Probably because it was the default editor in a bunch of Linux distributions.
And that because vi was present and popular on commercial Unix.
How Did Vim Become So Popular?
21–30 of 507 posts
Re: How Did Vim Become So Popular?
#22Because nobody knows how to quit
Ah early web development nostalgia.
Re: How Did Vim Become So Popular?
#23For 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…
Long time vim lover here as well, but I guess I hear often that for a lot of folks, input isn't the bottleneck.
Re: How Did Vim Become So Popular?
#24For 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…
Some people use trackballs or pads with their thumbs, or trackpoints.
Re: How Did Vim Become So Popular?
#25Back in ye olden tymes, you could count on some variant of it being everywhere. It’s lightweight, ubiquitous, and powerful. It’s way more powerful than default Windows tools.
There’s a steep curve, but if you can handle it and learn a couple of things (%s//g) being one of them, you’ll get people hooked. Then the olds shame the young staff to use it.
The muscle memory aspect is significant too. I’m a suit now, but can still work magic with Vi years later. The faculty at my college pushed emacs hard, but customizations are missing on foreign machines, and the key combos were too awkward on normal keyboards (for me) and the skills wore off.
Re: How Did Vim Become So Popular?
#26real answer : because redhat and debian had replaced elvis with vim as the default vi early on. I don't remember the exact drama, but maybe something to do with the license.
Re: How Did Vim Become So Popular?
#27I know how I first encountered vi... it was probably 1994 or 1995... (Wiki looks like maybe 1994 was first intel release, so that tracks) - and I had only used Linux up to that point and had never really used an editor other than pico (now nano, which was the editor for the pine email client!).
I thought playing with Solaris would be "cool" so I installed it and couldn't get it on my network because I needed to edit the /etc/resolv.conf to add host resolution, but there was no pico editor!
I ended up digging into manual pages to figure out how to use vim, and over the course of getting the system set up I got pretty comfortable with a lot of the patterns vim let me make faster, they are mostly things I might run in a shell like grep or awk, but I can do it without shelling out, so that was a bonus.
edited: now that I think of it, I bet I was not using vim, just vi - so the relevance to this article might not be quite on.
Re: How Did Vim Become So Popular?
#28For 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…
Long time vim lover here as well, but I guess I hear often that for a lot of folks, input isn't the bottleneck.
I don't see it as a bottleneck, but focus. Not searching for the mouse or something or stretching fingers to Edit with Meta Alt Control and Shift etc. but fingers where they feel comfortable efficiently browsing the files.
Re: How Did Vim Become So Popular?
#29For 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…
Long time vim lover here as well, but I guess I hear often that for a lot of folks, input isn't the bottleneck.
Yes I hear that as well. IMHO most of the time is thinking but when I want to move stuff from my brain to my screen I prefer maximum bandwidth and not having to consciously think about it. To each their own I guess.
Re: How Did Vim Become So Popular?
#30> 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.
I hear good things about https://kakoune.org/. But I have 20 years of muscle memory for vi keybindings, and they're well-established enough that you can even use them in other editors like VSCode. So I'm wary of training my fingers to do something else that only works in one editor.