Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Where Vim Came From

twobithistory.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

211–220 of 265 posts

Re: Where Vim Came From

#211

Post by bonyt »

Lio wrote: post #114
ahoka wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Vimtut…

Check out https://vim-adventures.com/ to learn the basics!

Re: Where Vim Came From

#212

Post by pletnes »

Avamander wrote: post #176
pletnes wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Relatedly, the emacs users I’ve met were 10+ years older than me (so far). Also, a huge number of other editors have vim keybindings as an option or plugin: intellij, eclipse, visual studio - the list goes on forever...

> a huge number of other editors have vim keybindings as an option or plugin: intellij, eclipse, visual studio - the list goes on forever... I think I managed to crash the IntelliJ vim keybinding mode like twenty times when trying to get used to vim. I did try later to just use vim on it's own, but it really doesn't appeal to me at all, I have to google pretty much everything I need to get done and that takes so much…

I printed a cheat sheet. The first 1-2 weeks are less productive. After that, it’s «life before and after». Would recommend learning plain vim, just to keep yourself from getting confused from what’s vim and what’s intellij.

Re: Where Vim Came From

#213

Post by erikbye »

nextlevelwizard wrote: post #57
tmalsburg2 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Selection bias: the crowd on /r/linux is likely not representative.

Why not? Do Emacs users usually use other OS than Linux?

Of course. Even a few game devs use Emacs on Windows.

Jonathan Blow and Casey Muratori (he recently switched to something else I think, not sure if he's back to Emacs) being two prominent ones.

I use Emacs whether I'm on Linux, FreeBSD, macOS or Windows.

Re: Where Vim Came From

#214

Post by erikbye »

cup-of-tea wrote: post #118
pyrale wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I use Emacs and this is completely anecdotal, but I agree, it feels like vim is the hip editor. I think it started to become hip when Rails gained traction. A lot of screencasts using vim. I guess this was when TM had fallen out of favor or something.

A lot of Elixir devs use vim, as well, and many came from Ruby/Rails.

Re: Where Vim Came From

#215

Post by azernik »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #166
krylon wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> every time I've tried to spend serious time in Emacs over the past 30 years on a PC or Mac keyboard, I've ended up with stabbing pains in my wrists within a week I used to think "emacs pinky" was a joke, but it is real. Eventually I learned how to re-map Caps Lock to be a Ctrl-key (I never used Caps Lock anyway), and Caps Lock is far more comfortable to reach with my pinky than either of the regular Ctrl-keys.

Yup. Remapping Caps Lock is kind of a shibboleth for Vim/Emacs users. Emacs users remap to CTRL; I hear Vim users remap to ESC.

Vim users do indeed. I still get a bit of ESC pinky, but not nearly as bad as the default layout would cause.

Re: Where Vim Came From

#216

Post by azernik »

curlypaul924 wrote: post #145
cstross wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Your equation of "not ever" and "never" is off - "ever" means "always", and "never" means "always not" ("ever not"). In logic terms:

"Ever so" = for all, so

"Never so" = for all, not so

"Not ever so" = not (for all, so) = there exists, where not so.

The last is fairly clearly the intent of GP. Startup is short either way now, but there exists a time when it was not short - insert references to old slow hardware that would take 10-20 seconds to boot emacs.

Re: Where Vim Came From

#217

Post by erikbye »

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'…

To first-time Emacs users:

Do M-x (alt-x) and type help-with-tutorial, hit your enter key (RET in Emacs jargon).

Re: Where Vim Came From

#218

Post by lysium »

pimeys wrote: post #80
pletnes wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Relatedly, the emacs users I’ve met were 10+ years older than me (so far). Also, a huge number of other editors have vim keybindings as an option or plugin: intellij, eclipse, visual studio - the list goes on forever...

The funny thing is, emacs has the most compatible vi mode and they call it the evil-mode. Happy user for many years.

Check out spacemacs then :-)

Re: Where Vim Came From

#219

Post by erikbye »

Draiken wrote: post #179
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…

Honestly I feel that it has become more of a fame and dissimination thing than anything else. I've seen VIM portrayed as this holy grail of productivity for several years now, while Emacs has always been portrayed as a quirky complex editor. I'm a VIM user and never used Emacs (nothing against it) but, correct if I'm wrong, both have a similar philosophy and have a higher learning curve than modern editors. They're a…

http://emacsrocks.com/

http://emacs.sexy/

Re: Where Vim Came From

#220

Post by calhoun137 »

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.

The majority of "vim users" are painful to watch berating other programmers out of a misguided sense of self importance and overblown massive egos all because someone else dares to use the mouse to do something when they could save less than 1 second by using a hotkey instead.

People are most productive when they use the tools they know best. I use vim all the time, but I also like to use the right tool for the job, and sometimes that tool is an IDE and other times that tool is a gasp mouse.

( P.S. Please don't take this comment too seriously or personally, I am mostly kidding and am being extra hyperbolic on purpose because this thread seems like such a wonderful opportunity to rehash the never ending vim vs sublime debate and I wanted to get the sublime side of the argument off on a strong footing ;) )

Post reply on HN