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Where Vim Came From

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Re: Where Vim Came From

#201

Post by Vinnl »

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…

Well, you explained the attractiveness of both vim and emacs better than I did, so I now better understand why people like Emacs, and I hope this also helps explain to the grandparent why people often try Vim.

Emacs still is not that high of a priority for me to learn (I don't care much for org-mode or non-CLI-git), but at least it's on the list now, so well done :)

Re: Where Vim Came From

#202

Post by emblaegh »

kamaal wrote: post #132
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 don't know why emacs is such a barrier to everyone else or why vim is so attractive. Its simple. Its called 'The Rise of Worse is better'. Mainstream programming tools moved out of the control of power users long back, like decades back. We are now in a phase where every thing has to be 'easy' to use. Editors too are a part of it. Look at the continuing rise in interest in languages like Python and Go, and declin…

Can you imagine being so delusional you think vim is a dumbed down "casual" programming tool?

Re: Where Vim Came From

#203

Post by navd »

kamaal wrote: post #132
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 don't know why emacs is such a barrier to everyone else or why vim is so attractive. Its simple. Its called 'The Rise of Worse is better'. Mainstream programming tools moved out of the control of power users long back, like decades back. We are now in a phase where every thing has to be 'easy' to use. Editors too are a part of it. Look at the continuing rise in interest in languages like Python and Go, and declin…

I think you're looking at this the wrong way. There's a place for programming languages like Go. A tool does not have to "full featured" or "hard" to be good. And using "simple" tools does not make someone more dumb.

If you need a swiss army knife, then by all means use one. If you need a drill, Go ;-) with that.

There is beauty in simplicity as well.

Re: Where Vim Came From

#204

Post by JdeBP »

copperx wrote: post #83
keithnz wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It amused me that the hex file was described as esoteric given how prolific they are in the embeded world.

That brought back memories. When I was a kid I liked to poke around executables in the MS-DOS world. Hex editors were limited in the sense that they wouldn't let me insert bytes into the file, just edit existing ones. Because I didn't have access to an disassembler or an assembler (they were sold at stores but they were too expensive for me), I wrote a simple program that would convert a binary file into a text file…

One of the things that would have benefitted MS-DOS that came out of the box with OS/2 1.x was a PATCH.EXE , a tool for applying binary patches.

Re: Where Vim Came From

#205

Post by corpMaverick »

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…

My personal journey. My first editor was vi. Then I learned about emacs and used it for a few years. But I still had to use vi when I logged in remote machines that didn't have emacs. When vim came a long, it was almost as good as emacs and I could use it everywhere.

Conclusion: vi/vim was everywhere already.

Now days I use sublime. I still use vi/vim when using *nix servers.

Re: Where Vim Came From

#206

Post by rini17 »

boomlinde wrote: post #98
lysium wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or spacemacs.

... which uses needs evil-mode

Evilmode is useless for long-time vim users with muscle memory. Things such as different behavior of ? or / are frustrating. Also many popular plugins (such as orgmode) interfere with evilmode. And movement between windows. And there's not even a consistent keystroke to close a window in emacs, and evilmode's mapping of q muddies the situation even further.

Re: Where Vim Came From

#207

Post by maxnoe »

jhbadger wrote: post #168

I'm an Emacs user but I'm really surprised at the number of (presumably, as HN skews young) younger people here using vi or derivatives. Most younger people I know use neither vi nor emacs, using Sublime Text or an IDE or something, but vi seems much more alien to the modern worldview than Emacs, as it a modal editor, which has died out in all but vi-clones these days.

26yo astrophysicist / datascientist here. Using neovim since two years now and before vim for 3 years as main editor.

I don't know anyone below 40 using emacs. (Neo)Vim using (lots of) plugins has a pretty solid user base around here. Most is Atom / VS Code / Jetbrains IDE but vim has a solid standing especially along the more enthusiast programmers.

Re: Where Vim Came From

#208

Post by OskarS »

raverbashing wrote: post #125
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.

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'…

Your comparison is a little unfair. If you just want to use it as a text editor, Emacs is easier to use than Vim. You can move around with the arrow keys, typing letters inserts them into the document, there are the standard menus, toolbars and scrollbars you would expect. In other words, if you're looking for a "Notepad replacement", Emacs works just fine as that, and you don't have to learn anything about the meta key or whatever.

I agree that Emacs overall is more complex overall (which is not necessarily a bad thing), but from a "first impressions" perspective, Emacs wins.

Re: Where Vim Came From

#209

Post by AlexeyBrin »

chr15p wrote: post #182
krylon wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> If you need to be ssh'd in anyway to run commands then being able to edit a file remotely is of limited value.

You can access the remote shell from TRAMP and run commands, just like you can access the local shell from Emacs on your local machine.

Re: Where Vim Came From

#210

Post by TeMPOraL »

raverbashing wrote: post #184
TeMPOraL wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 t…

Thanks for your thoughts. The tutorial could definitely be improved and restructured.

> 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.

Hey, Vim is the ergonomic one, Emacs is the extensible one (ergonomy improves somewhat with evil-mode, aka. vim emulation in Emacs) :).

> 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.

The reasoning here is this: those conventions used in modern programs are hurting your productivity. Vim in particular is strongly optimized towards making your keypresses maximally efficient. Emacs much less so, but still, its defaults beat arrow keys, for which you need to move the entire hand.

FWIW, Emacs has cua-mode (named after that IBM CUA thing I mentioned), which gives you behaviour similar to every other program you know. Maybe it could be introduced to people earlier, but there's a good argument against it - CUA keybindings are really inferior to what vim/Emacs gives you.

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