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The Future of the Vim Project

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Re: The Future of the Vim Project

#211

Post by dmbche »

earth2mars wrote: post #198

Why so many people love vim? I have a genuine question. I was trying to delete contents of a file and paste new content. It was nightmare for me to remember the 3 or 4 finger combination shortcuts with small and cap letters involved during the process. I like if the shortcuts using Ctrl or shift or Alt or Command or Windows buttons over 3 finger with caps changing keys. The cognitive load in remembering shortcuts is…

Very simply - Vim is a program that you are required to be a "poweruser" of to make work. You NEED to know most keypresses and shortcuts ( at some point, Vim is a language that you're speaking to the text you're editing ). This is not the case with most software - but find anyone that is a poweruser of any software and they'll love it to death.

Because most things can be done 10 different and equivalent ways, you develop your own personal way of interacting with it, and it's "personalised" to your workflow - not by design, but because you won't remember things you don't use/understand.

Learning Vim shows you to rely on yourself and to persevere, and if you do it you are likely to stick with it. Just like Emacs!

Re: The Future of the Vim Project

#212

Post by massysett »

fortunateregard wrote: post #17

What is it that prevents the rest of the vim community from adopting neovim? From what I can observe, a great deal already have. But for the folks holding out, what is it that outweighs all that neovim has to offer?

My Vim needs are very modest. I just don’t need anything Neovim has. It’s complication I don’t need.

If Vim got no new features, I wouldn’t care. If Vim became unmaintained but still available from distributions, I’d still use it. If Vim became unavailable (e.g. due to lack of maintenance) I’d be more likely to switch to nvi than Neovim.

I could probably switch to nvi now, but I have no reason to.

Re: The Future of the Vim Project

#213

Post by nunez »

earth2mars wrote: post #198

Why so many people love vim? I have a genuine question. I was trying to delete contents of a file and paste new content. It was nightmare for me to remember the 3 or 4 finger combination shortcuts with small and cap letters involved during the process. I like if the shortcuts using Ctrl or shift or Alt or Command or Windows buttons over 3 finger with caps changing keys. The cognitive load in remembering shortcuts is…

Vim is a nightmare if you don't use it very often. Moving around a text editor with a keyboard feels extremely strange coming from a traditional text editor or IDE.

However, once you get used to it, it's absolutely amazing. You can move as fast as your thoughts, sometimes faster.

I forced myself to use Vim for two weeks after having been a long-time eMacs user (and Notepad++ prior to that). Those two weeks were hell. I felt like a baby learning how to walk.

It felt like second nature a few months later, and any editor that didn't have keybindings felt primitive a few months after that.

Re: The Future of the Vim Project

#214

Post by 0cf8612b2e1e »

tome wrote: post #150
woleium wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But we don't use LastPass after they have demonstrated over and over that they are not to be trusted with our secrets, right?

And it means they must be keeping the recovery passwords in plaintext, so it just gets worse...

The email does not have to be the password. Something like, “password is taped to the back of my diploma”

Re: The Future of the Vim Project

#215

Post by chipsrafferty »

earth2mars wrote: post #198

Why so many people love vim? I have a genuine question. I was trying to delete contents of a file and paste new content. It was nightmare for me to remember the 3 or 4 finger combination shortcuts with small and cap letters involved during the process. I like if the shortcuts using Ctrl or shift or Alt or Command or Windows buttons over 3 finger with caps changing keys. The cognitive load in remembering shortcuts is…

Why do you love the way you do it? You're used to it. vim users don't have a cognitive load because 99% of them learned vim at the same time as learning programming. Is it worth it in 2023 to learn if you're used to a standard input method? Probably not, the majority of complexity in most people's job takes place in the mind and saving even a hour a day is likely not worth it - consider that even if there is no added cognitive load with vim, the fact that you can input faster means you're moving faster which can be exhausting. I for one, like the menial aspect of typing as a way of taking a break from everything.

Re: The Future of the Vim Project

#216

Post by medeshago »

tuwtuwtuwtuw wrote: post #209
artogahr wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point is you don't remember them, they become second nature, intuition, and you just sort of... do it without thinking. Assuming you've given time to learn it, editing with vim takes less mental effort and is faster.

Do you have any source for that claim? I had a coworker who swore that X was the fastest way to do Y. Turned out it wasn't and X just made him very busy hitting keyboard quickly.

What source can he give you? It's clearly a personal annecdote that is shared between a lot of people that use vim. What kind of source are you thinking about?

Re: The Future of the Vim Project

#217

Post by yoyohello13 »

tuwtuwtuwtuw wrote: post #209
artogahr wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point is you don't remember them, they become second nature, intuition, and you just sort of... do it without thinking. Assuming you've given time to learn it, editing with vim takes less mental effort and is faster.

Do you have any source for that claim? I had a coworker who swore that X was the fastest way to do Y. Turned out it wasn't and X just made him very busy hitting keyboard quickly.

As a vim user, I am 100% convinced that I am not that much faster than my colleagues who use normal key binds. However, I subjectively feel a lot less friction editing with vim keys than I do with the mouse and arrow keys. So Vim makes me happier...

Re: The Future of the Vim Project

#218

Post by kyleee »

earth2mars wrote: post #198

Why so many people love vim? I have a genuine question. I was trying to delete contents of a file and paste new content. It was nightmare for me to remember the 3 or 4 finger combination shortcuts with small and cap letters involved during the process. I like if the shortcuts using Ctrl or shift or Alt or Command or Windows buttons over 3 finger with caps changing keys. The cognitive load in remembering shortcuts is…

the cognitive load approaches zero with continued use

Re: The Future of the Vim Project

#219

Post by cirelli94 »

earth2mars wrote: post #198

Why so many people love vim? I have a genuine question. I was trying to delete contents of a file and paste new content. It was nightmare for me to remember the 3 or 4 finger combination shortcuts with small and cap letters involved during the process. I like if the shortcuts using Ctrl or shift or Alt or Command or Windows buttons over 3 finger with caps changing keys. The cognitive load in remembering shortcuts is…

The cognitive load of using vim is the same you have while riding a bicycle, or while typing with ten fingers on the keyboard. After you get used, it's very easy. You just need to study or to play with it, e.g. with https://vim-adventures.com/ !

Re: The Future of the Vim Project

#220

Post by nzach »

oblio wrote: post #38
goku12 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Neovim team has always been positive towards Vim. This post doesn't paint the Vim team as being hostile either. However, I really wonder how practical a merge is, considering that neovim isn't a fork or Vim, rather an implementation from scratch. Edit: Looks like I'm wrong about neovim not being a fork of vim.

It's not an implementation from scratch, do you know the history of the projects? Neovim started out as a large clean up and refactor of Vim code, plus the addition of async code. That's a huge amount of work, partially re-implemented by Vim (Bram implemented his own version of async). Actually, after the Neovim launch a lot of the Vim features were just Bram chasing after Neovim features. Vim9script, :term, etc. I t…

>Neovim started out as a large clean up and refactor of Vim code, plus the addition of async code.

I don't think that is actually true.

As far as I remember Justin and Thiago (I think) wanted to implement the ':term' into vim and Bram just shut them off because he didn't wanted to lead Vim into the road that Emacs went.

And this was what prompted the Neovim fork. And they took the oportunity to also make a big refactor in the codebase.

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