Vim Creep

Coincidentally, I've been working on my knife skills lately. In the past, I often served dinner late because I took so long to chop the vegetables. (I'm vegetarian.) Now that I'm focusing on proper knife technique to chop quickly, I find that I can get dinner served faster — but also I have more flexibility to respond and experiment in the kitchen, because I can, for example, put the skillet on the stove before I start chopping the onion I'm going to sauté. And I'm less likely to burn things, because chopping takes less of my time and attention.

Of course, knowing how to cut isn't the same as knowing how to cook. Vegetables chopped slowly taste the same as vegetables chopped fast. But if you already know a thing or two about food, you can cook a little bit better if your cutting technique is better.

> If you have the chance to choose to invest time in learning either a language to extend your editor or a general purpose language which you can use to extend your editor, which would be your best bet?

It's not as uni-dimensional. Sure if I don't know either of Vimscript or Python, I will see learning Python as more beneficial. But the main reason vim chose vimscript(or emacs chose elisp) is you have a interpreter built in the editor itself. If all your extensions are vimscript, all you need to configure vim on a new box is to copy your .vimrc and .vim folder and everything will work - no package installation, no external dependencies.

If you already know vim and some programming, you can start writing basic vimscript in an hour or two. The more complicated ones(the ones Time Pope writes) are going to take a lot of time, irrespective of your language choice.

Also, vim extensions can be written in Python as well, but it requires that your vim has python support. How does ST does it? Does it bundle python?

For longer and more interactive shell interactions you can use job control, if your shell supports job control (bash, zsh and pretty much every reasonable user shell in existence). Ctrl-Z will suspend vim and drop you back into your shell, you can then unsuspend vim by running "fg" (at least in bash).

Alternatively, my own work flow consists of using tmux to have a split screen terminal, Vim left, REPL right.

> The problem with application-specific extension languages is that they may start underpowered and ad-hoc, whilst general purpose languages have already proved their worth and done so in several domains.

The embedded language has to be small, easy to learn, and most importantly, it should serve the purpose of extension. If it can serve other domains as well, that isn't really relevant as far as the editor is the concerned. Now vimscript doesn't do threading or evented io or thousands of other things - it isn't meant to do any of those.

> whilst GNU Emacs designers didn't reinvent the wheel and adapted a mainstream general purpose language to their needs.

Lisp can hardly be considered a mainstream, general purpose language(may be it was at the time they were adding it to emacs).

The point of vimscript wasn't to win any language design awards, but to have a langauge with a very small core which can be used for configuration and extension. As far as quirks go, all languages have quirks. PHP and JS probably have more quirks than Vimscript. Since you are so critical of Vimscript, care to cite me the pain-points which stop you from writing decent extensions in vimscript? There are a variety of scenarios in which vimscript implementation is much more simpler to an elisp implementation.

Consider this sample grap extension take from Steve Losh's http://learnvimscriptthehardway.stevelosh.com/chapters/34.ht...

    nnoremap g :set operatorfunc=GrepOperatorg@
    vnoremap g :call GrepOperator(visualmode())

    function! s:GrepOperator(type)
        let saved_unnamed_register = @@

        if a:type ==# 'v'
            normal! `y
        elseif a:type ==# 'char'
            normal! `[v`]y
        else
            return
        endif

        silent execute "grep! -R " . shellescape(@@) . " ."
        copen

        let @@ = saved_unnamed_register
    endfunction

And usage:

    viwg: Visually select a word, then grep for it.
    g4w: Grep for the next four words.
    gt;: Grep until semicolon.
    gi[: Grep inside square brackets.

Are you saying elisp implementation of the same concept(provide me a way to grep for arbitrary grep for words, and no, spawning a shell isn't the same thing) is going to be shorter or simpler?

> While Vim users were busy wrestling with the limitations of their extension language

I would really like examples where the limitation of vimscript is outshined by elsip. Check my snippet above - vimscript is written specifically for extending vim, and it does a good job.

> Emacs users were busy churning out macros and packages for their editor.

I find recording macros in vim simpler than emacs. By default. Vim doesn't have a save macro functionality, but either you use an extension to do that, or manually save the macro.

> The main reason I have chosen Emacs as my editor is that I get more bang for the buck.

It mostly boils down to this "I get more bang for the buck". There is not much objectiveness when it comes to vim and emacs. You enjoy emacs, I enjoy vim.

> Emacs can emulate Vim,

A very limited form of vim navigation.

> whilst the opposite is not true, as the folks who tried to port SLIME (a powerful package to code in Common Lisp) realized.

I didn't know about an attempt to port slime to vim, because you will have to fight vim for it, and vim won't yield. Vim doesn't do async processes and per the developers, it's not going to, period. So, no shells in the vim(you can folk a shell but then the editor goes away and when you exit the shell, you are back in the editor), no debugger, no slime...It's a conscious design decision. If you don't like it, use something else.

> Now vimscript doesn't do threading or evented io or thousands of other things - it isn't meant to do any of those.

Neither does Emacs Lisp. But whilst Emacs Lisp started as a simplification of a battle-tested general-purpose language, Vim Script started as a hack and continued that way, with further functions being added on a "as-needed" basis.

> As far as quirks go, all languages have quirks. PHP and JS probably have more quirks than Vimscript.

Effective analogy. PHP and Javascript started as hacks as well, they weren't meant to do much at first, and shared the same fate of Vim Script. The reason people put up with PHP and Javascript is that they had or have no alternative. And if there were no modal editor other than Vim, I myself would put up with Vim Script as well.

> Since you are so critical of Vimscript, care to cite me the pain-points which stop you from writing decent extensions in vimscript? There are a variety of scenarios in which vimscript implementation is much more simpler to an elisp implementation.

This is what we could name a "Perl fallacy": Perl scripts can be much shorter than scripts in other languages, but the former are more of a PITA to write.

However, I can cite a pain point: I can't write stand-alone applications with Vim Script. You may say this does not matter, because we are talking about extension languages here, but my view is different (and this was one of the original objections of mine). Why learn shell scripting (or something similar), different command-line text processing tools with their quirks when you can learn one framework well and use it for everything?

Evidence shows that Emacs' packages can go beyond Vim's, even when we factor out the kitchen-sink approach of Emacs. For instance, whilst Emacs programming packages parse - thus understand - code while perform syntax-highlighting, Vim's packages rely on regexps, thus messing syntax-highlighting when the syntax of a language is not quirky.

I don't understand your grep example, but providing an Emacs Lisp implementation would be pointless anyway. Languages are not to be judged so much by the terseness of their programs in specific cases as by their consistency and easiness of reading in general cases. Vim Script code is difficult to read because uses keyboard macros heavily, and suffers from accumulated cruft, where equivalent Emacs code would use named procedures with meaningful and consisten names.

> I find recording macros in vim simpler than emacs.

By "macro" I meant procedures, not keyboard macros.

> It mostly boils down to this "I get more bang for the buck". There is not much objectiveness when it comes to vim and emacs. You enjoy emacs, I enjoy vim.

I wish this were the case, but it is not. There is objectiveness. By learning Emacs, you are learning how to use a tool which is much more consistent and flexible. Since the learning effort is comparable, why would you choose otherwise? Concentrated effort on worthwhile tasks leads to higher returns.

>> Emacs can emulate Vim, > A very limited form of vim navigation.

Current Emacs packages emulate Vim as far as it is useful. Cloning Vim wouldn't make sense as there are equivalent Emacs facilities.

> I didn't know about an attempt to port slime to vim, because you will have to fight vim for it, and vim won't yield. Vim doesn't do async processes and per the developers, it's not going to, period. So, no shells in the vim(you can folk a shell but then the editor goes away and when you exit the shell, you are back in the editor), no debugger, no slime...It's a conscious design decision. If you don't like it, use something else.

I acknowledge that the kitchen-sink approach of Emacs has lead to aberrations (like Gnus), at which Vim users laugh, but the superiority of Emacs would persist even if you stripped out facilities that Vim doesn't offer by design choice.

You know what, Irahul? I like Vim. Really. I have studied many Vim books and lurked on Vim Wiki and Vim enthusiast's blogs. I have never learned how to use Emacs' default editor properly, as I switched to a Vim emulator early. Emacs has an effective editor implementation, Vim has an effective editing model. That's what is objective. Thankfully, we don't have to choose anymore.

Back to work ;-)