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How Did Vim Become So Popular?

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Re: How Did Vim Become So Popular?

#481

Post by macromaniac »

zoid_ wrote: post #289
macromaniac wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's a video of some more advanced vim features I threw together. I'd be surprised if you can do this using e.g. vanilla vscode https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UDGG3hK4Bg8 Its a simplified version of a problem from work a while ago where we had to generate ui from lots of csv files. The last dev on it was taking weeks, but with vim I was able to come in and finish the boilerplate instantly. (We were commited to non…

Nice vim demo on youtube, how does the sequenced numbering work? Can vim increment a number without any plugins?

Ya, basically go up, grab number, go down, paste number, increment number, go down, repeat 50 times. Needed for generating xaml that had row and column #s from the csv, interestingly excel could gen the code too relatively quickly.

Re: How Did Vim Become So Popular?

#482

Post by drbojingle »

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…

So Vim has more champions. Sounds like you experience ineffective ones all the same.

Re: How Did Vim Become So Popular?

#483

Post by ketzu »

stnmtn wrote: post #475
ketzu wrote: post #459

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually I never wondered if there were shortcuts for those, so your response prompted me to check the keymap of m PyCharm. There definetly are many extended ones, but doesn't seem to cover all of that and are not as composeable. > But know that I've learned it, i genuinely don't think about it, and every time I'm not in VIM and have to move my mouse and click on a character I feel like I lose my train of thought of…

> I believe that, so please believe me when I tell you that I just have navigation with the mouse and other shortcuts internalised for many things. Definitely! I just want to provide an actual reason for why VIM is great as people who are very into it are the worst at telling you why it's good. It's usually, "well if you spend 3 months tinkering with configurations and plugins, you can basically have most of the feat…

> I just want to provide an actual reason for why VIM is great

Thank you for that, I value it! It seems I was unneccessarily defensive!

> if you're ever ssh'ing into servers, you can be confident that you can be close to as productive editing files there as you are in your IDE

That is a nice point.

Re: How Did Vim Become So Popular?

#484

Post by ohgodplsno »

xtracto wrote: post #435
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…

Interesting comment. I've been programming for more than 25 years. Have used stuff like GWBASIC, TurboPascal/C , fancy ide like VisualStudio, Eclipse, Netbeans and the new kids like atom or vscode. I even used DDD at some point. Line debugging becomes less and less valuable as you become more mature in you dev career. Sometimes you have a race condition bug, some times the target architecture just doesn't provide it…

>some times the target architecture just doesn't provide it (devkitpro/devkitarm or embedded) and sometimes bugs that are evident in production just cannot be replicated in your debugging environment.

It happens, yeah. What mostly happens is that 99% of software development has debuggers available and that they are infinitely better and more useful when resolving issues. Printing, then realizing you don't have enough info, chaning your code, recompiling, printing, etc, is just not good software development practices.

Live with your constraints when you have no other choice. Use the tools that have been a standard in the industry when they are available to you.

Re: How Did Vim Become So Popular?

#485

Post by ulisesrmzroche »

gpmcadam wrote: post #389
ulisesrmzroche wrote: post #386

If vim came out today, it wouldn’t be popular. eMacs maybe, with a pretty theme, but vim is vastly overhyped.

Tools like VimR and Onivim suggest that this hypothesis might not be true. https://www.onivim.io/

That’s got 4K stars. I wouldn’t say it’s popular.

Re: How Did Vim Become So Popular?

#486

Post by hellofunk »

m0zg wrote: post #197
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…

> And since, almost nothing else (save for maybe git) beat learning vim from a return on investment perspective Same here. Love high ROI tools where the rug doesn't get pulled from underneath me ever year or two. Linux console tools, bash, vim, etc. My vim config dates back 20+ years, with only small modifications. I can log in into just about any *nix machine made in the last 30 years and be able to edit text at lea…

> C++ is the same. Glacial pace of change, skills from 20 years ago are still good with minimal modifications. 20 years from now it'll still be in use and it'll still be about the same. Which is exactly how I like it.

This gave me a bit of a chuckle since any modern serious C++ work is really a different language since 2011. Most of the C++ prior to that are considered anti-patterns now. It's hard moving at a glacial pace; the language gets major evolutions every 3 years.

Re: How Did Vim Become So Popular?

#487

Post by red75prime »

theon144 wrote: post #265
red75prime wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why? To be sure that the editor isn't in insert mode. Using another slot of short-term memory to keep an editor's mode seems wasteful.

Contrary to popular techy opinion, short-term memory is not composed of hard, fixed "slots" that fill up and overflow. It's not like remembering one more byte of information will make a variable name fall out of your memory on the other end. Besides, it might just as well become something you don't need to use memory for at all - just press Esc to make sure. If you're in command mode, nothing happens. If you're in in…

> short-term memory is not composed of hard, fixed "slots" that fill up and overflow.

Nevertheless it is a limited resource.

> just press Esc to make sure

It's better to press Esc twice. Otherwise there's a risk of terminal emulator interpreting a command as an escape sequence.

Re: How Did Vim Become So Popular?

#488

Post by mbar84 »

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…

> VS and other editors quietly get along with their work and feel no reason to advocate for their editor like it was a religion.

Well of course not, because their editors SUCK!

Re: How Did Vim Become So Popular?

#489

Post by luxurytent »

wadkar wrote: post #19
luxurytent wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't Pico the usual default?

I have seen nano to be the default for most debian and fedora derived distributions from early 2000s. Not sure if things changed in late teens. Or maybe I am misremembering things.

I always confuse pico and nano, tbh.

Re: How Did Vim Become So Popular?

#490

Post by patrec »

austhrow743 wrote: post #361
patrec wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Still wasteful. Map Capslock to both Escape and Ctrl and never look back https://github.com/alols/xcape (for linux) https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/132564/how-can-i-r... (for macOS) https://github.com/ililim/dual-key-remap (for windows)

What's the advantage to having control on it as well? Do people have trouble reaching the control key?

Try it (or swap caps and control for day, to make sure you don't accidentally "cheat"). On most keyboards reaching the control key is very unergonomic compared to the capslock key. I wonder how many cases of RSI could be avoided by this simple tweak alone.
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