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The State of Vim

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Re: The State of Vim

#101

Post by jiscariot »

hnfong wrote: post #92
dmortin wrote: post #4

I 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.

This google trends graph is very illustrative: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=emacs,vi... emacs is surely on a decline, but it’s not obvious that Vim is on the same trend. This matches “theory” and anecdotal evidence: the people who chose emacs probably didn’t like modal editing, and when “better” IDEs came along they just switched. But there’s nothing like Vim (except editors specifically inspir…

Google translate says vim = 'I came' in portuguese, so I guess that explains Brazil.

Re: The State of Vim

#102

Post by mordae »

dmortin wrote: post #4

I 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.

One of the kids in my computer club found himself to be an avid Helix user. I guess once the dust settles around nvim's approach to LSP and stuff, give or take 5 years, it will build itself quite a following, including young people. I think the hackability is attractive.

Re: The State of Vim

#103

Post by sevensor »

ookdatnog wrote: post #56
dmortin wrote: post #4

I 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'm sticking with emacs for now because it is the only editor I have encountered that actually works well in conjunction with a tiling window manager; by which I mean: it works well as a single process accessed through multiple windows (here I mean "windows" as in OS windows -- internally Emacs calls this "frames") although it has features for managing panes internally, it doesn't insist that you use them and each wi…

Kakoune does this too, and it’s amazing with a tiling window manager. On a big monitor, I can get 4-5 terminal emulators across, and in any of them, at any time, I can attach a kakoune client, copy and paste between buffers in different windows, edit the same file in two places at the same time, close all the clients and reattach later, and so on. Emacs is the only other editor that does this, as far as I know.

Re: The State of Vim

#104

Post by bawolff »

skriticos2 wrote: post #93
heisenbit wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, committees are good at saying no. They tend to say no to two not perfect ideas and then force a consensus containing most often the worst aspects of both original approaches. The good news is that the result is so bloated that can‘t be changed and so provides a stable foundation for years of misery. There are counter examples of course but the power dynamic of committees is not conductive to results that hav…

When I think about the two models, I have Linux as the dictator type and XML as committee designed. Both are functional enough, but the while so few data points are hardly conclusive, I think it's generally indicative. I'm not a particular fan of XML, even if it's functional enough to get the job done. Of course you have to find a dictator that is ready to invest all the time and energy to care for a project over a p…

> I'm not a particular fan of XML, even if it's functional enough to get the job done.

XML by itself is okay-ish. The true design by comittee disasters are the specs surrounding it. XMLSignature, SOAP, etc

Re: The State of Vim

#105

Post by bitbasher »

porphyra wrote: post #11

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.

I would prefer to use vim, but most plugins are limited to neovim these days. I also feel the overall speed of neovim is better and less janky when interacting with buffers and navigating files.

The treesitter highlighting in neovim is also better/supports more files out of the box than vim. In vim I was far too used to syntax highlighting being broke halfway through a file for one reason or another (lines too long, syntax new or broken, etc).

I dislike setting up neovim, but I also dislike vim's heavy use of language specific plugins. In a perfect world I'd have lsp+treesitter in vim out of the box and no need to install any plugins.

Re: The State of Vim

#106

Post by sevensor »

volemo wrote: post #25
krykp wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I wonder, will there be something to emacs, as nvim is to vim?

This already happened, decades ago. Xemacs was widely deployed for a while. For that matter, vim is the most popular of several editors that did this to vi. (Elvis, stevie, nvi, others probably.) At any rate, I think Xemacs is still more or less maintained, but I haven’t seen anybody use it in decades.

Re: The State of Vim

#107

Post by sevensor »

myaccountonhn wrote: post #63
openmarkand wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have tried several times and I always switched back to vanilla vim. Neovim has various nice features but it requires a lot of time to migrate correctly IMHO. 20 years of habits are hard to leave, I think. Sure the configuration file is retro compatible, but some of the plugins are better suited for neovim and vice versa. I use a dozen of them and if I switch permanently to neovim I'd like to start fresh using more…

I found the neovim community to operate a bit like the node ecosystem, you pull in a plugin for every problem that solves already solved problems their own way. The plugins are also very flashy with tons of animations, colors and emojis, which to me is just distracting. That said I think people should use what they like, and I am happy that there is a big community developing an alternative to VSCode. I just didn't f…

The Unix integration is so very good. I have keybinds to fmt for line wrapping and date to insert timestamps, and I like being able to pipe a selection to dc to do some quick math. It’s so easy, I do it without even thinking about it.

Re: The State of Vim

#108

Post by tomrod »

flohofwoe wrote: post #29
eviks wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

that'd be the wrong lesson to extend a period of using a bad governance model for longer

You need someone to say 'no' to all the stupid ideas, and also to the occasional good idea to stay focused. Committees and communities are quite bad at that. IME the BDFL model has mostly worked best for open source software development, unless the BDFL is a complete ass of course. (also software projects don't need to be democracies, e.g. people won't starve or sent to the gulag if things go sideways)

One of the most powerful ideas I've come across is Arrow's impossibility theorem, which basically states that you don't get a lot of nice group choice outcomes without a dictator in the mix. It's a math formulation, so its not commenting on the realities of a despot, but rather, someone's choices will always dominate if you want a certain set of properties in the decision making.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow%27s_impossibility_theore...

Re: The State of Vim

#109

Post by bandrami »

eviks wrote: post #8
mmooss wrote: post #5

Earlier 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.

https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2024/technology#1-other-tool... emacs is 4% vs VSCode 73%, so it's not popular, though vim still is

Isn't stackoverflow's most-accessed question to date "how do I exit vim?"

Re: The State of Vim

#110

Post by maleldil »

112233 wrote: post #46
porphyra wrote: post #11

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.

Neovim sounded like a good idea, so I switched, too. Then after an update, it broke mouse selection in terminal, by turning on some crazy option by default. I still have to search how to disable it each time. Ok, things like that happen. Then, after another update, it broke terminal update. Like, your screen scrolls up or down a line and the text does not get redrawn correctly. Is it a wezterm issue? Well, the origin…

Vim is more stable simply because it changes less often. Neovim is constantly improving its APIs, and that can break stuff. If you don't want to deal with breaking changes, just don't update. You can still use most plugins.
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