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Bram Moolenaar Discusses Developing Vim, How He Uses It, and Version 8

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Re: Bram Moolenaar Discusses Developing Vim, How He Uses It, and Version 8

#21

Post by cygned »

mcjiggerlog wrote: post #12
owaislone wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Neovim is Vim for me and many other users. Vim is irrelevant to me now. The community is rallying behind Neovim and it shows great potential. It just needs to be bundled by major distros so it can be installed on servers with 1 command and that'll be the end of old Vim. Bram has done a tremendous job with Vim but it's time to move on to the Vim of the future.

I've never touched neovim as I'm perfectly happy with vim - what reasons are there for me to consider making the switch? I would guess neovim isn't even on the radar of most vim users. I don't see neovim surpassing vim any time soon, personally.

That got me: https://github.com/neovim/neovim/wiki/FAQ#how-can-i-change-t...

It feels faster to me, but I haven't compared to vim 8. I don't use any plugins doing work in the background, so that's not the difference here.

Re: Bram Moolenaar Discusses Developing Vim, How He Uses It, and Version 8

#22

Post by greyman »

I don't know if I am too old or just think differently than vim enthusiasts, but I somehow couldn't bring myself to like vim. Of course that's might be since I can't find motivation to dig into it further. As a developer I use it almost daily when doing something on the server, like editing some config etc., but I somehow always prefer a software, where you do things intuitively without needing to first learn a shortcut for everything. I just prefer Visual Studio or Visual Studio Code from Microsoft when developing code, accepting that I must use mouse and the editing process might take slightly longer. Also, as awkward as it might sound, visually vim looks a bit ugly to me and I never could get fully over it. :-)

Re: Bram Moolenaar Discusses Developing Vim, How He Uses It, and Version 8

#23

Post by kerny »

red2awn wrote: post #14

Too bad most of the new features are already in Neovim.

Why is it bad? Competition is always a good thing, and I'm glad that Neovim urged Braam to improve Vim as well.

Personally, I'll rather use Vim as it focuses on stability and long-term compatibility. I have a huge respect for Braam for maintaining the project for so long. On the other hand, some of the Neovim's promises are just that, big dreams. Development on Neovim has slowed down and if you look at their git history, you'll see most of their commits are actually upstream patches taken from Vim.

I also see a lot of hate towards Vim source code and code styling, which is not that bad and I actually prefer it to Neovim's two spaces per indentation style.

Re: Bram Moolenaar Discusses Developing Vim, How He Uses It, and Version 8

#24

Post by rubenv »

greyman wrote: post #22

I don't know if I am too old or just think differently than vim enthusiasts, but I somehow couldn't bring myself to like vim. Of course that's might be since I can't find motivation to dig into it further. As a developer I use it almost daily when doing something on the server, like editing some config etc., but I somehow always prefer a software, where you do things intuitively without needing to first learn a short…

> I somehow always prefer a software, where you do things intuitively without needing to first learn a shortcut for everything

That doesn't even apply for an IDE. As a vim user I always feel lost in those at first.

Any tool with a bit of power will require familiarization. You won't get the most out of that IDE unless you learn it.

Re: Bram Moolenaar Discusses Developing Vim, How He Uses It, and Version 8

#25

Post by pawadu »

mikekchar wrote: post #9

I was surprised to learn that vim started out on the Amiga. Back in those days I was using DME, by a certain Matt Dillon (of Dragonfly BSD fame, not the actor ;-) ). At the time it was the only editor that could drag me away from Emacs. Ironic that Vim later seduced me away from Emacs again...

Incidentally, the Amiga Workbench Utility disk (or whatever they called it) included a very nice microemacs implementation:

http://www.guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/amigaos204

Suffice to say, I have been a very happy emacs user since then ;)

Re: Bram Moolenaar Discusses Developing Vim, How He Uses It, and Version 8

#26

Post by agumonkey »

greyman wrote: post #22

I don't know if I am too old or just think differently than vim enthusiasts, but I somehow couldn't bring myself to like vim. Of course that's might be since I can't find motivation to dig into it further. As a developer I use it almost daily when doing something on the server, like editing some config etc., but I somehow always prefer a software, where you do things intuitively without needing to first learn a short…

It can vary with time and context. I had a long period where mangling text in high prowess was important to me. Because I was somehow in love with programs, and doing lots of things with my fingers felt good and worthy. Also because I was using Java, very verbose as everybody knows.

Some people will love Java and accept its verbosity, I cannot.

Now I found out about lisps, ml, or even ruby and suddenly verbosity decreased.. you need less text edition.

And even more than that, focusing on algorithms and conceptual structures makes you forget about editing, formatting, or even live check etc. You often think deep beforehand. Then type a few things, because the design is more balanced.

Re: Bram Moolenaar Discusses Developing Vim, How He Uses It, and Version 8

#27

Post by ptero »

greyman wrote: post #22

I don't know if I am too old or just think differently than vim enthusiasts, but I somehow couldn't bring myself to like vim. Of course that's might be since I can't find motivation to dig into it further. As a developer I use it almost daily when doing something on the server, like editing some config etc., but I somehow always prefer a software, where you do things intuitively without needing to first learn a short…

In terms of doing things intuitively -- I think (maybe incorrectly) that you mean seeing icons that you can click on to perform a certain action rather than the keyboard command that does the same. If so, that is easy to fix by adding buttons. The problem with this approach is that mouse-driven commands are almost never "mouse-only" -- you still need to move the hands back and forth between keyboard and the mouse (e.g., after you click "save as" you need to type the file name to save to) and this wastes quite a bit of time.

But people are different, some prefer it this way and some not. Even on the keyboard-driven side there is a clear divide between those who like single-mode interface of Emacs and those who love Vim and hate the pianist training of Emacs multi-finger actions.

Re: Bram Moolenaar Discusses Developing Vim, How He Uses It, and Version 8

#28

Post by executesorder66 »

greyman wrote: post #22

I don't know if I am too old or just think differently than vim enthusiasts, but I somehow couldn't bring myself to like vim. Of course that's might be since I can't find motivation to dig into it further. As a developer I use it almost daily when doing something on the server, like editing some config etc., but I somehow always prefer a software, where you do things intuitively without needing to first learn a short…

> I don't know if I am too old or just think differently than vim enthusiasts

You make it sound like vim is a new thing. It's 25 years old. And vi is 40 years old. If you've been writing code for longer than that, then damn. I'm impressed.

> prefer a software, where you do things intuitively without needing to first learn a shortcut for everything.

Like what? ctrl + c or ctrl + v? I doubt anyone has every figured those out by themselves. They either read the documentation, or someone showed them. Or do you mean intuitive as in right click on selected text, and then click the copy option? to each their own, but I couldn't stand wasting that much time every time I want to copy or paste something.

> accepting that I must use mouse and the editing process might take slightly longer.

Kind of answers my previous question. But for me, it's not that using the mouse wastes an extra second here and there. But it breaks the constant flow of typing on the keyboard. I don't like that constant start/stop of switching between the keyboard and mouse. But you don't mind it, and that's fine. (I'm just explaining from my perspective, why people would prefer something like vim)

> visually vim looks a bit ugly to me

Everyone's tastes are different, but I don't understand this. It's just a cursor, the text you are working with, and a small bar at the bottom with some info. How is that ugly? I mean you can change the font to whatever you like.

Re: Bram Moolenaar Discusses Developing Vim, How He Uses It, and Version 8

#29

Post by weaksauce »

ageofwant wrote: post #13
owaislone wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Neovim is Vim for me and many other users. Vim is irrelevant to me now. The community is rallying behind Neovim and it shows great potential. It just needs to be bundled by major distros so it can be installed on servers with 1 command and that'll be the end of old Vim. Bram has done a tremendous job with Vim but it's time to move on to the Vim of the future.

vim is great, but neovim is better. Of course these days I'm a spacemacs proselyte. On my dev box spacemacs and neovim is used interchangeably. On most servers I just stick with the default distro vim, unless it becomes a remote dev machine. Point is I use all three all the time, and I fully expect to continue doing that until world hunger or me ends.

Plus 1 for spacemacs. Magit is amazing software and I held out for a long time learning it because I didn't think that it was worth the time. It's so good that it makes you rethink version control. Makes everything so easy... Even the more advanced features.

Re: Bram Moolenaar Discusses Developing Vim, How He Uses It, and Version 8

#30

Post by cderwin »

mcjiggerlog wrote: post #12
owaislone wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Neovim is Vim for me and many other users. Vim is irrelevant to me now. The community is rallying behind Neovim and it shows great potential. It just needs to be bundled by major distros so it can be installed on servers with 1 command and that'll be the end of old Vim. Bram has done a tremendous job with Vim but it's time to move on to the Vim of the future.

I've never touched neovim as I'm perfectly happy with vim - what reasons are there for me to consider making the switch? I would guess neovim isn't even on the radar of most vim users. I don't see neovim surpassing vim any time soon, personally.

The honest truth is that almost everyone will have the same exact experience in neovim as in vim, and that the differences right now (this could always change) are mostly for developers hoping to use vim in a creative way. For example, nvim has a decoupled back end, so ides could emulate vim without having to do emulation at all -- they would literally just communicate with the neovim backend. Another example, which I think is great, is that to support python extensions, nvim does not need to be recompiled. A third one, which is perhaps the least valuable but is also the most user-facing, is that you can now open terminals within neovim. Of course, you can do this with vim and tmux, but sometimes it's nice that I can set up a binding for -t to open a terminal, or -p to open an ipython shell instead of using tmux's more cumbersome default bindings. That said, there are of course ways to set up fantastic tmux bindings, I just haven't.

I love neovim, but the idea that "most people use nvim" or "vim is dying" is just wrong. Though I really do think nvim's development philosophy will lead to better results than Moolenaar's.

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