, change jumps to different addresses, change strings, and then I would reassemble the executable with another program to see the effect. I used this to translate programs and games to Spanish by changing the strings in the executable. Messages in Spanish are in average longer than English ones, so I couldn't just use a hex editor.

It's funny to me that the hex file format is a real thing.

Re: Where Vim Came From

#84

Post by kqr »

3rdAccount wrote: post #16
ubernostrum wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm always kind of curious about comments like this -- it seems everybody knows you have to play games of Twister and hit twelve control keys simultaneously to do even the most basic things in Emacs. But... I use Emacs. I've been using it for almost twenty years. And I'm struggling to think of anything I use regularly the involves hitting more than two total keys simultaneously (keys pressed in sequence obviously don…

Emacs really hurts my hands. Maybe evil mode is for me? I like lisp and want to learn emacs, but vim seems more elegant when you don't need to write anything yourself.

On the contrary: with vim you have to write everything yourself over and over. With emacs you capture it in a Lisp function once and never write it again.

Re: Where Vim Came From

#87

Post by erik_seaberg »

DougMerritt wrote: post #73
enf wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

CP/M ED is more in the TECO tradition than anything else, through the DEC influence. It is oriented around characters rather than around lines as the ed family is.

And if you keep going back, TECO (like QED) can be traced back (via ports, rewrites, shared authors, etc) to the PDP 1 and Colossal Typewriter. All those histories are intertwingled back then.

Heh, I'd forgotten that EMACS started out as "editor macros" that were eventually ported from TECO's command language to MacLisp.

Re: Where Vim Came From

#88

Post by Vinnl »

cup-of-tea wrote: post #71
j0e1 wrote: post #38

> While Emacs certainly still has a following, some people think that the Editor Wars are over and that Vim won.16 The 2018 Stack Overflow Developer Survey suggests that this is true; only 4.1% of respondents used Emacs. I'm an Emacs user for years now and love the editor. But I'm curious about this claim of its poor popularity. The article refers to a piece from http://www.linux-magazine.com/Online/Blogs/Off-the-Bea…

Very difficult to do with free software and completely irrelevant really. At some point in your life it's OK to accept that you're the weird one. We're the weird ones. Donald Knuth, Richard Stallman, Guido van Rossum, Rich Hickey et al are the weird ones. I don't know why emacs is such a barrier to everyone else or why vim is so attractive. But I don't understand most other humans about most things.

As someone who came into all this "after" the editor wars and is now using Vim, these were what I understood were their selling points:

- In Vim, you learn how shortcuts work and how they compose, and then you can apply them to a bunch of new situations and "guess" which other shortcuts apply.

- Emacs can do a whole lot and you can customise it exactly to your liking. Oh, and it also supposedly works really well with Lisp.

Not sure how accurate my view of Emacs is, but the Vim selling point has turned out to be true for me. The Emacs selling point just didn't appeal to me. I don't care for having to customise my text editor everywhere I work with it, and I don't know yet what awesome customisations there even are. I also don't use Lisp (though I'd like to, someday, and might checkout Emacs then).

Re: Where Vim Came From

#89

Post by kmgr »

That's a great read. I'm not a hardcore vim user, but like most devs I bump in to it often enough to get somewhat familiar with its wacky interface. I always had this feeling I'm using a legacy tool (in a nerdy positive way) even though it's relatively young. This article shows that my feeling was quite accurate.

Re: Where Vim Came From

#90

Post by dosy »

This is a great historical trace / origin story. And now it all makes sense. But I'm a little disappointed. As someone who came to vim from the world of Notepad / Wordpad / WordPerfect / Word, vim, when I finally learned how to be productive in it, seemed so revolutionary and amazing. I sort of was hoping for a story that justified this feeling, like "Bram had a dream one night where alien greys appeared to him and told him he had a mission for humankind. They then showed him source code for a perfect text editor used in the Aldebaran system for millennia. It's name, they said, would be vim. Bram created it in a non-stop 3 day sprint before expiring for 1 month."
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