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Bill Joy's greatest gift to man – the vi editor (2003)

theregister.co.uk

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Re: Bill Joy's greatest gift to man – the vi editor (2003)

#171

Post by appleflaxen »

gfodor wrote: post #118
supernova87a wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately, the barrier I faced with even trying VI is that you cannot discover any functionality intuitively. Exaggerating (but just a little) I could not even figure out how to type without someone giving me a tutorial. That was enough to make me stop.

When given a tradeoff between intuitivity and other benefits, vi almost always breaks against intuitivity. It's this design philosophy taken to its logical extreme.

There's a better fit than "intuitive"

Vim is extremely intuitive in its compositional behavior; I have never used "67w", but I know exactly what it would do because of composition.

I think "discoverability" is closer.

Re: Bill Joy's greatest gift to man – the vi editor (2003)

#172

Post by edanm »

war1025 wrote: post #42
maximusjesse wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Neovim definitely has significant market share, you can compare Github stars as one statistic to consider: https://github.com/vim/vim - 20k https://github.com/neovim/neovim - 36.5k This is in some part due to the fact that neovim has been on Github longer, but it's still a a major indicator. Neovim has many benefits over Vim, and has been applying pressure on Vim for years to improve its own development and codebase.…

NVim certainly has it's own cult following, I would expect that it pales in comparison to Vim for actual day to day usage. Glad to see the project is still alive and moving forward. Seems like most new editors or forks in general die a quick death.

> NVim certainly has it's own cult following, I would expect that it pales in comparison to Vim for actual day to day usage.

Why? It's a fork of vim, which adds some functionality and removes some functionality. But it's not an entirely new editor or anything.

Re: Bill Joy's greatest gift to man – the vi editor (2003)

#173

Post by bdamm »

u801e wrote: post #159
bdamm wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

vi also builds its concepts together in a great way. Navigation keys are powerful, but combined with actions, they become monumentally powerful in a way few IDEs seem to replicate well. Something simple like "copy the next 10 lines to the clipboard" is just 10yj or 10Y or even y10j. No awkward reaching for control keys. Now combine those actions into macros and things get really fun. One of the most fun navigation ke…

> One of the most fun navigation keys is the under-reported "f" key. If the cursor isn't where you want it to be There's also the t key which will place the cursor on the character just before it. There are also the F and T keys that will search backward in the same line and the ; and , keys that allow you jump from character to character in that line. But, if you want more flexibility and the ability to jump across…

There are so many navigation keys and combinations, that's kind of what is great about it. A lifetime's worth, in the case of vim and neovim. I personally have got a lot of mileage out of f, F, t, T, /, ?, G, 0, W, w, e, E, b, B, }, and %.

Re: Bill Joy's greatest gift to man – the vi editor (2003)

#174

Post by war1025 »

edanm wrote: post #172
war1025 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

NVim certainly has it's own cult following, I would expect that it pales in comparison to Vim for actual day to day usage. Glad to see the project is still alive and moving forward. Seems like most new editors or forks in general die a quick death.

> NVim certainly has it's own cult following, I would expect that it pales in comparison to Vim for actual day to day usage. Why? It's a fork of vim, which adds some functionality and removes some functionality. But it's not an entirely new editor or anything.

> Why?

Not sure what you are questioning exactly.

Why does it have a cult following? Because there are enough people to keep the project going and it makes them happy for whatever reason.

Why does it have far less usage than Vim proper? Because it's a young, niche project, and Vim has been around forever. Same reason CentOS and Ubuntu have a far bigger usage share than any of the "trendy" distros.

Re: Bill Joy's greatest gift to man – the vi editor (2003)

#175

Post by war1025 »

maximusjesse wrote: post #96
qznc wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For a nearly 30 year old software like vim, Github stars are not a relevant metric. Vim probably has users who have never even heard of Github.

Yeah, it's not an accurate indicator since various factors play into how many stars Neovim has, e.g. Vim is prebuilt into most OS distros, so lack of a need to download it, Neovim is more contributor friendly, etc. I highlighted this not to show the insignificance of Vim, but rather the rise of Neovim.

NeoVim certainly got a lot of press for a while. I think it has faded quite a bit in the past few years since Bram stole their thunder somewhat by integrating their biggest selling points.

I am fairly certain I have NeoVim starred on Github. I haven't used the editor except for an hour to try it out when it was new. I use Vim all day every day for work.

I would expect a similar situation for many of those stars.

Stars on Github really don't mean anything.

Re: Bill Joy's greatest gift to man – the vi editor (2003)

#176

Post by edanm »

war1025 wrote: post #174
edanm wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> NVim certainly has it's own cult following, I would expect that it pales in comparison to Vim for actual day to day usage. Why? It's a fork of vim, which adds some functionality and removes some functionality. But it's not an entirely new editor or anything.

> Why? Not sure what you are questioning exactly. Why does it have a cult following? Because there are enough people to keep the project going and it makes them happy for whatever reason. Why does it have far less usage than Vim proper? Because it's a young, niche project, and Vim has been around forever. Same reason CentOS and Ubuntu have a far bigger usage share than any of the "trendy" distros.

Ah sorry I misunderstood. I thought you meant it has functionality for day to day usage, not just less users. My mistake!

Re: Bill Joy's greatest gift to man – the vi editor (2003)

#177

Post by gruturo »

kmarc wrote: post #113
sacks2k wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"This is especially important if you have to edit a file on a remote server" This may have been true a decade ago, but editors like Visual studio code now have remote editing abilities over SSH. I regularly have 50+ files open at a time for editing/compiling and I've never found editors like VI very helpful. If I need to make a quick edit to a config file, it does the job.

Now imagine that SSH going from a Citrix windows desktop running on a Windows 10 VM on your linux laptop. Every key press reacts in around a second. Welcome to banking "security"! Now let's say I want to `d5}`, to delete the next 5 paraghraph. In vi(m) I can do this by telling it "hey vim, delete those 5 damn paragraph!" In fancy VScode I have to say more like... "Hey editor, wait a sec, I'm moving my cursor over the…

> Now imagine that SSH going from a Citrix windows desktop running on a Windows 10 VM on your linux laptop. Every key press reacts in around a second. Welcome to banking "security"!

Oh god are you one of my colleagues?

Re: Bill Joy's greatest gift to man – the vi editor (2003)

#178

Post by [deleted] »

kmarc wrote: post #168
Redoubts wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So if you have an incredibly shitty setup, and have no idea how vscode works, then it might be worth it. Got it.

I have a quite good setup, in general. Unfortunately this is some external requirement I cannot do anything about. Also, as opposed to many people, I actually got to work and know both the IDE-world (including VScode), and the vim world. I have a base for comparison. Hopefully you "got that" too.

[deleted]

Re: Bill Joy's greatest gift to man – the vi editor (2003)

#179

Post by coliveira »

reddit_clone wrote: post #124
coliveira wrote: post #23

I used Emacs for 5 years before learning vi. What a change! While Emacs tries to put the kitchen sink inside the editor, vi tries simply to be a keyboard interface to the rest of the system. I've never looked back since I learned this way of working.

Emacs user here. Emacs' real value is not really in text editing, though it is no slouch in text editing. It does so many other things so well, at this point it is unthinkable for me to not have it. Eg. OrgMode, Magit, Helm, Tramp, Dired and slime to mention a few. Its a lifestyle ;-)

This confirms my point, people using Emacs are not interested in editing alone, but in a platform for elisp code. That's the reason I prefer vi.

Re: Bill Joy's greatest gift to man – the vi editor (2003)

#180

Post by mckinney »

Ok, I get that vi is a legend etc. I think I understand why, but I'll keep that to myself. But honestly, it's a relic. Hell, it was a relic in the late 80s when I was in college! Few of my classmates bothered with it unless they HAD to use it, which in my view is what makes vi so sticky. We can thank the academic community for perpetuating it as some kind of "expert" tool and encouraging or even requiring students to use it. The same ignorance that keeps CS dogma alive such as "good programmers don't use GUI debuggers or IDEs." My college age kid in CS came home parroting this nonsense. But at this stage of her education I'm quite used to unindoctrinating. There is no reason a university should teach kids to use vi as a primary code editor. It's a crime in the context of a modern, statically typed language such as Java.
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