Live data from Hacker News

20 Years of Vim

contextualize.ai

71–80 of 81 posts

Re: 20 Years of Vim

#73
post #17
post #2

I used data from the Vim git repository to create an annotated chart of some of the main moments in the last 20 years of Vim development. Vim was the first text editor I've ever used (back in 2008), and it shaped the way I interact with computers forever. I'm grateful to all maintainers, and to Bram for creating it and shepherding it through all these decades. The annotations are interactive, so if you hover them you…

> Vim was the first text editor I've ever used (back in 2008) How could anyone skip any other more "normal" editors and jump right into Vim?

Be old. I went from VMS' EDT in the late 80s to JOE (Joe's Own Editor) on Ultrix, to Emacs, and finally Vim. I finally switched to Neovim after Bram's passing.

Re: 20 Years of Vim

#74

Vim goes back to 1988, publicly released in 1991. I've been using it for 29 years now. The last 20 years don't mean anything; the Vim codebase is too much of a dumpster fire for anything significant to happen in that time span. They had to fork an entire parallel command set to implement "location lists" (new in Vim 7, I think) which are exactly like the "quickfix list". Most of the difference are that location list…

You could maybe switch to a block cursor when you’re in visual mode with let &t_SI = "\e[6 q" and let &t_EI = "\e[2 q" in some auto commands to sort of address this

[deleted]

Re: 20 Years of Vim

#75

Vim goes back to 1988, publicly released in 1991. I've been using it for 29 years now. The last 20 years don't mean anything; the Vim codebase is too much of a dumpster fire for anything significant to happen in that time span. They had to fork an entire parallel command set to implement "location lists" (new in Vim 7, I think) which are exactly like the "quickfix list". Most of the difference are that location list…

You could maybe switch to a block cursor when you’re in visual mode with let &t_SI = "\e[6 q" and let &t_EI = "\e[2 q" in some auto commands to sort of address this

This seems like a good compromise. Also, say, the r command which replaces the character under the cursor could also switch to a block cursor momentarily. E.g.

  a|b
Type r, and b gets covered by a block cursor. Then type c, and b is replaced by c, and cursor goes back to bar.

Re: 20 Years of Vim

#76
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Vim was the first text editor I've ever used (back in 2008) How could anyone skip any other more "normal" editors and jump right into Vim?

Be old. I went from VMS' EDT in the late 80s to JOE (Joe's Own Editor) on Ultrix, to Emacs, and finally Vim. I finally switched to Neovim after Bram's passing.

What made you switch from emacs to vim?

Re: 20 Years of Vim

#77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When do most people use text editors? I think wouldn’t be that surprised if somebody fist used a text editor when they first got into Linux or programming.

I’d imagine most people’s first impression would be Notepad on windows- I wouldn’t count Word or even WordPad.

WordPad is criminally underrated.

Re: 20 Years of Vim

#78

Vim goes back to 1988, publicly released in 1991. I've been using it for 29 years now. The last 20 years don't mean anything; the Vim codebase is too much of a dumpster fire for anything significant to happen in that time span. They had to fork an entire parallel command set to implement "location lists" (new in Vim 7, I think) which are exactly like the "quickfix list". Most of the difference are that location list…

You could maybe switch to a block cursor when you’re in visual mode with let &t_SI = "\e[6 q" and let &t_EI = "\e[2 q" in some auto commands to sort of address this

Indeed, I use block cursor in visual and normal mode, I beam in insert mode and underscore in replace mode.

Re: 20 Years of Vim

#79
post #39
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really can't recommend Drew Neil's resources enough. The vimcasts¹ series are great if you're the sort of person who likes videos to learn with, and both his books are excellent²³. [The books may appear to be getting a little long in the tooth, but their contents are still very applicable to today's usage.] My own "trick" for improving my vim usage was to start mapping things to that have better replacements, it is…

Thanks! Now I'm curious what is bad about hjkl movements :)

Ideally, you would never need to adjust motion by a random number of characters; you would use semantic motion by text object, making hjkl a rare corrective move. In practice, we are only humans, so...

Re: 20 Years of Vim

#80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Be old. I went from VMS' EDT in the late 80s to JOE (Joe's Own Editor) on Ultrix, to Emacs, and finally Vim. I finally switched to Neovim after Bram's passing.

What made you switch from emacs to vim?

Its complexity. Elisp is both a blessing and a curse. It's great to be able to make deep, fundamental changes to Emacs via Elisp, but sometimes, you end up wading though very difficult-to-read code trying to figure out how it works. IME, vim is less flexible, but simpler when I just want to edit code and not think about Emacsisms.
Post reply on HN