How Did Vim Become So Popular? • Hacker News Board

Re: How Did Vim Become So Popular?

#421

Post by walleeee » Wed, Jul 01, 2020, 1:38 PM UTC

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…

> I would say Vim isn't popular at all.

The fact that most popular editors and IDEs (every one you mention) have VI/VIM plugins suggests otherwise.

It's (usually) not the editor itself that people find appealing. It's the key bindings. It's the fact that you can navigate around a file without reaching for the mouse.

Re: How Did Vim Become So Popular?

#422

Post by slim » Wed, Jul 01, 2020, 1:42 PM UTC

Lio wrote: post #276

slim wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You may be using vim wrong. Good for you if you like it that way

You're going to have to explain that one because I generally switch back to command mode after every edit so I use ctrl-[ a lot. I'd be VERY interested to hear why that's wrong and what you do differently.

my reasoning was : you could have mapped caps lock to ESC but you did not. So maybe you are using CTRL too much (CTRL-V maybe?) which is not the best way to use vim.

Re: How Did Vim Become So Popular?

#423

Post by dleslie » Wed, Jul 01, 2020, 1:46 PM UTC

reactchain wrote: post #171

dleslie wrote: post #156

I used Vi, and then Vim, for a good 15y before I switched to Emacs. I made the switch because I had heard that Emacs let you manipulate your buffers with lisp as one would any other data in a programming language. I find I only really do that when using Org Mode or REST mode, but I'm still glad that I made the switch. The editor is ... mine. Mine in a way that a professional's tool should be an extension of themself.…

> The editor is ... mine One of the things I like most about vim is that you can use it on just about any remote machine, and even if you don't have your own vimrc the default editor is still really powerful.

Tramp mode lets me do that with Emacs, and I get to keep my custom environment.

Re: How Did Vim Become So Popular?

#424

Post by mumblemumble » Wed, Jul 01, 2020, 1:46 PM UTC

tralarpa wrote: post #417

me_me_me wrote: post #409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Code browsing and inspection is somewhat hampered by the fact its CLI. That's interesting because code browsing and inspection are by far the most important reason why I use a modern IDE. I tolerate all their weaknesses (slow, high memory consumption, errors after updates, etc.) because of this. I am surprised that somebody would say "I am using editor XYZ despite its weaknesses in code browsing and inspection".

It's always seemed to me that vim and other lightweight editors are most popular among people who are working in dynamic and functional languages, and heavyweight IDEs are most popular among people who are working in big, static, enterprisey OO languages like C++, Java and C#.

I don't think that's just a coincidence.

Re: How Did Vim Become So Popular?

#425

Post by sqrt17 » Wed, Jul 01, 2020, 1:53 PM UTC

dkns wrote: post #279

the_jeremy wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am also surprised by this. What are you basing it on? For arbitrarily comparable online communities, it looks like emacs.stackexchange.com is twice as active as vi.stackexchange.com

Stack Overflow survey ( https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2019#development-e... ) has Vim at ~25% while Emacs is at 4.5%.

it also has notepad++ at 30.5% - I've seen one or two people who would use notepad++ when nothing else is available, but I don't think many people have it as their primary IDE.

Also, if you sum up all the JetBrains products (which you can get as IntelliJ Ultimate if you shell out the money), you land in the vicinity of 63% (not vim-related but a neat fact)

Re: How Did Vim Become So Popular?

#426

Post by dhagz » Wed, Jul 01, 2020, 1:53 PM UTC

tralarpa wrote: post #417

me_me_me wrote: post #409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Code browsing and inspection is somewhat hampered by the fact its CLI. That's interesting because code browsing and inspection are by far the most important reason why I use a modern IDE. I tolerate all their weaknesses (slow, high memory consumption, errors after updates, etc.) because of this. I am surprised that somebody would say "I am using editor XYZ despite its weaknesses in code browsing and inspection".

What Vim lacks in browsing/inspecting code it makes up for with the speed you can make edits - using motions and macros can make tedious code changes nearly effortless.

So it depends on what you value more.

Re: How Did Vim Become So Popular?

#427

Post by hhmc » Wed, Jul 01, 2020, 1:55 PM UTC

saberience wrote: post #360

rauhl wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I know I'm going against the popular opinion here, but I have never observed anyone using either Vim or Emacs to outperform a competent IDE user, especially Visual Studio or IntelliJ. > I mean sure, if you think IDEs are just slow, expensive text editors with fewer keyboard shortcuts, then you'll be disappointed, but features like "navigate to any symbol by prefix", "find all usages" helm-projectile-ag (which I hav…

Emacs looks like shit though, requires tons of time requiring to set it up and it still won't have the same insane functionality that Visual Studio does. Are you really trying to compare the two things? If you are then I would suggest it's because you haven't tried VS recently and realized the huge functionality it has... I mean, does Emacs have a whole UI for handling unit tests which can be made to run automaticall…

> they accessible, easy to use, and "just work."

..unless you happen to not be on Windows.

Re: How Did Vim Become So Popular?

#428

Post by Lambdanaut » Wed, Jul 01, 2020, 1:57 PM UTC

488643689 wrote: post #410

squiggleblaz wrote: post #400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)

Pretty much this. I'm learning Godot and love almost everything about it over Unity... except that its IDE doesn't have a vim-mode, which is ALMOST a deal-breaker.

Re: How Did Vim Become So Popular?

#429

Post by alboy » Wed, Jul 01, 2020, 1:58 PM UTC

School-Cotton wrote: post #404

alboy wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't think I've claimed otherwise? Still, in my timeline those plugins aren't called IdeaEd or VsEm.

Re: How Did Vim Become So Popular?

#430

Post by badhombres » Wed, Jul 01, 2020, 2:00 PM UTC

tralarpa wrote: post #417

me_me_me wrote: post #409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Code browsing and inspection is somewhat hampered by the fact its CLI. That's interesting because code browsing and inspection are by far the most important reason why I use a modern IDE. I tolerate all their weaknesses (slow, high memory consumption, errors after updates, etc.) because of this. I am surprised that somebody would say "I am using editor XYZ despite its weaknesses in code browsing and inspection".

Vanilla Vim I would agree is not good for code browsing and inspection, but two things I've noticed when coding with Vim:

1. Code Browsing is an initial, one time cost when learning the code base. After you learn the code base, I've needed this ability much less.

2. Adding plugins like NERDTree and fzf/ripgrep have helped make code browsing much easier in Vim. The downside to this is that if you're new to Vim, you need to learn how to use these plugins on top of learning how to Vim. So it's just more to learn. But you can also think of this as another one time cost in general.