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How Did Vim Become So Popular?

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Re: How Did Vim Become So Popular?

#401

Post by mumblemumble »

gpmcadam wrote: post #388
saberience wrote: post #357

Controversial comment here, but I would say Vim isn't popular at all. I would say instead, Vim advocates are incredibly vocal (a bit like Vegans and Crossfitters) and won't hesitate to talk about it at all times. I've been engineering now since 2002 so approaching 20 years and sure, every office has one guy who's the "hardcore" Vim guy. Everyone else in the office uses Visual Studio or VSCode, Atom, Sublime, IntelliJ…

Did you not read TFA? ~25% of web devs in the SO 2019 survey said they used VIM as their editor. Amongst dev-ops that number is higher, around 40%. https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2019#technology-_-... So your anecdotal example of "99% of people using VS or VSCode" doesn't ring true for the industry as a whole.

You're misinterpreting that graph. The key detail to note there is that the bars don't add up to 100%. Meaning that it's showing what percentage of people use that IDE/editor at all. The phrasing, "~25% of web devs... used vim as their editor," implies that 1 in 4 web devs use it as their primary or preferred editor, which is not something that can be inferred from the data.

For my part, when I answered the survey, I checked vscode, intellij, vim, jupyter, emacs, and rstudio. Most of those are there because they're my preferred editor for some task or other, but vim is only there because it's the only editor I can expect to have available on every server I ssh into. So, while I did say that I use vim in the survey, I would encourage you not to count me as a vim user for the purposes of any popularity debates.

Re: How Did Vim Become So Popular?

#402

Post by artemave »

deergomoo wrote: post #395
koonsolo wrote: post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is too bad. I'm a Vim user and combine the best of both worlds: vim plugin in VSCode. A few of my colleagues are vim users, and fortunately for the others we are not as vocal as you describe. I already accepted of being the weirdo that uses vim, because my programming skills make up for it ;). I do have a shortcut to disable it, when we do some pair programming.

> vim plugin in VSCode. How is that these days? I used it a couple of years ago but it had issues at the time, namely some performance problems and getting stuck in a particular mode. I ended up abandoning vim bindings because the JetBrains plugin was also buggy, and I straight up had no feasible way to get those bindings in Xcode, but I hold out hope for a glorious LSP-based future where I can just use vim and get a…

If you haven't already, you might want to check out coc.nvim https://github.com/neoclide/coc.nvim

Re: How Did Vim Become So Popular?

#403

Post by divan »

saberience wrote: post #357

Controversial comment here, but I would say Vim isn't popular at all. I would say instead, Vim advocates are incredibly vocal (a bit like Vegans and Crossfitters) and won't hesitate to talk about it at all times. I've been engineering now since 2002 so approaching 20 years and sure, every office has one guy who's the "hardcore" Vim guy. Everyone else in the office uses Visual Studio or VSCode, Atom, Sublime, IntelliJ…

Most vegans are actually quite quiet about it, so it’s a sort of survivorship bias, where you simply have no way to find out how many non vocal vim users out there :)

Re: How Did Vim Become So Popular?

#404

Post by School-Cotton »

alboy wrote: post #346
auggierose wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. It's like when somebody wants to learn how to fly, people tell them first to learn how to run really fast.

Nowadays Vim isn't just Vim the text editor but rather a specification for text manipulation. All of the popular IDEs have Vim plugins and the benefits of learning both are perfectly additive.

I think your timeline is inverted. vi-style text manipulation has been a thing long before Vim.

Re: How Did Vim Become So Popular?

#405

Post by Bnshsysjab »

psychoslave wrote: post #390
saberience wrote: post #357

Controversial comment here, but I would say Vim isn't popular at all. I would say instead, Vim advocates are incredibly vocal (a bit like Vegans and Crossfitters) and won't hesitate to talk about it at all times. I've been engineering now since 2002 so approaching 20 years and sure, every office has one guy who's the "hardcore" Vim guy. Everyone else in the office uses Visual Studio or VSCode, Atom, Sublime, IntelliJ…

In my experience, after University, I never see team members extensively dispute on this topic. I have a strong preference for Vim, but if other are fine with other tools, that's nice. We can possibly show each other how we manage things differently. It's not like Vim is perfect, and even taken the sharp learning curve apart, there are many things that are not ideal. But so are other tools. I tried some IDE here and…

> there are many things that are not ideal

I’ve never used vim, mind sharing what it’s weaknesses are?

Re: How Did Vim Become So Popular?

#406

Post by boomlinde »

kevarh wrote: post #31

Vi (and ed) are the only text editors required to be included in the POSIX spec. A base Unix (and most Linux) installs will have some version of vi or vim installed by default. If I'm working on someone else's box this pretty much guarantees I can edit files with my basic vi knowledge without having to install a different editor.

Vi is not strictly required; only if POSIX2_UPE and POSIX2_CHAR_TERM are defined.

Re: How Did Vim Become So Popular?

#407

Post by matvore »

dannycastonguay wrote: post #68
blinding-streak wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hated Vi at first. Absolutely loathed it. I was all about emacs. But I gave vi another shot, and I'm so glad I did. The learning curve can be steep, and it's really unintuitive at first (or it was for me). But once it clicks a little bit, and you settle in.. Wow. I felt way more productive using it than any other editor.

(Helpful tip) map caps lock to escape: https://vim.fandom.com/wiki/Avoid_the_escape_key

I still use caps lock since I regularly code in POSIX shell, C, C++, and Perl, which all have naming conventions that use all-caps names.

Also, as a VIM user, I only have to use Alt when I’m dealing with GUI apps, which is definitely common, but a time when I don’t mind moving my hands around.

So for me, Esc is Alt. Alt is caps lock. And of course caps lock is Esc.

And I swap Super key and Control, since the Super key is easier to press with my palm on my ergonomic keyboard. And Ctrl does have a lot of uses in Vim.

I also map the Windows Menu key (not the Super key, but the other one which is used for showing context menus) To underscore. That helps me type C identifiers with multiple words in them. This one remapping is a huge benefit, almost as important as mapping caps lock to Esc.

Re: How Did Vim Become So Popular?

#408

Post by war1025 »

not_kurt_godel wrote: post #241
war1025 wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been using vim for ~8 years now as my editor at work. I don't even use the "fancy" movements that everyone always brags about. It's still way more convenient to move around in than any other editor I've used. I don't know where I saw it, but the idea that "Code exists to be read" really resonates with me. I don't care how fast I can crank out code. I care about how efficiently I can hop around from place to plac…

This just sounds like a nightmare to me. I can't stand it when I have a terminal program with an unseeable list of files/panes that have to be opaquely navigated through. I very much want to be one of those vim/emacs ninjas but I just don't see how this is more ergonomic than Jetbrains where any file - not just 'open' ones - is readily available with all sorts of search methods with a single shortcut. And then I can…

> I just don't see how this is more ergonomic than Jetbrains where any file - not just 'open' ones - is readily available with all sorts of search methods with a single shortcut.

I would guess the difference is that I use a separate terminal window for all of that stuff. I have my desktop split into three main workspaces. The first has my terminal, the second my browser, the third my editor. I have two more workspaces just in case, but they rarely get used. I have shortcuts set up to hop between workspaces using ``.

If I want to track through where something is used or defined, `git grep` usually gets me what I want. From there, if there is a file I want to look at, I use my shortcut `go ` to open it. This used to be an alias for `gnome-open`, but a couple years ago they switched it to `xdg-open` . It opens the file with whatever program would open it when opening it from the file browser, which for any text file is my vim instance over in workspace 3.

I don't pay much attention to which files are open or not. Usually I build up a working set of files I care about pretty quickly and then I can hop between them from within vim. Otherwise I can easily go back over to my terminal and open it by name directly.

It may not be for you, but it's far from a nightmare in my experience.

Re: How Did Vim Become So Popular?

#409

Post by me_me_me »

Bnshsysjab wrote: post #405
psychoslave wrote: post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience, after University, I never see team members extensively dispute on this topic. I have a strong preference for Vim, but if other are fine with other tools, that's nice. We can possibly show each other how we manage things differently. It's not like Vim is perfect, and even taken the sharp learning curve apart, there are many things that are not ideal. But so are other tools. I tried some IDE here and…

> there are many things that are not ideal I’ve never used vim, mind sharing what it’s weaknesses are?

Code browsing and inspection is somewhat hampered by the fact its CLI.

I use ctags and macros to move around code but its not always perfect.

But then again there are many things I dislike in modern IDEs, I don't think there is a ideal solution, just like there is no one language to solve all problems.

Re: How Did Vim Become So Popular?

#410

Post by 488643689 »

squiggleblaz wrote: post #400
saberience wrote: post #357

Controversial comment here, but I would say Vim isn't popular at all. I would say instead, Vim advocates are incredibly vocal (a bit like Vegans and Crossfitters) and won't hesitate to talk about it at all times. I've been engineering now since 2002 so approaching 20 years and sure, every office has one guy who's the "hardcore" Vim guy. Everyone else in the office uses Visual Studio or VSCode, Atom, Sublime, IntelliJ…

Almost every editor allows you to interact with it as though it's Vim. But most editors don't allow you to interact with them as though they're any other editor. I think that's a point in Vim's favor? (I certainly don't use Vim for most of my coding. It's not good enough. But I do use Vi keybindings in VSCode, Visual Studio and PhpStorm depending on what language I'm using. I'm not particular enamored of VSCode eithe…

This. I just want hjkl and dd in every editor, but I don't use any other vim idiom often, and things like multiple cursors or alt+up/down move lines are the editor's fancy features I rely on most. (Sadly the VS Code vim plugin is broken all the time)

But hjkl I need even in my webbrowser. (In Thunderbird I've send many mails to junk by accident.)

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