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Why I teach vim

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Re: Why I teach vim

#61

Post by blackrock »

emidln wrote: post #55
fergie wrote: post #8

"I wish I could say I agonized over all the options at the time and decided vim was the best pedagogical solution, but the reality of the situation was that vi was what I used in college because my father taught me vi" We dont talk about this much, but many of us hardcore Vi/Emacs users have had this knowledge imparted to us from a mentor. Thats probably why the use of Vi/Emacs is much higher in established tech envi…

I work at a trading company on builds and developer productivity. vi is known by all 600+ people that touch code or admin systems as a baseline. I think we mention the basics in our dev school. If you need to edit somewhere outside your personal host, your choices are basically ed/vi. IntelliJ dominates Java development at well over 90%. CLion is what we teach for C++, but it's roughly 50% CLion, 30% vim, 10% Emacs,…

On Windows, use Bitvise. SSH into your Linux box. Use the file browser GUI to navigate to your file. Edit it in Sublime, or your favorite editor.

Vi is ok for viewing files on a terminal, and for small edits, but it’s rather mediocre for any significant amount of development work.

Re: Why I teach vim

#62

Post by swaranga »

goatinaboat wrote: post #35
pvg wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

people have such strong opinions about someone else's editor choice. I want to reiterate that I'm merely pursuing an intellectually curious line of inquiry into whether modal editing enthusiasts are brainworm-infested cultists, not engaging in base mudwrestling about editors, which the guidelines forbid.

I want to reiterate that I'm merely pursuing an intellectually curious line of inquiry into whether modal editing enthusiasts are brainworm-infested cultists, not engaging in base mudwrestling about editors, which the guidelines forbid. Absolutely. I am not wedded to my editor, I happen to prefer Emacs, if it’s not installed I shrug and use cat and sed. The older more experienced people at my company tend to use vi o…

This is personal experience of course but I have not seen that to be the case in my company, irrespective of editors people have mostly the same type of questions. Out of curiosity, what kind of questions do the non Vim/Emacs folks keep asking?

Re: Why I teach vim

#63

Post by chousuke »

jdrek1 wrote: post #56
pvg wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're not really the same thing, compared to vi[m], emacs is statistically dead. And there are already lots of people who're well into their careers in academia and industry who aren't users of either. My own contrarian and probably equally wrong take is that it's mostly about accepting the (evidence-free) premise that modal editing is actually a good thing. It's hard, you suffer but lots of smart people tell you i…

I don't think your take is wrong. I have yet to see any actual argument from the vim/emacs crowd. I'm genuinely curious about what makes them defend their editor choice that heavily but whenever I ask them for their reasons all I get is a "modal editing is great because modal editing is great". I can somewhat understand "don't have to touch the mouse" as that's a personal preference for them (even though IDEs have ke…

For me, modal editing is great because it's comfortable. I almost never need chords save for those using control, which resides in its rightful place below the tab key.

Lots of typing, zero RSI.

Modality also enables the vi "mini-language" that makes editing actions and movement composable, which is nice.

Re: Why I teach vim

#64

Post by gigatexal »

fergie wrote: post #8

"I wish I could say I agonized over all the options at the time and decided vim was the best pedagogical solution, but the reality of the situation was that vi was what I used in college because my father taught me vi" We dont talk about this much, but many of us hardcore Vi/Emacs users have had this knowledge imparted to us from a mentor. Thats probably why the use of Vi/Emacs is much higher in established tech envi…

Yup. I use vim because a senior team lead used it and it was the unspoken defacto editor to use and as a (very, very junior) dev at the time it was engrained in my psyche.

Stockholm syndrome aside I use it still because of all the inertia of learning I put in. I’m getting ever more productive with it so I’m sticking with it.

Re: Why I teach vim

#65

Post by beny23 »

The ability to efficiently navigate and edit files while SSH’d into an instance is a very useful skill. You just wouldn’t have the permissions to install your favourite editor and vi is almost everywhere.

I had to learn vi when working on green screen terminals logged into HP/UX and there was no alternative but am very glad I did as I find that nothing as ubiquitous allows me to efficiently change files.

Does that mean I would go around advocating one editor over another? No, whatever works for you. I know vi works for me for editing files.

Would I use vi instead IntelliJ for development work? No, I found the development environment allows me to be more productive on project work.

But I think you’re doing students a favour teaching vi.

Re: Why I teach vim

#66

Post by Siira »

fergie wrote: post #8

"I wish I could say I agonized over all the options at the time and decided vim was the best pedagogical solution, but the reality of the situation was that vi was what I used in college because my father taught me vi" We dont talk about this much, but many of us hardcore Vi/Emacs users have had this knowledge imparted to us from a mentor. Thats probably why the use of Vi/Emacs is much higher in established tech envi…

- I learned vim/emacs on my own in my second year of undergrad. Because I am the kind of person who wastes time searching for the best tool for the job.

- I have since tried to make more people use them, and pushed them as a TA of the advanced programming class. Nobody likes these stuff. They are useless for most people. The only real usecase is for sysadmins who need to quickly edit files remotely.

- Even if they were somehow some gatekeeped holy grail that only rich people with mentors got; So what? If rich people with a lot of resources (including mentoring resources) can’t do better than us normal folks, then doesn’t that mean sth is fundamentally broken? More resources should translate to more knowledge/skills. The fact that in our current world the conversion rate is so inefficient (especially since these rich folk probably enjoy mildly better genes as well) is evidence that our current education methods do not scale. A corollary of which is that the US should spend a lot less on education which in the end doesn’t produce any results. (Compare the US expenditures with other countries.)

Re: Why I teach vim

#67

Post by gtsop »

apocolyps6 wrote: post #22
pvg wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're not really the same thing, compared to vi[m], emacs is statistically dead. And there are already lots of people who're well into their careers in academia and industry who aren't users of either. My own contrarian and probably equally wrong take is that it's mostly about accepting the (evidence-free) premise that modal editing is actually a good thing. It's hard, you suffer but lots of smart people tell you i…

The "suffering" has honestly been overblown by jokes about not being able to quit on one side and the mythologizing of the leet ninja 10x programmer who is only bound by his typing speed and can't waste time reaching for the mouse, on the other side. It continues to surprise me why people have such strong opinions about someone else's editor choice. My current theory is vim users are like vegans/gluten free/paleo/etc…

> My current theory is vim users are like vegans/gluten free/paleo/etc, in that its a personal choice that some are public about.

This is not a good theory. Surely, this effect appears wherever you've got conflicting choices about what is best, but there are always reasonable arguments on why you should do X over Y. And you know, there are always people who respect other's choices.

I am a vim user and I 100% understand why others don't want to get into it. I don't bully them, I will explain only once why I think it is a better environment and then they are free to carry on with their lives and so am i.

People who are extremely attached to their choices are (to me) unable to understand that every tool is for a job && different people have different needs. This shouldn't lead us to label a group of users and ignoring the pros and cons of smth

Re: Why I teach vim

#68

Post by maccard »

beny23 wrote: post #65

The ability to efficiently navigate and edit files while SSH’d into an instance is a very useful skill. You just wouldn’t have the permissions to install your favourite editor and vi is almost everywhere. I had to learn vi when working on green screen terminals logged into HP/UX and there was no alternative but am very glad I did as I find that nothing as ubiquitous allows me to efficiently change files. Does that me…

I've been a professional developer for 10 years and programming for longer than that. In all of that time, efficiency of editing files on a remote server has never been something I've needed to optimize or been concerned about. Have I had to do it? Yeah, occasionally. Yet when I do, it's almost always changing a config file in a minor way.

Back when I started it was editing the code on a live server so I used textwrangler/notepad++ with an ftp editor.

I don't buy the argument that learning an editing paradigm for this very specific use case (which is likely getting less and less common) at all. This is coming from someone who uses vim bindings in my daily editor.

Re: Why I teach vim

#69

Post by blt »

arendtio wrote: post #29
cupofcoffee wrote: post #26

I used vim for some time could never really get into it. The benefits that it offers over other simple code editors like TextMate isn't really worth the learnign curve. It pretty much feels like a mini programming language for text editing.

I'm not so sure about that. Yes, I have the hard part of the learning curve behind me, but learning vim actually changed how I write code in a very positive way. Now, I think a lot more in terms of lines and e.g. rogue whitespaces happen rarely. I know that are tools who can remove them, but I want to illustrate, that the editor improved the quality of what I type. In the end, it depends how much time it will cost yo…

I agree that vim makes you much more line-oriented, but I'm not sure it's always a good thing. My non-vim collaborators find it strange that my LaTeX files have each clause of a sentence in a separate line.

Re: Why I teach vim

#70

Post by pritovido »

rgoulter wrote: post #19
pvg wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're not really the same thing, compared to vi[m], emacs is statistically dead. And there are already lots of people who're well into their careers in academia and industry who aren't users of either. My own contrarian and probably equally wrong take is that it's mostly about accepting the (evidence-free) premise that modal editing is actually a good thing. It's hard, you suffer but lots of smart people tell you i…

> it's mostly about accepting the (evidence-free) premise that modal editing is actually a good thing. Kakoune's development has started fairly recently. The oldest tags on its GitHub repo are for 2018. I think this defies "people want to continue the legacy of actually-not-that-great thing because I had do suffer, so other people should too". I think you'd only put into making/promoting Kakoune if you genuinely thou…

The difference between a modal editor and a GUI one is that in the GUI one, the commands are organized in the menu and you access this mode(the menu display mode) by clicking instead of pressing a key.

In fact, if you use shorcuts, they are the same thing.

Modal editing is not hard. I learned vim and emacs without problems. Step by step, focusing on what was the next thing useful for me and learning it after that.

Not harder than learning German or English or Chinese Mandarin. Any human languages is way more sophisticated and people learn it anyway.

There is 3.000 words (or commands) that you need to use to speak a basic language. 20.000 if you are an educated person.

Do you believe that if people in Germany speak german fluently they are trying to signal anything to others?

People learn a language because they use it. As simple as that. The more you use it, the easier it gets.

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