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How Did Vim Become So Popular?

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Re: How Did Vim Become So Popular?

#491

Post by agumonkey »

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…

I like vim, it's efficient.

This comes from an emacser. Emacs who shares this trait a bit (albeit rarely installed by default) .. when sublime text was all the rage I saw how emacs had 50% of it builtin and the rest was absorbed in a few monthes. I felt emacs would never fade at that point.

Re: How Did Vim Become So Popular?

#493

Post by pengaru »

IshKebab wrote: post #292
pengaru wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's too many little things to mention, they do all add up to be quite significant in the course of programming. Here's a tiny sample of some stuff I use constantly: Move cursor forward word at a time: w ignoring punctuation: W reverse: b B Move cursor to next occurrence of character Z: fZ reverse: FZ Delete forward to next occurrence of character Z: dfZ reverse: dFZ Change forward to next occurrence of character…

> Delete forward to next occurrence of character Z How often do you really do things like this though? It seems like, sure you can do weird obscure things quicker in Vim, but only if you happen to remember how do to the weird obscure things, and it's only useful in weird obscure situations. For 99% of tasks the built-in VSCode stuff does the job for me. Ctrl-D especially.

In the very comment you're replying to I already said "stuff I use constantly".

Re: How Did Vim Become So Popular?

#494

Post by ricksharp »

macromaniac wrote: post #214
ricksharp wrote: post #92

Does anyone have a good video comparing vim speed coding vs vscode using built in editor features? I’ve been using vscode for years and the YouTube videos that demo vim features are shallow (like how to enter a blank line - really?). I can do the same thing I have seen in vim videos without memorizing a bunch of strange key bindings all while being able to edit code instantly without changing modes. I would love to s…

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…

That’s pretty cool. It seemed a bit slow creating the “macro” but pretty cool to see it run through all the lines.

The way I would do that in vscode would be with a multi-edit, but it would get iffy at that many lines.

I‘ll record a video doing the same for comparison tomorrow.

This makes me wish there was a site for recording challenges like this where developers could race using their favorite tools.

Vim vs VScode would be an amazing way to learn tips from experts on both sides.

Re: How Did Vim Become So Popular?

#495

Post by andrewksl »

NateEag wrote: post #118
tenebrisalietum wrote: post #35

Disappointed the article went straight from punch cards to video terminals without mentioning teletypes. > Having that thing show up on computers in those days was pretty tricky, and some considered it a resource hog. Well in the 60's and 70's, you didn't necessarily even have a display, you might be using a physical teletype. `ed` is built for that. Even when you had a display, it could be slow. The VT05 from 1970,…

Perhaps my favorite video on YouTube is this glorious footage of someone hooking a 1930s teletype up to a computer running Linux: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=2XLZ4Z8LpEE Watching it for the first time is what finally made ed click for me. And yes, I was disappointed that the author clearly didn't understand why ed has the UI it does. It's about the teletype, not the computational cost of having a WYSIWIG UI.

Yeah that video is all kinds of amazing. I also got lost down a several hour rabbit hole watching the guy and his buddies bring up an AGC and perform a simulated lunar landing with it. Thank you for sharing!

Re: How Did Vim Become So Popular?

#496

Post by alwillis »

brabel wrote: post #343
harisund wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's the real question - So you are convinced you don't need Vim, right? Why are you on this thread? No one's saying vim is superior. However, you need to have an open mind to understand the alternatives. It's not like Vim is a paid product and by you not using it, Vim is going to die out soon or anything. If you dont' like it, great? You are happy with the alternative, great. You seem like you just want to deliber…

I am in this thread because this is not a thread about how Vim is great, it's a thread about how Vim became popular, which I honestly don't understand in a day and age where modes are completely unnecessary. I see lots of happy Vim users telling the rest of us how they are so happy with Vim and they can't understand how anyone can do anything without it... so I thought I should point out I feel extremely productive o…

which I honestly don't understand in a day and age where modes are completely unnecessary.

Modes are everywhere. My microwave has a defrost mode. Cars have reverse mode. Pill bottles have modes where the bottle has to be held differently to open it.

Modelessness isn't all it's cracked up to be.

I’ve used many editors on the Mac—BBEdit, SubEthaEdit, Chocolate, TextMate, TextWrangler and a few more obscure ones.

I switched to Vim and haven't looked back nearly 10 years ago because the "modeless" editors had limitations and issues I didn't like.

I used Emacs when I worked at MIT because that's what everyone used, but it never took for me when I had to use Unix.

What the author didn't mention is that when Ruby on Rails was the new hotness, so many of the leaders in that movement were Mac users, on TextMate. But when TextMate went into limbo, and then eventually died, that tribe needed a new editor and they essentially all moved to Vim.

Many of the early Rails videos were done on Vim; they were quite influential.

I wanted an editor I wouldn't outgrow in a few months and Vim fit the bill nicely.

And to this day, I feel like I'm pretty proficient with Vim but I also know I'm using like 10-15% of what Vim can do and it's nice to know all that capability is there for when I need it.

Re: How Did Vim Become So Popular?

#497

Post by bjoli »

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.

Not if you use Emacs/evil. Tramp invalidates most of the "well, vim is available on all my remote servers, whereas Emacs never is". I just remote into a server from within Emacs.

Evil is also the best and most complete vim experience outside of vim.

Re: How Did Vim Become So Popular?

#498

Post by mcjiggerlog »

IshKebab wrote: post #292
pengaru wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's too many little things to mention, they do all add up to be quite significant in the course of programming. Here's a tiny sample of some stuff I use constantly: Move cursor forward word at a time: w ignoring punctuation: W reverse: b B Move cursor to next occurrence of character Z: fZ reverse: FZ Delete forward to next occurrence of character Z: dfZ reverse: dFZ Change forward to next occurrence of character…

> Delete forward to next occurrence of character Z How often do you really do things like this though? It seems like, sure you can do weird obscure things quicker in Vim, but only if you happen to remember how do to the weird obscure things, and it's only useful in weird obscure situations. For 99% of tasks the built-in VSCode stuff does the job for me. Ctrl-D especially.

Not that specific example, but you'd really be surprised by how useful some of these things are. For example you can do a `di[` to delete everything inside an array. Or `ci"` to replace everything inside a string.

Re: How Did Vim Become So Popular?

#499

Post by insertnickname »

mimimi31 wrote: post #376
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.

Try out a US* QWERTY keyboard for a few months. I grew up with non-English keyboards, but then some years ago I got stuck with a US keyboard for half a year, and after that I didn't want to go back. I can easily type the few non-English characters I need with the X.org compose key, so I can easily write in my native language. I assume it would work equally well for any language using a Latin-script alphabet.

*) US, not UK. UK QWERTY is trash.

Re: How Did Vim Become So Popular?

#500

Post by funcDropShadow »

jng wrote: post #302
ricksharp wrote: post #92

Does anyone have a good video comparing vim speed coding vs vscode using built in editor features? I’ve been using vscode for years and the YouTube videos that demo vim features are shallow (like how to enter a blank line - really?). I can do the same thing I have seen in vim videos without memorizing a bunch of strange key bindings all while being able to edit code instantly without changing modes. I would love to s…

Here's my best take at this so far, I wrote it in 2007: Why, oh WHY, do those #?@! nutheads use vi? http://www.viemu.com/a-why-vi-vim.html

This post has been my enlightenment about modal editing. Thank you for this excellent piece. And I've referred dozens of people to it after me.
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