Many of the Vim nerds I know, including myself, have switched over to Neovim. Only when using a remote server with a default installation do I use regular old Vim.
The State of Vim
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Re: The State of Vim
#12VIM seemed to have fared well under the new leadership, despite not being able to control the timing of this power transfer. Maybe other BDFL projects would be inspired by VIM's experience and setup successors early. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benevolent_dictator_for_life
that'd be the wrong lesson to extend a period of using a bad governance model for longer
Re: The State of Vim
#13I wonder how long vim and emacs can stay vibrant. I've used emacs in the last 20 years, so I stick with it, but new generations who are trained on vscode and such are less likely to use such "old fashioned" tools. Surely, there will still be emacs and vim users 50 years from now, but the user numbers and the community power will diminish as the graybeards gradually leave this plane.
I use VIM bindings in VS Code. Always assumed many do but might be wrong
Re: The State of Vim
#14Earlier quoted context omitted.
https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2024/technology#1-other-tool... emacs is 4% vs VSCode 73%, so it's not popular, though vim still is
Thanks. In more detail: Visual Studio Code 73.6% Visual Studio 29.3% IntelliJ IDEA 26.8% Notepad++ 23.9% Vim 21.6% Android Studio 16.1% PyCharm 15.1% Jupyter Notebook/JupyterLab 12.8% Neovim 12.5% ... Emacs 4.2% ... Spacemacs 0.4% So Vim + Neovim = 34.1%, essentially second to Visual Studio, the overwhelming leader.
I wonder why is Spacemacs listed as a separate entry?
Re: The State of Vim
#15Many of the Vim nerds I know, including myself, have switched over to Neovim. Only when using a remote server with a default installation do I use regular old Vim.
From the Stack Overflow survey:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42811182
Vim 21.6%
Neovim 12.5%
Re: The State of Vim
#16I wonder how long vim and emacs can stay vibrant. I've used emacs in the last 20 years, so I stick with it, but new generations who are trained on vscode and such are less likely to use such "old fashioned" tools. Surely, there will still be emacs and vim users 50 years from now, but the user numbers and the community power will diminish as the graybeards gradually leave this plane.
I use VIM bindings in VS Code. Always assumed many do but might be wrong
Ditto.
I went from vim to neovim, but the LSPs for python/go(lang) for large files (not that large, maybe 10k loc) seem to really bog it down (back then, no idea if it's better now), whereas with VS Code it was still performant enough. So I ended up using VS Code with Vim bindings.
And yes, with ad hoc work, I still end up using system vim when just doing simple edits (e.g. adding a line to README.md or somesuch)
Re: The State of Vim
#17Earlier quoted context omitted.
Emacs and Vim have remained popular through several generations. What do developer surveys say? Vim was near the top a few years ago, iirc.
With nvim, there has been quite the resurgence of Vim. Good software tends to be resilient. I believe both emacs and vim will see many, many more years.
Neovim feels indeed the proper future-proof evolution of a standard. Its still a bit cumbersome to setup (fonts, lots of plugins to configure, opinionated and overly decorated UI etc.). The acid test of maturity is the dry functionality you get out of the box in a fresh linux. It should be "just right", introducing the new thinking and functionality of neovim without getting in the way.
Re: The State of Vim
#18I wonder how long vim and emacs can stay vibrant. I've used emacs in the last 20 years, so I stick with it, but new generations who are trained on vscode and such are less likely to use such "old fashioned" tools. Surely, there will still be emacs and vim users 50 years from now, but the user numbers and the community power will diminish as the graybeards gradually leave this plane.
I think Neovim helps with this, though last time I was using it (via... bootstrap? One of the prebuilt addon packs) at some point a Mason update broke my LSPs for multiple languages and i went back to VS Code on my Linux laptop because I didn't want to fight with it.
Re: The State of Vim
#19Many of the Vim nerds I know, including myself, have switched over to Neovim. Only when using a remote server with a default installation do I use regular old Vim.
I went back and forth quite a lot until i decided to stick to vim. The reason being that I want to gain deep knowledge of my editor instead of depending on a gazillion plugins that occasionally break. Now, I understand this is something you can do with both vim and neovim, however the documentation of neovim is littered with both the vim docs and the new lua docs, and there is a vibe of "you already know all of vim, here is the lua equivalent", which made it very inaccessible to me. I decided I'll spend the time in the more simple editor of the two and maybe reevaluate this decision again in 3-4 years
Re: The State of Vim
#20I wonder how long vim and emacs can stay vibrant. I've used emacs in the last 20 years, so I stick with it, but new generations who are trained on vscode and such are less likely to use such "old fashioned" tools. Surely, there will still be emacs and vim users 50 years from now, but the user numbers and the community power will diminish as the graybeards gradually leave this plane.
You can't really compare vim and emacs beyond a superficial level.
Emacs is fundamentally an interactive shell, like Bash. It has a text editor, also like Bash. It is of course generally more powerful and featureful than Bash.
Hence, people sometimes live in Emacs, because it's a shell like Bash or Gnome or KDE.
I use Emacs and VSCode. VSCode for some code repos, and Emacs for general computer usage.
Meanwhile, Vim is a text editor. It is neither a shell nor an IDE, although it can be adapted somewhat into an IDE.
I also use vi (alongside Emacs and VSCode). vi is for editing some text if I am not in Emacs for some reason or if I temporarily borked my Emacs config.
(I also use ed, for when I'm in a dumb terminal or I don't want to lose screen context.)
Vim or Emacs "dying" is not really an issue, although Vim or Emacs losing enough mindshare to keep them up to date as competitive IDE options, maybe that might happen.