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Where Vim Came From

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Re: Where Vim Came From

#111

Post by rhizome31 »

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.

> Vim is attractive to many because it launches in a fraction of a second

I often joke than with all the Vim plugins I use, I manage to make my Vim starts as slowly as Emacs (I haven't encountered wide popular success with this joke though)

Re: Where Vim Came From

#112

Post by chr15p »

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.

Not just its launch time but its ubiquity, vi comes installed on pretty much every linux/unix machine no matter how minimal the install so if you are a sysadmin whose job involves jumping between machines a lot it makes far more sense to learn vi then install emacs everywhere. Its also the reason to use it without customization so you dont come to rely on a feature that isn't installed on that one machine with a critical problem

Developers tend to work on a single machine so can tailor it much more to their own preferences.

Re: Where Vim Came From

#113

Post by federicoponzi »

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…

What about starting a new poll? :) https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfgn71T6I3olMRNCTDQ... Feel free to suggest options adds or edits

Re: Where Vim Came From

#114

Post by Lio »

ahoka wrote: post #81
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.

That's always funny. I have the same reaction with IDE users who vocally disdain my use of Vim. Usually, I find they're copying and pasting with a mouse in a solitary window in the centre of the screen whilst boasting about syntax highlighting. :D

Of course it's great to see someone who actually really does know any piece of software give a demo of how they use it.

For Vim newbies I'd point people first to the Vimtutor and then to http://vimcasts.org/ as a starting point.

Re: Where Vim Came From

#115

Post by sshine »

zimbatm wrote: post #72
nextlevelwizard wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Completely anecdotally I've ever met two person who used Emacs and handful of people who use vim. At my current job I'm the only one who uses vim as my main tool, but collegue sitting next to me is the other Emacs user. Although some poeople have started to dabble in vim every now and then. I guess people just run into vim more often in the wild.

Completely anecdotally as well, all 3 emacs users that I know are the most brilliant developers that I know.

Extending your anecdote with my own clarifying anecdote: I know some brilliant Vim users, but I don't know any non-brilliant Emacs users.

Re: Where Vim Came From

#117

Post by vvillena »

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…

The vim commands are mostly great, they are a fantastic set of hyper-productive defaults we all should learn. One of the reasons is that almost every other editor has the ability to use vim commands.

Evil, the Emacs vim plugin, implements the vim commands plus some popular vim plugins (like vim-surround), and the resulting experience is awesome. I'm a heavy Spacemacs user and the user experience is so well done that it is a joy to use.

Re: Where Vim Came From

#118

Post by cup-of-tea »

pyrale wrote: post #78
cup-of-tea wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stupid poll. Due to the limited options, people who use neither editor seriously have voted vim simply because they know about it. Also it can't be denied that vim is the hipster editor, used by the same kind of people that use reddit. People that use emacs, like me, do not vote in polls on reddit.

Dude, your comments come across as categorizing and slightly judgemental. It's fine to use vim, and it's fine to use emacs. No need to get upset over a piece of technology.

I meant to say vim is the "hip" thing, as in, it's in fashion with a certain type of programmer for some reason. Fashion definitely exists in our world, even though it's hard to admit. In my (purely anecdotal) experience, vim gets a lot more lip service than actual use.

Re: Where Vim Came From

#119

Post by cup-of-tea »

vvillena wrote: post #117
Vinnl wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The vim commands are mostly great, they are a fantastic set of hyper-productive defaults we all should learn. One of the reasons is that almost every other editor has the ability to use vim commands. Evil, the Emacs vim plugin, implements the vim commands plus some popular vim plugins (like vim-surround), and the resulting experience is awesome. I'm a heavy Spacemacs user and the user experience is so well done that…

> One of the reasons is that almost every other editor has the ability to use vim commands.

Really? It would have to be a modal editor to use vim commands. Emacs commands, on the other hand, could work with the vast majority of editors out there, and actually do work in many cases. readline, for example, which is used by bash and many other CLI programs uses emacs bindings. fish and zsh use them too.

Re: Where Vim Came From

#120

Post by arendtio »

sgillen wrote: post #97
rounce wrote: post #76

I wouldn't be surprised if a large part of Vim's current popularity stems from EDITOR=vim by default on many distros, despite often having emacs and always including nano. Even over a decade ago when I was in my early teens this seemed pretty common.

Definitely a part of it, I’m an emacs user but I’ve been on enough machines that only have vi(m) and that I just need to make a quick edit on that I’ve had to learn the basics of vi anyway.

I believe vim is a lot smaller, so for many cd-images it is easier to find the space to include it.

The quickes way to validate this believe was to look for the Ubuntu package sizes (look at the size (installed)):

https://packages.ubuntu.com/bionic/vim-nox

https://packages.ubuntu.com/bionic/emacs25-nox

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