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Where Vim Came From

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Re: Where Vim Came From

#241

Post by azernik »

krylon wrote: post #231
azernik wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Wouldn't you hit ESC with your ring finger or middle finger instead? (When I used vim, I preferred Ctrl-C so I would not have to move my fingers so far.)

That would require lifting my hand off the home row, which would be uncomfortable on my wrists. Playing around with it now, the motion seems to be more of a sideswipe, with a bit of muscle tone to keep the finger from just bending out of the way.

Side note - I've noticed a big improvement in general hand pain since I got into climbing regularly, and specifically starting working with a hand exerciser.

Re: Where Vim Came From

#242

Post by 3rdAccount »

kqr wrote: post #84
3rdAccount wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Emacs really hurts my hands. Maybe evil mode is for me? I like lisp and want to learn emacs, but vim seems more elegant when you don't need to write anything yourself.

On the contrary: with vim you have to write everything yourself over and over. With emacs you capture it in a Lisp function once and never write it again.

But using the alt and ctrl keys is super duper awkward.

Re: Where Vim Came From

#243

Post by scroot »

3rdAccount wrote: post #242
kqr wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the contrary: with vim you have to write everything yourself over and over. With emacs you capture it in a Lisp function once and never write it again.

But using the alt and ctrl keys is super duper awkward.

Lots of Emacs people will map their caps-lock key to ctrl for this reason

Re: Where Vim Came From

#244

Post by grawprog »

For some reason i'm not the biggest fan of vim on a computer. But, vim on android with termux is the best editor i've found for android and I don't know why but as weird as it may seem using vim with the right touchscreen keyboard isn't actually that bad. It's the only realy solution i've found for doing small amounts of programming on my phone. Nothing big, but for small hundred line or so, scripts and such vim is definitely the best thing i've found to use on android.

Re: Where Vim Came From

#245

Post by robdachshund »

meitham wrote: post #67
nextlevelwizard wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The fact that the subreddit is called r/linux instead of r/gnulinux is a major turnoff to emacs users.

Lol maybe if stallman actually made linux anyone would care. He's an insane man claiming a bunch of dev tools constitute an OS. Still hasn't made his own kernel because he can't.

Linux is linux. Not gnu linux. Bite me.

Re: Where Vim Came From

#246

Post by JadeNB »

ubernostrum wrote: post #93
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...

I use a Mac, where most text field by default support at least some readline keybindings, so Emacs knowledge comes in handy :) (try it yourself! If you're on a Mac, open the reply box in a browser that uses Mac-native controls, and start typing, then hit C-a or C-e or other readline key combos and see which ones work)

There used to be a kext that would make Mac text fields respect vim keybindings. (Maybe there still is, but I've lost track of how to use kexts safely these days, or whether it's even possible.) I miss it terribly.

Re: Where Vim Came From

#247

Post by eadmund »

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…

I think it's basically the Blub Paradox for editors: vi(m) is so much better than almost any editor, that its users think 'this, this is truly the best!' When they look at e.g. nano or Notepad++ or Atom, they can easily see how vi(m) is so much better, but when they look at emacs, they simply think, 'nah, I don't need to use that!'

The thing is, just like conditional, symbolic expressions and garbage collection are pretty important for writing expressive programs, so too a power extensible interface to textual information is important for communicating with a computer. vi(m) is a great editor, but emacs is a great editing environment.

Re: Where Vim Came From

#248

Post by eadmund »

cstross wrote: post #124
copperx wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Vim is attractive to many because it launches in a fraction of a second. This is especially important to sysadmins, who don't "live in a text editor." It's also quite popular to use vim without customization. I understand that some people have simple needs. I don't. The editor wars are over for me and Emacs has won.

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…

Emacs is sufficiently powerful that I think it’s worthwhile to use a keyboard with a proper set of modifiers. Moreover, the emacs approach is sufficiently powerful that I think it's worthwhile to use a keyboard with a proper set of modifiers in any program. Use easily-hit keychords for common functions and more-difficultly-hit chords for uncommon ones; maybe even reserve a prefix for certain uses (e.g. Super for the OS & Hyper for the user).

It's 2018; our keyboards could stand to keep up.

Re: Where Vim Came From

#249

Post by eadmund »

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…

> 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.

eshell supports TRAMP: from an eshell, you can do something like 'cd /ssh:news@news.my.domain:/opt/news/etc' and then run `ls` &c., seeing the results you expect. You can run 'service restart innd' or whatever you'd like, it it runs remotely.

Yeah, emacs is pretty awesome.

Re: Where Vim Came From

#250

Post by meken »

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.

That's four keystrokes. Impressive! I don't think there's a five-keystroke pattern.
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