Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
How Did Vim Become So Popular?
181–190 of 507 posts
Re: How Did Vim Become So Popular?
#182Disappointed 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,…
Perhaps my favorite video on YouTube is this glorious footage of someone hooking a 1930s teletype up to a computer running Linux: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=2XLZ4Z8LpEE Watching it for the first time is what finally made ed click for me. And yes, I was disappointed that the author clearly didn't understand why ed has the UI it does. It's about the teletype, not the computational cost of having a WYSIWIG UI.
Re: How Did Vim Become So Popular?
#183Has anyone put together a interactive VIM tutorial?
Re: How Did Vim Become So Popular?
#1841. vi is everywhere, and...
2. vi with no plugins is still super powerful, which is helpful on random hosts / coworker's machines / basically anywhere, and...
3. since vi is still so powerful out of the box, i only need a few lightweight plugins to close the loop and make the most powerful editor i can imagine needing. 99% of my plugin usage is fzf and ale w/lsp, which are arguably two very powerful plugins, but the cognitive overhead is very low, and at least among peers my editor doesn't seem to be slowing me down at all
i would also pose the controversial opinion/hot take that using a less "powerful" (non-IDE) editor helps you write better code. humans can only fit so much into their working memory at a time. vim doesn't really let me do crazy refactors or jump through endless chains of class hierarchies (well, with lsp it can, but...). compared to my eclipse/intellij days (and codebases worked on by other people using those tools) i am forced to tame complexity by defining good module boundaries and abstraction barriers.
Re: How Did Vim Become So Popular?
#185Earlier quoted context omitted.
Alas, the emacs install base is fraction of vi/vim.
I've always assumed the opposite with how people say emacs is a nice OS and poor editor... What does Vim over emacs?
I know some people run Emacs in daemon mode, but it's not always convenient to do that
This and when I ssh into any machine, I know there will be a vi at the very least
Re: How Did Vim Become So Popular?
#186I've been using Vim more and more in the past few months, but I still use VS Code primarily for a lot of my work. At work, I do a lot of Node/TS stuff, so VS Code just offers a whole wealth of tools that I'm already familiar with. I'm sure I could pimp out Vim to do it just as well, if not better, but I still enjoy VS Code. Where Vim shines for me is for creating and editing small files. I use vim for my journal, qui…
Re: How Did Vim Become So Popular?
#187I've been using Vim more and more in the past few months, but I still use VS Code primarily for a lot of my work. At work, I do a lot of Node/TS stuff, so VS Code just offers a whole wealth of tools that I'm already familiar with. I'm sure I could pimp out Vim to do it just as well, if not better, but I still enjoy VS Code. Where Vim shines for me is for creating and editing small files. I use vim for my journal, qui…
Re: How Did Vim Become So Popular?
#188Input is not the bottleneck. I don't have a good reason why, but I love editing text with Vim. I enjoy learning complex tools. Maybe that's why. I am also a JS developer, I guess it all makes sense now.
It allows me to have a deeper level of focus.
Re: How Did Vim Become So Popular?
#189There used to be a lot more parity between Vim and Emacs. But nowadays, it's swung a lot further towards Vim. Any ideas why?
Re: How Did Vim Become So Popular?
#190in TRS-80 BASIC, you could go `EDIT 100` and bring up a line 100 in a line editor, vi sort of reminded me of that when I was learning it something like 25 years ago. It is still my main code editor.
25 years ago was 1995