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Where Vim Came From

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Re: Where Vim Came From

#181

Post by close04 »

cup-of-tea wrote: post #131
raverbashing wrote: post #125

Earlier 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…

Usability is always and without a doubt the responsibility of the designer. The old saying might be valid for tools that are meant for complex tasks. Expert level tools where doing the job a certain way is more important than doing it intuitively. In reality that saying is mostly used as an excuse for a tool that could be more effective but isn't.

If something as basic as a text editor is so unintuitive it is not the user's fault.

There's always the option of providing better examples or documentation, or a more intuitive "control scheme" which allows users to toggle between "old" and "new".

The fact that some tools choose to do it "the hard way" is almost entirely rooted in tradition and reluctance to do it another way. Not because it's better.

Re: Where Vim Came From

#182

Post by chr15p »

krylon wrote: post #156
chr15p wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 crit…

OTOH, emacs has TRAMP which allows you to edit files remotely, using ftp or ssh as the transport layer. (Okay, I do not use that feature often, and I do still use vi sometimes for quickly editing a config file or something).

A normal sysadmin workflow would be, log in via ssh, poke at some log files, run a couple of commands, edit a config file, restart a service, check the logs again, logout. If you need to be ssh'd in anyway to run commands then being able to edit a file remotely is of limited value.

I actually really like emacs, for a while I used it as my login shell (no x-windows and with e-shell providing a command line), and elisp is an awesome tool (in theory if not always in practice), but when I moved into sysadmining and later consulting the practical issues meant vi was by far the best option.

Re: Where Vim Came From

#183

Post by I_complete_me »

lysium wrote: post #39
massysett wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You want evil-mode.

Or spacemacs.

I'm a long-term vim user but I felt the need to look into emacs to see what it had to offer. I messed about with various implementations of emacs until I found Spacemacs and then - may I quote Keats here?

"Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes He star'd at the Pacific—and all his men Look'd at each other with a wild surmise— Silent, upon a peak in Darien." Substitute Spacemacs for Pacific and we're on the same page!

Re: Where Vim Came From

#184

Post by raverbashing »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #169
raverbashing wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The defaults you're used to are a historical accident, and are also crap Agreed, that's why I use modern IDEs as well when vim gets in the way > How on Earth did you get there? f1 + ? then "describe bindings" which looks like the most relevant option (I had opened a file with emacs first, I see the welcome page has more helpful guidance, but opening a file is usually what people do first) > following a (somewhat) c…

> Thanks for reinforcing my point that Emacs is more worried about gatekeeping people than being friendly Any ideas how it could be better? It has a built-in tutorial. It has thorough help. It welcomes you with instructions on getting help, as you noted yourself. There's plenty of guides and tutorials on-line, too. What else could it do to be more friendly, that would not involve sacrificing its productivity features…

> Any ideas how it could be better?

There are a couple of things to explore. I've followed your suggestion and looked at the tutorial, which is fine for the most part (Alt didn't work but it's probably my terminal's fault, ESC ESC works but it's not great)

Compare it with vimtutor.

In the 1st page vim taught how to move around and how to close VIM. Emacs is still teaching 'PgUp/PgDown'. It teaches you how to insert text 7 pages down. Vimtutor: 3rd page

For this basic operations emacs is not harder than vim it is just that they go on and on on and don't get much to the point. To find out how to save a file you need to go all the way down and then read about 'buffers' and how your file is now a buffer and you save it (??)

And that seems to be the main difference. Everything is harder than it should be. Most shortcuts involve C-x something or C-x C-something (which is not very ergonomical). It does not share the conventions or even the vocabulary of other systems.

And something that applies to vim as well: Programs should cut the crap about using direction keys/PgUp/Down/Home/End. My 80s computer had them. Every modern computer has something similar to those operations and that works on all programs. "Oh but then you have to take your hands off of home" I do use a mouse and I do use other programs, as much as I like shortcuts, I have to move my hands and there are a lot of shortcuts outside of that area.

Re: Where Vim Came From

#185

Post by zaeem »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #107
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).

loved that comic

Re: Where Vim Came From

#186

Post by chr15p »

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.

I have been amazed how many really good linux people will close and re-open a file in vim because they dont know how to undo.

Its weird to me how people will spend weeks learning openstack or kubernetes in depth but never think "there must be a way to do this..." or get round to googling a 5 minute basic command tutorial for the text editor they use every day.

Re: Where Vim Came From

#188

Post by JdeBP »

cup-of-tea wrote: post #100
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…

I don't really know when the editor wars took place or when (or if) they finished, but I started to look for a serious text editor around ten years ago. Before that I was using different "IDEs" for every programming language I used but I knew that it made no sense to invest serious effort into something like Netbeans for Java. I also realised that I was using maybe 10% of the functionality of these tools, and it was…

They took place in the 1980s and early 1990s. They were rather silly at the time. Taking them seriously now, decades afterwards, is definitely silly.

Re: Where Vim Came From

#189

Post by bluedino »

Izkata wrote: post #5

I see MS-DOS is mentioned near the bottom, but the part I was most curious about was not. When I got my dad's old Windows 3.1 laptop somewhere around 1999, I discovered DOS and started fiddling with it, eventually discovering the "edlin" editor. Everyone else though it was bizarre and hard to use, but I really liked it because I could look at different parts of a file at the same time. The commands were similar to th…

During the DOS 5.0 days I discovered EDIT.COM and the split windows blew my mind. I would view function prototypes or structs while writing code in the window below. And I could do it in 80x43 instead of 80x25!

Re: Where Vim Came From

#190

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]
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