Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How Did Vim Become So Popular?

pragmaticpineapple.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

381–390 of 507 posts

Re: How Did Vim Become So Popular?

#381

Post by [deleted] »

necrotic_comp wrote: post #365
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.

My argument isn't that vi/vim/neovim are not superior editors but the editing grammar is a superior way of thinking about text. This grammar can be reasonably replicated in any environment, and confusing the grammar for the editor is what makes people make such claims. This is coming from someone who lives in vim for his daily work, likes it, but always finds annoying sharp edges that are hard to reason about and scr…

[deleted]

Re: How Did Vim Become So Popular?

#382

Post by the_gipsy »

kamaal wrote: post #196
reactchain wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

100% concur with this. I learnt Vim many years ago and I genuinely don't know what I'd do without it. It's always just there when I ssh into a new server. And the JetBrains suite has an awesome vim mode meaning I can use most (but not all) vim shortcuts with an actual IDE. I don't think vim itself works well as an IDE substitute, and wouldn't use it for hardcore web dev for example - but for quickly editing random fi…

>>I don't think vim itself works well as an IDE substitute, and wouldn't use it for hardcore web dev for example - but for quickly editing random files there's nothing that comes close. Exactly my thoughts, you need vim and emacs these days if you want to munge through large amounts of text. The thing is in these days of Kibana and Elastic search. You don't do much of this kind of work anymore. Code is text. But it's…

The use case of vim is not using an insane amount amount of arrows/ctrl/shift for everything.

It's like a mechanic using just one adjustable spanner and one screwdriver to e.g. replace a clutch. It's ok if you really don't have anything else, but any good mechanic will use a set of good tools. (sorry in advance for the car analogy).

BTW a modern vim setup with CoC is not very short of an IDE, but at lightspeed.

Re: How Did Vim Become So Popular?

#383

Post by jfkebwjsbx »

chadcmulligan wrote: post #121
busterarm wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's also what's so hard about hiring junior candidates and why so many companies shy away from it. Truly junior hires don't really know the tools yet. You can't really afford to wait for the rare junior who does, so unfortunately it's not as useful a test in that situation. That's why I think OP's "seasoned sysadmin" line is perfectly valid. The junior that knows their tools has already cleared the hardest hurdle fo…

Indeed, I always advise people who want to be developers to build some stuff to show, to separate yourself from everyone else, and make it easier for the hirer. That is another reason to do it, an IT degree doesn't mean you can write code, as you say the rest can be learnt.

An IT degree is not about writing code. Perhaps you are referring to CS.

Re: How Did Vim Become So Popular?

#384

Post by flippinburgers »

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…

Spoken like someone who has never gotten accustomed to the power of vim :)

Do you know who would likely "compromise a project"? The junior dev that is unable to stray outside their IDE when getting things done.

Re: How Did Vim Become So Popular?

#385

Post by anthk »

apexalpha wrote: post #375
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/

IRC users don't use vim, but nvi. They don't need any more. They probably use entr(1) and make(1).

Re: How Did Vim Become So Popular?

#387

Post by jfkebwjsbx »

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…

Sorry but as someone that has done both C# in Visual Studio and embedded development in vim/gdb/UNIX, your claims do not hold up...

> have no comparable analogue in traditional text-focused, non-IDE editors.

The same features have been there in TUI editors for many, many years. There is nothing visual about the backend that handles those queries.

Whether the interface is easier to use or not is a different matter, but the features have been there for decades.

> Not to mention visual debuggers

Well, yes, visual debuggers are better with a GUI, that is obvious.

> not to mention remote debugging!

Remote debugging is very common. What you are thinking of is visual ones.

> However, objective tests show that even highly skilled users aren't as fast at completing high-level tasks as mouse-users.

Citation needed.

Blender, for instance, is praised by artists for its hard modeling productivity thanks to all the shortcuts.

A few years ago when I worked in VS, I used all kinds of shortcuts. It does not matter that the tool has a GUI or not to make the keyboard useful. It is orthogonal.

> took days or weeks to solve the same problem! Days!

That is just nonsense. There is no way one takes days/weeks to "debug" something that takes 30 minutes in another general purpose language.

Either the task could be trivially solved using the .NET standard library and not the others (which makes it incomparable), or they picked up participants with no clue in the other languages.

The debugger or the GUI/TUI distinctions have nothing to do with that. A visual debugger is most useful when dealing with very big code bases that you did not write yourself. For a programming puzzle that fits in 100 lines, a visual debugger is irrelevant unless you are new to programming.

Re: How Did Vim Become So Popular?

#388

Post by gpmcadam »

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…

Did you not read TFA?

~25% of web devs in the SO 2019 survey said they used VIM as their editor. Amongst dev-ops that number is higher, around 40%.

https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2019#technology-_-...

So your anecdotal example of "99% of people using VS or VSCode" doesn't ring true for the industry as a whole.

Re: How Did Vim Become So Popular?

#390

Post by psychoslave »

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…

In my experience, after University, I never see team members extensively dispute on this topic. I have a strong preference for Vim, but if other are fine with other tools, that's nice. We can possibly show each other how we manage things differently.

It's not like Vim is perfect, and even taken the sharp learning curve apart, there are many things that are not ideal. But so are other tools. I tried some IDE here and there, but never found an improvement in my productivity – which would be certainly easier to improve by not going to sites like Hackernews. :D

I do find some things in some IDE horrifying, like having the amount of RAM consumed by the application displayed in the default interface, and seeing it growing while you don't ask anything to the application. I mean, even dropping the fact that it does require so much resource to do nothing, what a strange idea to clutter the interface with this data if the goal is to let users focus on there issues.

But that's no reason to be zealot of any other editor, including Vim. I'm rather confident that going with a matrix with measurable metrics, Vim wouldn't have rated 100% everywhere nor any other tool would.

To me the greatest feature of vim is that it's available virtually everywhere, so you can take it and the skill you gained on it everywhere. It doesn't make it something should use all the time, but it makes the point on how it might worth the effort to start learning it. That also a positive retro-active loop, that explain "why Vim is so popular", I guess.

Post reply on HN