Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Where Vim Came From

twobithistory.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 265 posts

Re: Where Vim Came From

#101

Post by cup-of-tea »

kqr wrote: post #92
cup-of-tea wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You use it wrong. You're supposed to keep your local emacs running and use tramp to login to the remote server. That way you still have your emacs config with you and don't have to load it again. What vim users don't seem to understand is: I never restart emacs. Mine stays running for weeks, even months at a time. When I change my emacs config I just run the code. I don't restart emacs.

You understate how great tramp is. It is what allows me to simply not care whether a file system is local or remote. They all behave like local file systems under tramp.

Describing Emacs using English is necessarily an understatement. It can only be properly described using Lisp.

Re: Where Vim Came From

#102

Post by [deleted] »

meken wrote: post #35
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…

> Do people genuinely run into cases where they frequently have to be hitting 3+ keys simultaneously to use Emacs? Paredit mode has several useful ones for writing elisp. - C-M-f, C-M-b, and C-M-u (forward-sexp, back-sexp, and up-sexp) - C-( and C-) (barf and slurp commands) - C-M-k (kill-sexp) M-: (eval-expression in the minibuffer) is also a frequent command for me. I've overlaid several keys in the number row with…

[deleted]

Re: Where Vim Came From

#103

Post by dmortin »

Vinnl wrote: post #88
cup-of-tea wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Oh, and it also supposedly works really well with Lisp.

Most Emacs users don't use it for lisp (aside from programming the editor if needed).

Re: Where Vim Came From

#104

Post by dmortin »

blackrock wrote: post #99
cup-of-tea wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I once used emacs. I still do from time to time. But it's too complicated for its own good. Vim works pretty well. It's simple enough to get by. But these days, I usually only use it for viewing mode. And maybe for some light editing. For anything more complicated, then I just shell into the server, and open the file in a full featured text editor.

Emacs has Tramp, so you can open and edit the remote file right on your computer and emacs takes care of shelling into the server in the background and applying your edits.

Re: Where Vim Came From

#105

Post by LukaD »

pimeys wrote: post #80
pletnes wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Relatedly, the emacs users I’ve met were 10+ years older than me (so far). Also, a huge number of other editors have vim keybindings as an option or plugin: intellij, eclipse, visual studio - the list goes on forever...

The funny thing is, emacs has the most compatible vi mode and they call it the evil-mode. Happy user for many years.

I've been using evil-mode for a few years and I'm also very happy with it. It's the only vim emulation I've seen so far that implements "g?" (rot13). That's how compatible this mode is.

Re: Where Vim Came From

#106

Post by Dylan16807 »

u801e wrote: post #30
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…

> And I'm struggling to think of anything I use regularly the involves hitting more than two total keys simultaneously One I can think of is M-! (shell-command). I'm a vim user, and I frequently use the corresponding :r !some_command to read output from a shell command into the vim buffer.

If you count shift then it's a matter of one modifier vs two which is honestly pretty small of a difference.

Re: Where Vim Came From

#107

Post by TeMPOraL »

dosy wrote: post #90

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 t…

This is, in fact, the story behind Lisp Machines. Unfortunately, humans quickly forgot the lessons from the aliens, and made computing the mess it is today.

The history is documented here: http://landoflisp.com/ (scroll down and follow the arrows).

Re: Where Vim Came From

#108

Post by Lio »

dmortin wrote: post #104
blackrock wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I once used emacs. I still do from time to time. But it's too complicated for its own good. Vim works pretty well. It's simple enough to get by. But these days, I usually only use it for viewing mode. And maybe for some light editing. For anything more complicated, then I just shell into the server, and open the file in a full featured text editor.

Emacs has Tramp, so you can open and edit the remote file right on your computer and emacs takes care of shelling into the server in the background and applying your edits.

Vim has bcvi which is a similar concept.

Whilst I'm happy to use plain Vim it can be useful if you've customised your own set up and don't want to port it to each server.

For those interest in how use raw Vim as a "fully featured" editor I'd recommend Drew Neil's book,

https://pragprog.com/book/dnvim2/practical-vim-second-editio...

http://sshmenu.sourceforge.net/articles/bcvi/

Re: Where Vim Came From

#109

Post by azernik »

copperx wrote: post #79
cup-of-tea wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Vim is attractive to many because it launches in a fraction of a second. This is especially important to sysadmins, who don't "live in a text editor." It's also quite popular to use vim without customization. I understand that some people have simple needs. I don't. The editor wars are over for me and Emacs has won.

The performance issue isn't about sysadmins wanting fraction-of-a-second launches; it's about Serious Programmers back in the 90s wanting precious memory. "Eight Megs And Constantly Swapping" was the derogatory nickname, back when eight megs was a lot.

(And, secondarily, launch times then were longer; 0.2 seconds vim vs. 2 seconds emacs is a very different comparison than between 2-second vim and 20-second emacs.)

Re: Where Vim Came From

#110

Post by TeMPOraL »

dmortin wrote: post #104
blackrock wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I once used emacs. I still do from time to time. But it's too complicated for its own good. Vim works pretty well. It's simple enough to get by. But these days, I usually only use it for viewing mode. And maybe for some light editing. For anything more complicated, then I just shell into the server, and open the file in a full featured text editor.

Emacs has Tramp, so you can open and edit the remote file right on your computer and emacs takes care of shelling into the server in the background and applying your edits.

Tramp also works with things like dired (Emacs directory/file browser) and GDB. Which means that nowadays, I often don't even need to explicitly open a shell on the server (and if I do, it's M-x shell). Tramp also handles tunneling connections and user/privilege switch. So, for instance, I can open my remote home directory, as root, on some server in another network like this:

C-x f ssh:me@public-server|ssh:me@private-server|sudo:private-server:/home/me

And it will just work, opening a dired view of the home directory on remote server, with root privileges. Further commands (e.g. opening files) will also work on the remote, mostly seamlessly.

Internally, Emacs manages shell connections and translates your operations to shell commands; e.g. opening a file will copy it over to your system, and saving it will copy the altered version back.

Post reply on HN