in TRS-80 BASIC, you could go `EDIT 100` and bring up a line 100 in a line editor, vi sort of reminded me of that when I was learning it something like 25 years ago. It is still my main code editor.
How Did Vim Become So Popular?
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Re: How Did Vim Become So Popular?
#12> What I am trying to say that vim is an effort of over half a century of good idea accumulation, putting lots of effort into being backward compatible. I wonder what Vi(m) would be like if it were redesigned from scratch.
Probably something like spacemacs.
Emacs + vim really are the peanut butter and chocolate of getting stuff done.
Re: How Did Vim Become So Popular?
#13Probably because it was the default editor in a bunch of Linux distributions.
Isn't Pico the usual default?
on more consumer grade distros I've had to `export EDITOR=vi` before to get vi to come up for things like `crontab -e` and for `git` messages. But it is the default on most systems I've come across personally.
Re: How Did Vim Become So Popular?
#14We also need to understand that a subset of vi features is part of the POSIX standard, so any POSIX system will need to have "vi". vim is the logical choice there.
So as a result vim has become the reference implementation for the POSIX vi featureset.
Re: How Did Vim Become So Popular?
#15> What I am trying to say that vim is an effort of over half a century of good idea accumulation, putting lots of effort into being backward compatible. I wonder what Vi(m) would be like if it were redesigned from scratch.
Probably something like spacemacs.
If you like emacs, switch to doom emacs.
spacemacs development is almost dead
Re: How Did Vim Become So Popular?
#16> What I am trying to say that vim is an effort of over half a century of good idea accumulation, putting lots of effort into being backward compatible. I wonder what Vi(m) would be like if it were redesigned from scratch.
vis comes to mind (https://github.com/martanne/vis), although perhaps something even more aggressively plugin-first would be even better
Re: How Did Vim Become So Popular?
#17Earlier quoted context omitted.
Probably something like spacemacs.
Emacs + vim really are the peanut butter and chocolate of getting stuff done.
I really want to give spacemacs a try, but unfortunately I've just been using traditional emacs for far too long. vi does seem to have a much better editing model than emacs. The tools Emacs has for buffer navigation and editing have always struct me as incredibly primitive.
Re: How Did Vim Become So Popular?
#18To me at least, the answer is and always has been: speed.
Re: How Did Vim Become So Popular?
#19Probably because it was the default editor in a bunch of Linux distributions.
Isn't Pico the usual default?
I have seen nano to be the default for most debian and fedora derived distributions from early 2000s. Not sure if things changed in late teens. Or maybe I am misremembering things.
Re: How Did Vim Become So Popular?
#20For me it is being able to efficiently navigate a file without leaving the home row (Gotta learn touch typing first). Once you understand the commands follow a composable grammar it is really like a superpower for dancing around text.
„Go down 5 lines, move right two word, replace the contents of the brackets“. I don‘t use the actual editor all that often but have vim mode enabled in all my „real“ editors like VSCode or JetBrains Suite. I am often wondering how people do edit source efficiently without vim mode but I am too shy to ask.