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How Did Vim Become So Popular?

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Re: How Did Vim Become So Popular?

#371

Post by koonsolo »

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…

IDE + Vim plugin FTW!!! ;)

Experience with Visual Studio plugin and VSCode, both worked very good.

Re: How Did Vim Become So Popular?

#372

Post by ketzu »

akho wrote: post #275
ricksharp wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the feedback. vscode has regex find replace, but I don’t use it very often. It does show every match highlighted in the current file while entering the find value, which is nice. It does the same for multi files if needed and gives a nice preview of every change. Word navigation I use a great deal (especially with multi-cursor editing). Ctrl+left/right jumps words, home, end to begin end of line. Ctrl+f Z…

Ctrl-arrows is not the same thing as vim’s wordwise movement. If you need to go 5 words forward, it’s 5w ; if you want to capitalize the next 3 words, gU3w ; the point is composability, not a single operation. Same goes for f.

I guess I, and maybe other non-vim users, just don't see much use in the composability. From many examples I've seen in this thread, the only one I found truly interesting was the branching undo feature.

For most features, the advantage seems very small, as the use-case is so rare, or it's not the limiting factor anyways.

But this is very limited to my experience. I am pretty sure, if I already knew those things, I would value that investment the same way the vim users do in the vim threads. But for now, it seems to me, that the investment is not worth the payoff and I am better off learning something else.

Re: How Did Vim Become So Popular?

#373

Post by 1_player »

eddieoz wrote: post #363
saberience wrote: post #357

Controversial comment here, but I would say Vim isn't popular at all. I would say instead, Vim advocates are incredibly vocal (a bit like Vegans and Crossfitters) and won't hesitate to talk about it at all times. I've been engineering now since 2002 so approaching 20 years and sure, every office has one guy who's the "hardcore" Vim guy. Everyone else in the office uses Visual Studio or VSCode, Atom, Sublime, IntelliJ…

I think they are just being posers. When we compare the efficiency of debugging (p. ex.) it is clear who can find the problem fast. Today if I'm conducting an interview and the someone tries to convince me he/she is a good programmer and just use vi/vim, I need to rethink my decision because it can compromise the whole project. I'm not saying they are not good, but having the capability of fast debugging and solving…

I don't get it. Are you saying vim users are bad programmers and bad at debugging?

Re: How Did Vim Become So Popular?

#374

Post by ulisesrmzroche »

aspaceman wrote: post #333
ulisesrmzroche wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m pretty good at using vim, There’s really nothing I don’t know, and I’ve watched tons of courses and read tons of tutorials. I got my own vimrc like plenty of people. But People still use macvim, and hit Apple S, and Use the mouse, I’m hardly the only one. See Yehudas “everyone who tried to teach me to use vim was wrong” When I was younger I cared more about it, but it’s all just yak shaving. What there isn’t are…

Hey just wanna let you know that I'm a fellow Vim user that uses the mouse for practically everything. I like using Vim for editing, but my brain still likes to do the "context switch" where I dig into menus and such.

That’s good to hear. Everyone’s pretending like any criticism of vim is obviously coming from incompetence.

Re: How Did Vim Become So Popular?

#375

Post by apexalpha »

saberience wrote: post #357

Controversial comment here, but I would say Vim isn't popular at all. I would say instead, Vim advocates are incredibly vocal (a bit like Vegans and Crossfitters) and won't hesitate to talk about it at all times. I've been engineering now since 2002 so approaching 20 years and sure, every office has one guy who's the "hardcore" Vim guy. Everyone else in the office uses Visual Studio or VSCode, Atom, Sublime, IntelliJ…

sounds a lot like the IRC guy...

https://xkcd.com/1782/

Re: How Did Vim Become So Popular?

#376

Post by mimimi31 »

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…

What has always kept me from learning Vim is my non-English keyboard layout. Many of the default key combinations are impossible or require some serious finger acrobatics.

Sure, I could try figuring out a new set of easily reachable and non-conflicting keybindings for my own machines, but much of my motivation for learning it in the first place was being able to work on remote machines more comfortably.

Re: How Did Vim Become So Popular?

#377

Post by LilBytes »

saberience wrote: post #357

Controversial comment here, but I would say Vim isn't popular at all. I would say instead, Vim advocates are incredibly vocal (a bit like Vegans and Crossfitters) and won't hesitate to talk about it at all times. I've been engineering now since 2002 so approaching 20 years and sure, every office has one guy who's the "hardcore" Vim guy. Everyone else in the office uses Visual Studio or VSCode, Atom, Sublime, IntelliJ…

I sent this comment to my colleague, I'll see if it triggers him... :-)

Re: How Did Vim Become So Popular?

#378

Post by ulisesrmzroche »

aspaceman wrote: post #338
ulisesrmzroche wrote: post #124

I’ve been using Vim professionally for like ten years now and I can’t tell you what benefits do I get out it exactly. I still use a mouse and I don’t see what’s so bad about it.the whole home row argument has never been convincing.

I really like how Vim is set up, even if I don't personally use the home row stuff. I just like the stability of the interface, its simplicity, and performance especially. I used to get really obsessed with editor stuff, then I realized I was wasting my time and that Vim was already installed on every machine - no additional install ever needed to set up the environment. I usually only ever add one or two lines to my…

But just installing VSCode is simple too and in practice, it’s universal. I feel like people are self handicapping, specifically because the bottleneck in development is understanding, and not input speed.

If I was to say what do I like about Vim is the modal interface, and really because to me if feels right, I cant say that it’s objectively better

Re: How Did Vim Become So Popular?

#379

Post by heavenlyblue »

psnosignaluk wrote: post #356
kstenerud wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've used vi for 25 years now, starting on a m68k based BSD machine. It's an adequate editor, handy in remote shell sessions and good to know how to use, but I'd MUCH rather use an IDE or a windowed editor with menus and mouse and hotkeys like Sublime. I mean real hotkeys, not emacs. At the end of the day, it takes a certain kind of mind to like vi, and if you're not of that mind, you probably never will be.

I think it depends heavily on what you're doing. My world is full of YAML/HCL/cnf files, and if I'm writing code, Go, where code is for software that runs from the command line, a daemon, or a no frills API/web service. Atom/VSCode and other IDE's were wasted on me, so I found myself gravitating back to Vim for its ease of use for those use cases. That said, vim-bootstrap did save me effort of getting a pretty solid…

Of course IDEs are wasted on Go - there’s literally not a single IDE in the world that can find all implementations of an interface in Go.

Re: How Did Vim Become So Popular?

#380

Post by [deleted] »

saberience wrote: post #357

Controversial comment here, but I would say Vim isn't popular at all. I would say instead, Vim advocates are incredibly vocal (a bit like Vegans and Crossfitters) and won't hesitate to talk about it at all times. I've been engineering now since 2002 so approaching 20 years and sure, every office has one guy who's the "hardcore" Vim guy. Everyone else in the office uses Visual Studio or VSCode, Atom, Sublime, IntelliJ…

[deleted]
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