I've been a vim user for almost two decades, but recently my usage has increased dramatically due to the proliferation of high quality LSP servers that plug in through CoC.nvim. It really has removed all the maintenance hassle of keeping your language environments up to date.
How Did Vim Become So Popular?
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Re: How Did Vim Become So Popular?
#52No other text editor has so much in common with playing a musical instrument. Everything you do eventually becomes muscle memory; an expression of grammar rather than the execution of a procedure.
Re: How Did Vim Become So Popular?
#53For me it is being able to efficiently navigate a file without leaving the home row (Gotta learn touch typing first). Once you understand the commands follow a composable grammar it is really like a superpower for dancing around text. „Go down 5 lines, move right two word, replace the contents of the brackets“. I don‘t use the actual editor all that often but have vim mode enabled in all my „real“ editors like VSCode…
Long time vim lover here as well, but I guess I hear often that for a lot of folks, input isn't the bottleneck.
I've been using vim for about 7 years and for me it's not so much about the efficiency as it is the pleasure of commanding (programming!) a powerful, wellmade tool.
Re: How Did Vim Become So Popular?
#54Speaking personally, I've been a professional developer for almost decade and even in my relatively short career I've seen a lot of technologies come and go. I was reluctantly roped into it by my first boss, an enthusiastic Vim advocate. And since, almost nothing else (save for maybe git) beat learning vim from a return on investment perspective. From the default mac OS installation to some old Fedora box that has no…
I was in the same boat. First real gig out of college (well besides the stints during college) and I saw how fast my boss flew on his keyboard while editing files in vi/vim. Here I was painfully editing config files in nano while he was flying by with vim.
I took the time to learn it and have been using it since. I now try to pass the torch by showing folks on my team the neat things vi/vim can do. People are amazed how much you can do it with just few short keystrokes.
Re: How Did Vim Become So Popular?
#55Something 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.
One editor which used to be great at this is sam, which was explicitly designed to work across slow links, by being split into a frontend running locally, and a backend being run on the target host: http://sam.cat-v.org
An alternative to that is to run mosh and it will make assumptions about where the characters should be going.
Re: How Did Vim Become So Popular?
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
All of vi is specified by POSIX, but vi is only a subset of vim.
Right, but vim is a popular, easy-to-package implementation of vi.
Agreed and if you somehow really need strict POSIX compatibility than Vim’s compat settings make it behave almost 100% like traditional vi.
Re: How Did Vim Become So Popular?
#57Speaking personally, I've been a professional developer for almost decade and even in my relatively short career I've seen a lot of technologies come and go. I was reluctantly roped into it by my first boss, an enthusiastic Vim advocate. And since, almost nothing else (save for maybe git) beat learning vim from a return on investment perspective. From the default mac OS installation to some old Fedora box that has no…
Hated Vi at first. Absolutely loathed it. I was all about emacs.
But I gave vi another shot, and I'm so glad I did. The learning curve can be steep, and it's really unintuitive at first (or it was for me). But once it clicks a little bit, and you settle in.. Wow. I felt way more productive using it than any other editor.
Re: How Did Vim Become So Popular?
#58Speaking personally, I've been a professional developer for almost decade and even in my relatively short career I've seen a lot of technologies come and go. I was reluctantly roped into it by my first boss, an enthusiastic Vim advocate. And since, almost nothing else (save for maybe git) beat learning vim from a return on investment perspective. From the default mac OS installation to some old Fedora box that has no…
Same here, and then i discovered EVIL, the vi layer for emacs. The best of all worlds: Vim text manipulation grammar over the emacs engine.
Alas, the emacs install base is fraction of vi/vim.
Re: How Did Vim Become So Popular?
#59Re: How Did Vim Become So Popular?
#60I was an emacs user until I had a summer internship where I had to constantly rebuild SunOS and Solaris boxes. No emacs in the default install and no working networking. But vi was there and it became my default everywhere.