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How Did Vim Become So Popular?

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Re: How Did Vim Become So Popular?

#391

Post by griffinheart »

Lio wrote: post #217
licebmi__at__ wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Definitely, even now as I use emacs, I'm a 100% evil. It's just so natural (once you get it), that I don't know how other bindings (like ctrl-[whatever]) are prevalent in most other software, it's not like they are more memorable or intuitive. Fun story: I was into Free/Libre software as a teen, when I learnt how to move around in vi(m) and in my first tech gig (as a sysadmin), I was interviewed by some greybeard who…

(Funnily enough ctrl-[ is one of my most used shortcuts in vim. It’s a convenient alternative to escape if you map caps-lock to ctrl)

I really don't like chord like shortcuts, while ctrl and [ are positioned in a way you don't have to contort your hand it kind of requires you to move away from the hjkl row or stretch your pinkies. Consider mapping esc to jk (as a sequence) it works surprisingly well.

  inoremap jk
and

  inoremap
so that you never use esc again

not having chord like shortcuts was one of the main reasons that led me to try vim over emacs in the beginning, so I kind of think they're "anti" vim.

Re: How Did Vim Become So Popular?

#392

Post by gpmcadam »

As a meta-comment, I'm always so surprised at how many people see an article title ending with a question mark and come straight to the comments to chime in with _their_ answer, without seemingly reading the article, which itself is a view on the answer to the question.

Do people perhaps mistake these types of titles as "Ask HN..." type threads?

Re: How Did Vim Become So Popular?

#393

Post by snorlaxle »

dhmiller wrote: post #206
ricksharp wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok, also am curious about multi-insertion with cntr-left/right that vscode does: For example, let’s say I have a json object with variety of field names, one per line and I want to remove the quotes. With vscode, I can alt select all lines, Home Ctrl+right del cntl+right del. The trick is the field names are different length, does vim have multi-edit with the ability to navigate relative to each insertion point? Edit…

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…

VS Code can (sort of) do that: https://github.com/cdr/sshcode

Re: How Did Vim Become So Popular?

#394

Post by strathmeyer »

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…

Have you considered that every person who uses vim has sat down at a new job and been told by their boss how much they're going to love their IDE?

Re: How Did Vim Become So Popular?

#395

Post by deergomoo »

koonsolo wrote: post #370
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…

That is too bad. I'm a Vim user and combine the best of both worlds: vim plugin in VSCode. A few of my colleagues are vim users, and fortunately for the others we are not as vocal as you describe. I already accepted of being the weirdo that uses vim, because my programming skills make up for it ;). I do have a shortcut to disable it, when we do some pair programming.

> vim plugin in VSCode.

How is that these days? I used it a couple of years ago but it had issues at the time, namely some performance problems and getting stuck in a particular mode.

I ended up abandoning vim bindings because the JetBrains plugin was also buggy, and I straight up had no feasible way to get those bindings in Xcode, but I hold out hope for a glorious LSP-based future where I can just use vim and get all the benefits of my other editors.

Re: How Did Vim Become So Popular?

#396

Post by _wldu »

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…

Saying vi and vim are not popular is like saying Unix and Linux are not popular.

Re: How Did Vim Become So Popular?

#397

Post by catach »

1_player wrote: post #373
eddieoz wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I believe the assumption is that IDEs are dramatically superior tools for debugging.

Re: How Did Vim Become So Popular?

#398

Post by The_Colonel »

Lio wrote: post #341
arcturus17 wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tried getting vim to match my favorite features in VSCode / Jetbrains IDEs and almost went crazy. Rather simple things like code completion or syntax highlighting were already moderately complex to set up. The command palette present in both Jetbrains and VSCode also has thousands of actions easily searchable in plain language, the most simple of which can be replicated with vim (ex: open file) but many of which wo…

I'm not going to argue with your personal choice or that you should spend time configuring vim. I'll just point out that the things you've discussed are possible in Vim if you want them. E.g. live-templates (snippets) https://github.com/neoclide/coc-snippets and that if you don't want to spend the time configuring yourself projects like https://spacevim.org/ exist. Now there probably are some IDE features that vim ca…

There are things like refactoring which technically are supported by vim extensions, but are just utterly inferior to the dedicated IDEs.

For example - you know "extract method" refactoring. Pretty basic thing and I assume vim can do that. But on top of that when you extract the method, Intellij will go through rest of your code and try to figure out if some other parts could be automatically refactored to use this new extracted method as well. It will offer to change the method signature if needed to do that as well.

Intellij will - as you type - notify that the code you're writing is structurally duplicating an existing code and offer an intention to automatically refactor the code to remove the duplication.

Intellij offers an integration with databases - in my code I use a lot of SQL queries - intellij can connect to the data source and scan the schema. When you then type queries into strings, Intellij recognizes them as such, offers autocomplete to the tables/column and validates the query for correctness (also allows you to click through to the actual data view). It understands like 20 SQL dialects and things like JPQL as well.

Another example is the deep flow analysis which can point out logical mistakes as you type (things like NPEs). This is very helpful in daily programming, extreme example of that is shown here: https://blog.jetbrains.com/idea/2019/11/intellij-ideas-stati...

Most of the time when people showed me a "vim IDE", it looked like IDE from the 90s - highlight was that it showed you the list of class members, had a snippet manager and could sort of rename a variable. State of the art is much farther since the 90s though ...

Re: How Did Vim Become So Popular?

#399

Post by saberience »

gpmcadam wrote: post #388
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.

People could select more than one option in that survey (87,317 responses; select all that apply). You'll notice that the results add up to more than 100%. Most people who have to remote in to a server will be forced into using Vim sometimes, which will skew the results. Also, I would say that people who would respond to a SO survey arent a representative sample of all developers.

I do not use Vim as a daily driver at all, but I have to use it sometimes because I have no other choice (remoted in to a box). So if I had to say which editors I used, Vim would be there... sometimes.

Re: How Did Vim Become So Popular?

#400

Post by squiggleblaz »

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…

Almost every editor allows you to interact with it as though it's Vim. But most editors don't allow you to interact with them as though they're any other editor. I think that's a point in Vim's favor?

(I certainly don't use Vim for most of my coding. It's not good enough. But I do use Vi keybindings in VSCode, Visual Studio and PhpStorm depending on what language I'm using. I'm not particular enamored of VSCode either, btw, for the same reason that Vim isn't good enough - sure, it can do what you want. But you can't guess how to do it. You need to read the documentation. VSCode one ups Vim in just one way - it has a gui for searching and installing plugins. Visual Studio and PhpStorm allow you to browse the menus to find the facility you want. It may take for ever, but when you have some downtime, you can browse and use your learnings next time.)

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