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If I'm working on someone else's box this pretty much guarantees I can edit files with my basic vi knowledge without having to install a different editor.
Seeing what you type several seconds after you typed it is reminiscent of the 90s and dial up connections.
Having familiar vi keybindings in so many applications these days has been a productivity saver.
We also need to understand that a subset of vi features is part of the POSIX standard, so any POSIX system will need to have "vi". vim is the logical choice there. So as a result vim has become the reference implementation for the POSIX vi featureset.
real answer : because redhat and debian had replaced elvis with vim as the default vi early on. I don't remember the exact drama, but maybe something to do with the license.
> Having that thing show up on computers in those days was pretty tricky, and some considered it a resource hog.
Well in the 60's and 70's, you didn't necessarily even have a display, you might be using a physical teletype. `ed` is built for that.
Even when you had a display, it could be slow. The VT05 from 1970, only went up to 2400 baud. And if you were using a modem back then I think you were definitely most likely connected at 300 baud or below.
And once I got used to it, I couldn't really imagine using computers any other way. I'd go so far as to say that the 'home row' concept of vim is the ergonomic ideal of keyboard based computing, and I now try to mimic that behavior everywhere -- the vimium extension in chrome, various vim plugins for vs code and sublime etc. If you're on the fence, I'd urge you to give in!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Isn't that what neovim is trying to do?
AFAIK it still tries to stay mostly compatible with regards to how it is controlled, doesn't it? So while the internals are perhaps new, the frontend is not. But I think Kakoune https://kakoune.org would fit the bill
I think the basic premise of multiple cursors editing as a preferred model (which is what Kakoune does) is flawed. Why? Because large-scale scale changes are the exception, not the rule. By emphasizing multiple cursors, Kakoune actively makes it harder to do the normal thing people do in a text editor: jump around a file and make specific edits to individual lines. Instead, a bunch of normal movement commands (such as forward and backward search) leave extra cursors in your wake, forcing you to press an extra key to dismiss them otherwise you'll get erroneous edits that might not even be visible from where you are in the buffer. This is not a good thing.
The other basic premise that Kakoune addresses (that vim commands lack visual feedback) is not even an issue for experienced vim users who type commands quickly from muscle memory. The edits happen when the command finishes and you don't get distracted by intermediate results. For global substitution, you can always append the `c` flag to add a confirmation prompt to each substitution. That alone obviates much of the motivation for Kakoune's model.
Something I've come to rediscover is how good vi/vim is on a slow network connection. Our sharp networking team route me from London to Sydney so I can remote back to my London PC. Seeing what you type several seconds after you typed it is reminiscent of the 90s and dial up connections. Having familiar vi keybindings in so many applications these days has been a productivity saver.
Now I use vim for everything and it’s bindings in my browser, email client, todo list app, etc.
Disappointed the article went straight from punch cards to video terminals without mentioning teletypes. > Having that thing show up on computers in those days was pretty tricky, and some considered it a resource hog. Well in the 60's and 70's, you didn't necessarily even have a display, you might be using a physical teletype. `ed` is built for that. Even when you had a display, it could be slow. The VT05 from 1970,…