A Eulogy for Vim

#1

Post by mtts » Wed, Mar 25, 2026, 4:07 PM UTC

Re: A Eulogy for Vim

#2

Post by mikkupikku » Wed, Mar 25, 2026, 4:30 PM UTC

I've long had great respect for Drew, way since way back when he was sircmpwn writing cool calculator software. Great programmer, and an incredibly based individual. Stays true to himself even in the face of overwhelming pressure.

I completely disagree with his take on this; battleship vibecoder in vimscript is awesome and important, socially, because vibe coding makes computer programming accessible to the masses. I don't expect him to ever agree, but much respect nonetheless

Re: A Eulogy for Vim

#3

Post by AlexandrB » Wed, Mar 25, 2026, 4:32 PM UTC

> I won’t speculate on how he would have felt about generative AI, but I can say that GenAI is something I care about. It causes a lot of problems for a lot of people. It drives rising energy prices in poor communities, disrupts wildlife and fresh water supplies, increases pollution, and stresses global supply chains.

This kind of stuff drives me crazy sometimes. There's is little that's unique to AI here. These are the effects of any kind of industrial expansion. They're also the effects of population growth, in general. This stuff is a problem iff AI is a scam or hugely oversold and these resources are being wasted. But that's a different argument and a less clear-cut one.

> It re-enforces the horrible, dangerous working conditions that miners in many African countries are enduring to supply rare metals like Cobalt for the billions of new chips that this boom demands.

This point also deserves special mention. Most green technologies (solar panels, electric cars) also require a bunch of cobalt. Again, the "badness" seems to depend on your a priori evaluation of what the cobalt is being used for and not the cobalt mining itself.

I think there's also a pretty good chance that if a robot that could mine the same cobalt with no human intervention appeared tomorrow, many folks would complain about "hard working cobalt miners in Africa losing their livelihood to automation".

Re: A Eulogy for Vim

#4

Post by kgwxd » Wed, Mar 25, 2026, 4:32 PM UTC

If you're not using any software that might include code that originally came from an LLM, might as well give up on everything now. I'll give up the base if I ever have to remove built-in AI tools, but I don't foresee Vim dev getting that dumb anytime soon.

Re: A Eulogy for Vim

#5

Post by jmclnx » Wed, Mar 25, 2026, 4:32 PM UTC

Interesting he forked Vim 8.2.0148, but I am fine with that. I think I had to update ~/.vimrc to disable some a new default in v9 that annoyed me. I actually forgot what it was :)

I will have to look into his fork because I too do not want to see any form of AI in vim.

I may also look to see what Elvis looks like these days. I really liked the GUI and colors Elvis defaulted to and I stuck with it for a while, but eventually I went to vim in the v5 days for reasons I forgot.

Re: A Eulogy for Vim

#6

Post by School-Cotton » Wed, Mar 25, 2026, 4:33 PM UTC

mikkupikku wrote: post #2

I've long had great respect for Drew, way since way back when he was sircmpwn writing cool calculator software. Great programmer, and an incredibly based individual. Stays true to himself even in the face of overwhelming pressure. I completely disagree with his take on this; battleship vibecoder in vimscript is awesome and important, socially, because vibe coding makes computer programming accessible to the masses. I…

Computer programming has been accessible to the masses for years. All you need is motivation to learn.

The only people vibe coding has made programming accessible to is people who don't have such motivation.

Re: A Eulogy for Vim

#7

Post by skybrian » Wed, Mar 25, 2026, 4:33 PM UTC

This doesn't seem like a good cost-benefit analysis for AI. Not sure what that would look like, but it seems like making some attempt to quantify the benefits would help.

Re: A Eulogy for Vim

#8

Post by beastman82 » Wed, Mar 25, 2026, 4:34 PM UTC

Perhaps an argument against LLMs should acknowledge its awesome power could be harnessed for good, if only nominally

Re: A Eulogy for Vim

#9

Post by exitb » Wed, Mar 25, 2026, 4:35 PM UTC

[dead]

Re: A Eulogy for Vim

#10

Post by roryrjb » Wed, Mar 25, 2026, 4:37 PM UTC

I think I will use vim-classic and possibly contribute to it. Not because of AI, but because I actually want to use Vim over say something like Neovim* and I actually like vimscript, which imo didn't need the development of vim9script to improve it.

Regarding why not Neovim, I think it's because a large section of the community want to create more complex TUI elements or replicate GUI interfaces and make it more like VS Code. I use Vim for the "vim way" not because it's in a terminal or it's not bloated like some other editors.