> Thompson paid a visit to Queen Mary’s, saw the program Coulouris had built, and dismissed it, saying that he had no need to see the state of a file while editing it.
Classic Thompson
Where Vim Came From
141–150 of 265 posts
Re: Where Vim Came From
#142> 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.
Nah, the weird ones use Acme: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acme_(text_editor)
Re: Where Vim Came From
#143Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ok let me be very honest here, let's look at both editors learning curves - vi/vim You need to learn to open a file, edit it, move around and exit and the edit/view mode. Everybody learns how to do it. At first it sucks but you can learn this in 5 min. Nothing too hard, and yes, do use the direction keys, it's not the 70s anymore. From there you can learn other things - Emacs You try reading anything about it, there'…
> You need to learn to open a file, edit it, move around and exit and the edit/view mode. Everybody learns how to do it. At first it sucks but you can learn this in 5 min. > Nothing too hard, and yes, do use the direction keys, it's not the 70s anymore. All of that applies to emacs too. What's the difference? > Usability problems are never the fault of the user. That's contrary to the old saying: a bad workman always…
> That's contrary to the old saying: a bad workman always blames his tools
That is not what that means.
If GP had said "I cannot write good code in Emacs", that'd be a poor craftsman blaming their tools. But saying "this tool is not as effective as this other tool" is a thing that good craftsmen do.
(I'm not addressing the original claim, just meta-meta-critiquing your meta-critique).
Re: Where Vim Came From
#144How old are regular expressions, when the predecessor of `ed` already got it?
Edit: Found it[0]
Regular expressions originated in 1951, when mathematician Stephen Cole Kleene described regular languages using his mathematical notation called regular sets.
Re: Where Vim Came From
#145Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Startup time is a non-issue for both Vim and GNU Emacs on modern hardware. (It was not ever so: I remember first meeting Emacs under DOS on a 20MHz 386. It was not speedy.) Perhaps another underrated issue affecting relative uptake is keyboard layout. As the OP explained, Berkeley vi was originally developed on an ADM-3A tty, with no arrow keys and the "Esc" key where a modern keyboard would position the "Tab" key. I…
Nit: "not ever" and "never" are synonymous. I think you meant "it was ever so" or "it was always so" or "it was not ever an issue".
Interesting hypothesis. Ergonomics is certainly one of the reasons I chose vim over emacs.
Re: Where Vim Came From
#146Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is really hilarious. I am so glad you showed me that. The endless scroll section with the arrows. Great! :D and the music video...hypnotic.
you apparently missed the comic ;)
Just to be clear - the arrows are not endless, there's a comic down below :).
Re: Where Vim Came From
#147> Fred Fish was an American programmer that mailed out a floppy disk every month with a curated selection of the best open-source software available for the Amiga platform.
Fish disks contained mostly freeware/public domain as far as I remember. Not open-source software.
Re: Where Vim Came From
#148Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
I’m not sure if that’s actually true...vim has a hard dependency on ‘vim-runtime’ which is actually pretty big (28mb)
Re: Where Vim Came From
#149Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ok let me be very honest here, let's look at both editors learning curves - vi/vim You need to learn to open a file, edit it, move around and exit and the edit/view mode. Everybody learns how to do it. At first it sucks but you can learn this in 5 min. Nothing too hard, and yes, do use the direction keys, it's not the 70s anymore. From there you can learn other things - Emacs You try reading anything about it, there'…
Have you tried exiting vim? :D
Try exiting `ed`. Much more fun.
Re: Where Vim Came From
#150Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.)
I want my software to be instant, or as close to it as feasible. Vim is fast enough, make sometimes, and gcc not. This is in syntax-only mode for the latter.
But how can you get more instant than "it's already running"? The emacs way of doing things seems to be to do _everything_ in emacs -- it's your shell, your editor, your debugger, your mail client. Vim users, on the other hand, tend to only open vim when they need it.