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How Did Vim Become So Popular?

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Re: How Did Vim Become So Popular?

#321

Post by RMPR »

joelthelion wrote: post #311
RMPR wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just feel the urge to mention cscope which is ctags on steroids

And LSP is yet SO MUCH better

Heard good things about it, but I'm on an endeavour to learn how to do things with Vanilla Vim first to avoid abusing my use of plug ins for things Vim can handle gracefully ootb.

Now you're the creator of autojump, I just want to say your software is definitely a time saver, especially with this https://github.com/fdw/ranger-autojump, keep up with the great work.

Re: How Did Vim Become So Popular?

#322

Post by hellofunk »

blinding-streak wrote: post #57
duckfruit wrote: post #36

Speaking 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.

One thing I like about vim is that the defaults are more sane than emacs. Almost no one uses emacs out of the box without extensive customizations. People customize vi too, but out of the box it is already pretty close to being there on its own, which is really nice.

Re: How Did Vim Become So Popular?

#323

Post by hellofunk »

dastx wrote: post #253
duckfruit wrote: post #36

Speaking 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…

This is really interesting. I'm quite the opposite. I keep trying to make vim my main devtool but I just can't stay away from a fully fledged ide. At the same time, having heard from literally everyone that once you do get used to it, vim is way faster to do everything in. What advice do you have for someone like me to proper get used it once and for all? Are there any good resources you used to learn all the vim sho…

install vimtutor on your system, or just open this in vim:

https://github.com/TheNaoX/vimtutor/blob/master/vimtutor

It's a great start.

Personally, I find most modern IDE features are overrated and not necessary for productivity. For example, context-aware autocompletion is not necessary -- simple autocompletion based on things you've recently typed or that are open already in another buffer covers at least 90% of autocompletions I need. For the rest, I just have to type it out myself once, and now it is remembered too.

The same is true for browsing a file tree of your project, using syntax linters or reformatters, etc -- all of these are pretty straightfoward to setup in vim or emacs.

It can get a little tricker when dealing with breakpoint debugging, though. But in those cases, I just open in another IDE anyway that has extensive profiling tools, which vim does not have. But that's maybe once a week at most.

Re: How Did Vim Become So Popular?

#324

Post by alwillis »

imtringued wrote: post #273
dhmiller wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are things that vim does better. There are things that VS Code does better. There are things that Visual Studio does better. You can memorize all sorts of things about your particular editor of choice and you will be more efficient and effective in that editor. If I wanted to cherry pick examples of what vim does better, I could start all of them with, "first ssh into a random server." What makes vim great is t…

sshing into a server invalidates all the time you spent on customizing your local vim.

If you’re on your machine, you can do all of your stuff because you can edit files remotely from within Vim using SSH as the transport: http://usevim.com/2012/03/16/editing-remote-files

If you’re on a new machine, you can grab your dotfile repo from wherever you keep it—like GitHub for example—and you’ve got your complete config, since there just text files. Takes 5 minutes.

But even plain vanilla Vim is more than enough for many tasks on a new Unix/Linux box.

Re: How Did Vim Become So Popular?

#325

Post by hellofunk »

jiggawatts wrote: post #320

I know I'm going against the popular opinion here, but I have never observed anyone using either Vim or Emacs to outperform a competent IDE user, especially Visual Studio or IntelliJ. I mean sure, if you think IDEs are just slow, expensive text editors with fewer keyboard shortcuts, then you'll be disappointed, but features like "navigate to any symbol by prefix", "find all usages", and "Ctrl-click to navigate to def…

Visual Studio (not the Code version, though some will include that as well) is arguably once of the best IDEs ever created, so you are not wrong.

But often there are other issues. IntelliJ and its siblings can be very resource intensive -- many complain about the Clion launching your laptop fans, and its RAM usage, for example. And the UI of many IDEs has so much chrome everywhere, the UI often gets in the way for many. You can hide it and deal with it in some IDEs, but not all. There are just a lot of things to consider when selecting an IDE. For example, Emacs avy-jump is a really neat plugin (similar things for vim as well), but you'd have to work hard to configure an IDE for these kinds of features as well, so it goes both ways.

And btw -- Vim macros are perhaps one of the best text editing features ever created, and you can't find that so easy to use and powerful in any IDE.

And just the joy of actually editing text - which we do all day - arguably greater with the vim way of doing things. It just puts you in a certain zone.

Re: How Did Vim Become So Popular?

#326

Post by innocentoldguy »

jiggawatts wrote: post #320

I know I'm going against the popular opinion here, but I have never observed anyone using either Vim or Emacs to outperform a competent IDE user, especially Visual Studio or IntelliJ. I mean sure, if you think IDEs are just slow, expensive text editors with fewer keyboard shortcuts, then you'll be disappointed, but features like "navigate to any symbol by prefix", "find all usages", and "Ctrl-click to navigate to def…

You can share Vim, Emacs, and your entire terminal with other engineers using Tmux or Screen.

You can remote debug with GDB.

You can navigate to any symbol by prefix in Vim using regex.

You can "find all usages" via :Ag whatever-you-are-looking-for.

Just because you don't know how to do it doesn't mean it cannot be done.

Re: How Did Vim Become So Popular?

#327

Post by aspaceman »

greggyb wrote: post #104
CalChris wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's nice that ESC works but I also want : ex-mode to work as well. It's why I continue to use MacVim rather than Visual Studio Code. VSC's vim emulation is pretty good ... except for ex-mode and I use that a lot. So I go back to MacVim and stay there.

I've heard good things about a (maybe experimental?) feature to use neovim for VSC's ex-mode. Have you tried that?

Think you still have to go to some trouble to activate but I'm pretty srue this is supported officially now. I think you just point the Vim extension to a Neovim binary, and you can have Ex commands and such using an actual Vim runtime.

Not sure though

Re: How Did Vim Become So Popular?

#329

Post by wyclif »

ecopoesis wrote: post #60

I 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.

Almost the same here, except I skipped the emacs part and went straight to vi because I was working with Sun hardware.

Re: How Did Vim Become So Popular?

#330

Post by spekcular »

jiggawatts wrote: post #320

I know I'm going against the popular opinion here, but I have never observed anyone using either Vim or Emacs to outperform a competent IDE user, especially Visual Studio or IntelliJ. I mean sure, if you think IDEs are just slow, expensive text editors with fewer keyboard shortcuts, then you'll be disappointed, but features like "navigate to any symbol by prefix", "find all usages", and "Ctrl-click to navigate to def…

Do you have links to these studies available? My experiences support your claims, but I'd be interested in getting my hands on some objective data.
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