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Where Vim Came From

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Re: Where Vim Came From

#221

Post by krylon »

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.

I sometimes wonder who came up with the idea for Caps Lock anyway. I cannot remember ever using that key except by accident.

Re: Where Vim Came From

#222

Post by calhoun137 »

When you are learning programming, its important to be able to isolate the problem you are working on and focus on that. The fact is that vim has a steep learning curve, and no matter how fast you are at typing things, your rate of productivity is still limited by how fast you can make decisions and how fast you can think and solve problems. I strongly believe that mastering hotkeys and tools like vim is the final stage of achieving the highest levels of programming skill. This is because once you have learned so much and trained yourself hard to think and move really fast, only then does your productivity bottleneck become things like using the mouse too much, not knowing certain hotkeys, not using things like regex replace, multi-line edit, and so on. The problem is mastering a single tool requires a tremendous amount of investment of time and energy, and once you are at the point in your development as a programmer where you need to start improving on hotkeys, well you are already deeply invested in whatever tool you are using and making the switch to vim has a major cost associated with it, because now you have to learn everything you already know how to do all over again. Is this cost worth it? Sometimes, depending on how advanced a person is, other times, depending on the situation, it's not. I think this phenomenon explains a lot about why vim is not as popular as perhaps it deserves to be.

Re: Where Vim Came From

#223

Post by j0e1 »

federicoponzi wrote: post #113
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…

What about starting a new poll? :) https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfgn71T6I3olMRNCTDQ... Feel free to suggest options adds or edits

That's a great idea! As of now there are already 460 responses :)

Re: Where Vim Came From

#224

Post by thelazydogsback »

gumby wrote: post #42

From the article: > ...Emacs could cost hundreds of dollars (this was before GNU Emacs) Emacs clones (of various levels of compatibility) for unix and other systems could be purchased back around the time this sentence is set, but to be fair, the original Emacs (or EMACS -- the ITS filesystem only had upper case) evolved by RMS et al from Gene Ciccarelli's TECO init file was naturally free. And Bernie Greenbergs Emac…

I used one called Mince, I believe, on CP/M machines - I think on a Compucolor or Cromemco or something. There was another I can't remember the name of. Ah: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MINCE And found this - Lynx friendly as well! http://www.texteditors.org

Re: Where Vim Came From

#225

Post by pimeys »

lysium wrote: post #218
pimeys wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 :-)

Already running it! Although I have this in my head that I need to create my own emacs configuration from scratch and learn more how it works. Someday...

Re: Where Vim Came From

#226

Post by azernik »

krylon wrote: post #221
TeMPOraL wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I sometimes wonder who came up with the idea for Caps Lock anyway. I cannot remember ever using that key except by accident.

Because you got me curious enough to look this up:

It apparently originates from typewriters, when holding shift was quite physically taxing (since it literally shifted all the typeheads over to put alternate characters over the ribbon); so caps lock saved a lot of finger strain when typing acronyms or writing symbol-heavy text.

Re: Where Vim Came From

#227

Post by pantalaimon »

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).

Relevant XKCD https://xkcd.com/224/

Re: Where Vim Came From

#228

Post by krylon »

azernik wrote: post #226
krylon wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I sometimes wonder who came up with the idea for Caps Lock anyway. I cannot remember ever using that key except by accident.

Because you got me curious enough to look this up: It apparently originates from typewriters, when holding shift was quite physically taxing (since it literally shifted all the typeheads over to put alternate characters over the ribbon); so caps lock saved a lot of finger strain when typing acronyms or writing symbol-heavy text.

Thank you! It is kind of fascinating how much legacy from the typewriter era modern keyboard carry with them.

Re: Where Vim Came From

#229

Post by y4mi »

Lio wrote: post #161
yoz-y wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not both though? Both Qt Creator and Visual Studio code have quite good Vim Integration and their IDE features dwarf Vim with tons of plugins. I use all three for various purposes, but an IDE is a very useful things when working with languages that can take advantage of it.

Definitely. I can't see a reason not to if it works for you. The few times I've tried IDE plugins they get the Vi/Vim basics right but usually fall down later. The terminal means that I can almost always have consistent keyboard based workflow across platforms. I like being close to the OS and use external tools for things like git, debugging, profiling, etc. I'll supplement that with GUI tools when it suits me. E.g.…

vim-mode has grown on me, though i only use a tiny subset of its features.

Pretty much all i use it for is dd, O/o yy p/P cc I A f/F ... hmm, the list keeps getting longer...

Re: Where Vim Came From

#230

Post by krylon »

bunderbunder wrote: post #199
TeMPOraL wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

But having to spend a lot of time getting familiar with some tool, language or framework is not unusual in IT/Programming. Think of C++, or the .Net framework. When programming in C#, I spend at least 1/3 of my time browsing the API documentation or StackOverflow, TechNet, etc.

With emacs, as with C++ or .Net, the idea is that the effort to get familiar with the environment pays off big time after a certain point.

If somebody asks me (that happens almost never, though), my reply is to tell them about the long term-benefits of using emacs and to give both emacs and vi a try and decide what they like better. And that emacs vs. vi is not necessarily an either-or-decision. I use emacs as my main editor, but I often find myself editing config files using vi. I prefer emacs, but vi/vim is an excellent editor, too. More generally speaking, if somebody tries to frame something like the choice of editor as an either-or-question, consider if a-as-well-as-b is a valid answer, too.

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