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Where Vim Came From

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Re: Where Vim Came From

#191

Post by asveikau »

> How did Vim become so successful?

They didn't answer this question. The most obvious to me is that Linux distros have had it as the default for decades. If FreeBSD caught on instead maybe we'd have people writing the same article about the amazing history of nvi.

This is a weird thing to me. When I was getting started with this stuff, everyone out there acknowledged that vim was a vi clone in the first breath. There are now lots of folks that think vim is the primary thing. Kind of similar to how they call shell scripting "bash". I guess it's rather like asking what brand of Kleenex, or a Coke in the southeastern US.

Re: Where Vim Came From

#192

Post by eatonphil »

omaranto wrote: post #155
meken wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Only barf and slurp are paredit commands, the others you mentioned (the sexp motion and killing commands) are stock Emacs! (Well, by default C-M-u is bound to backward-up-list, either that's what you meant or paredit really defines a slightly different up-sexp commands. I don't remember right now.) The worst command I regularly use, in terms of number of modifiers, is definitely C-M-% for query-replace-regexp.

Yep, I use those movement commands for getting to the beginning or end of brackets when I edit JavaScript.

Re: Where Vim Came From

#193

Post by cup-of-tea »

jeremyjh wrote: post #152
cup-of-tea wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> It would have to be a modal editor to use vim commands. Or it would have to emulate them. Which is what VSCode, Atom, Visual Studio, Eclipse, Intellij, Netbeans, Kate all do. Those are just the ones I have used, I'm sure there are plenty of others.

That's not a trivial feature that "every other editor" can do, though.

> I'm sure there are plenty of others.

Emacs, for one.

Re: Where Vim Came From

#194

Post by arendtio »

zach43 wrote: post #148
arendtio wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

You are right the dependencies probably have a larger impact, but notice that emacs has a similar package emacs25-common (65mb) in its dependecy tree.

Re: Where Vim Came From

#195

Post by JdeBP »

chr15p wrote: post #121
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.

To be honest I've seen very few linux machines with emacs preinstalled, nano seems to be part of the ubuntu default install (maybe debian too?) but isn't on any fedora box I have immediate access too (it is available in the repos). This might be because I mainly deal in servers with smaller installs than most desktops. I would entirely agree that a lot of vims popularity lies in it being part of the default install o…

Because, of course ...

* http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/utilities/vi...

There is a whole history of why emacs is not likewise in the SUS, already related long since by other people.

Re: Where Vim Came From

#196

Post by JdeBP »

Syssiphus wrote: post #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.

The name "open source" had not even been coined at the time. "PD" was a popular contemporary prefix for things, although their actual public domain status was legally questionable, irrespective of the FSF's objections to the idea.

Re: Where Vim Came From

#197

Post by GlennS »

raverbashing wrote: post #167
TeMPOraL wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Nothing too hard, and yes, do use the direction keys, it's not the 70s anymore. Yet another thing 70s got better than today's software. The defaults you're used to are a historical accident, and are also crap - that is, an impediment to productivity. > I tried opening the help of both programs (...) > Emacs? I'll copy-paste here (key bindings help) How on Earth did you get there? The very first thing in the Help me…

> 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…

I don't think it's deliberate gatekeeping.

In the process of learning a tool thoroughly you forget what it was like to not know how to do it.

So, it becomes hard to write a good beginner's tutorial. And you forget why the things which help beginners are useful, so they just look like clutter.

Personally, I don't think that 10-15 minutes reading the Emacs tutorial is much help to anyone. However, I am glad that I have spent the past few years learning how to use Emacs (and I haven't even learned elisp properly yet), and grateful to the people who made it and all the great software around it.

Re: Where Vim Came From

#199

Post by bunderbunder »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #162
krylon wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> use the direction keys, it's not the 70s anymore. In my experience, the fact that I can navigate a file without taking my hands off the home row far outweighs any disadvantages hjkl might have. With emacs, the big point is that you can do so many things in it that you never have to leave it; that also means once you have the keyboard shortcuts memorized, you can use them everywhere - besides editing text, emacs can…

> that also means once you have the keyboard shortcuts memorized, you can use them everywhere That's half of the benefit. The other half is, in Emacs things compose and interoperate. That fancy autocomplete plugin you just installed? It will work for suggesting e-mail addresses just as well as for suggesting function calls in code. Multiple cursors? Regex search-and-replace? Keyboard macros? They work everywhere , wh…

As great as that is, though, they're all advantages that won't become relevant until you've really learned emacs, and won't become really advantageous unless you're comfortable enough with emacs that you're willing to commit to it.

In other words, its not stuff that's going to drive adoption. The ggp has a point about emacs having a higher barrier to entry for complete beginners.

Re: Where Vim Came From

#200

Post by JdeBP »

cup-of-tea wrote: post #119
vvillena wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

readline and ZLE (and indeed libedit/editline) provide both emacs and vi key bindings.
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