141–150 of 198 posts
It’s funny how many forks aiming to keep it free from LLM-generated code. The luddites are present even in the most progressive parts of the population.
vi was never progressive, it was "the Ancients knew it better, the present sucks, these kids have terrible taste, return to the one true Past"
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The Ancients did know it better. I sometimes try working without vim keybindings as it's a pain installing them everywhere. I usually give up the 3rd time I have to delete a function argument and can't dt, or select the body of a function and can't vi{. For everyone even somewhat decent at vim, having to hold right arrow until the cursor reaches the target is a humiliation ritual, and I genuinely feel second-hand emb…
allow me to quote the Ancients, the vi creator himself: > What would you do differently? > JOY: I wish we hadn't used all the keys on the keyboard. > ... > JOY: The fundamental problem with vi is that it doesn't have a mouse and therefore you've got all these commands. In some sense, its backwards from the kind of thing you'd get from a mouse-oriented thing. > Its like one of those pinatas - things that have candy in…
The fundamental advantage of vi is that it doesn't have a mouse. If you were born with three arms you can go for sam or something.
I wonder why there never was a vii, viii or ix?
I use Emacs but these days I spend so much time in the terminal that I'm seriously thinking going back to (N)Vim + Tmux combo. Emacs just feels so slow and complex when you are SSHing into multiple servers while running multiple AIs... I should go read that Vim book everybody recommends!
One thing I noticed that with Claude Code and Codex running in the terminal, I tend to use VS Code much less than before, and found myself opening files in vim more often. It just looks like, for me, the agent development brings me back to using the basic tools, like many years ago, before VS Code existed.
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I’ve been a long time vim user, and I honestly never really bought into the efficiency claims. That gets repeated over and over, but If you’re a slow typer then no editor can really make much of a difference. Little by little your movements become more complex and efficient, and the journey to figuring that out is fun and interesting. The slight contradiction in your comment has a lot of truth in it. It’s just fun, a…
> practicing this game makes you better at any number of tasks that are relevant to your daily work. Vi key bindings don't apply outside of vi
vis is absolutely great. Wish more people were aware of it (and it's cool it is mentioned in the post) and that more people used it. I still miss some features from vim, like buffers, but feels so much snappier, lighter and intuitive - and the structural regular expressions part is outstanding.
Totally agree, Vis really hits an spot between modern feel without losing what made vi great. The structural regex is a game-changer.
The first work i had to use vi and screen on a terminal, it were in 90s . I was used to dos editors ( edit, turbo C ... ) and windows . It was a pain. copy and paste at first was a nightmare. Copy from one file to another ,with named register and # was an hell ( it was vi not vim so only 2 files a time ,the actual edited and the prior ones ). I hated that place, that work, those tool for a while . I got so used to vi…
I actually learned VI using DOS and the Watcom C/C++ compiler and 32 bit dos extender, as it included a vi clone. Maybe it should be included in the list. It can still be downloaded from the openwatcom project, https://openwatcom.org/ftp/manuals/1.5/vi.pdf
I think use of the Watcom compiler led me to Vi way back then, and I am still trying to learn to not use the arrow keys.
I first used ed(1) back in the ye olden days of early 1980s, vi was like a major advance. Came in handy when I had to talk a guy through updating a Solaris config file to allow the box to boot when he only had a serial console in the early 2000s.