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How Did Vim Become So Popular?

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Re: How Did Vim Become So Popular?

#461

Post by oalae5niMiel7qu »

eddieoz wrote: post #363
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 think they are just being posers. When we compare the efficiency of debugging (p. ex.) it is clear who can find the problem fast. Today if I'm conducting an interview and the someone tries to convince me he/she is a good programmer and just use vi/vim, I need to rethink my decision because it can compromise the whole project. I'm not saying they are not good, but having the capability of fast debugging and solving…

IDEs are great for the early stages of a project, but once it hits production, this is the only debugging flow that has ever worked for me:

1. Read the logs.

2. Read the code that produced the logs.

Re: How Did Vim Become So Popular?

#462

Post by war1025 »

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.

I think it's highly industry and probably project dependent.

If company policy is that "we use X", then probably you're not going to have many people stray from that. The bigger the organization, the more likely you are to have strict guidelines in place like that.

I would guess people on Windows are also less likely to reach for Vim than any of the many other alternatives. If you're using Linux, you probably have a different view on the world to begin with, and are more likely to go with vim over whatever is the "new hot editor". I've heard Mac users like to reach for XCode, but I don't actually know many developers outside of work, and none of them use Macs, so I don't know.

Re: How Did Vim Become So Popular?

#463

Post by war1025 »

jrumbut wrote: post #88
dannycastonguay wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I still get some mileage out of my caps lock key and use "jj" and use paste mode if I have to insert an uncommon string with "jj" in it. Usually pasting it anyway.

I tried that `jj` or `jk` thing for a while and it just did not click with me at all.

I tried it because I was having a bunch of wrist pain. The actual solution to my wrist pain was easy: Don't code on a laptop keyboard. The ergonomics are terrible.

Re: How Did Vim Become So Popular?

#464

Post by _blz2 »

brabel wrote: post #228
pengaru wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's too many little things to mention, they do all add up to be quite significant in the course of programming. Here's a tiny sample of some stuff I use constantly: Move cursor forward word at a time: w ignoring punctuation: W reverse: b B Move cursor to next occurrence of character Z: fZ reverse: FZ Delete forward to next occurrence of character Z: dfZ reverse: dFZ Change forward to next occurrence of character…

Honestly, I can do almost all of these things with any standard editor as well, with standard shortcuts. The ones I can't do directly, I can do via Search/Replace functionality that is also standard in most modern editors. Your example about refactoring a function by using text editing capabilities is actually pretty bad unless you mean Vim can actually parse your programming language and perform the refactoring over…

The parent described only a fraction of what vim can do. The notion of text objects and combining them with plugins makes vim much more powerful. Even without plugins mastering vim makes writing code quite natural.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wlR5gYd6um0

Re: How Did Vim Become So Popular?

#465

Post by brabel »

Lio wrote: post #369
brabel wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am in this thread because this is not a thread about how Vim is great, it's a thread about how Vim became popular, which I honestly don't understand in a day and age where modes are completely unnecessary. I see lots of happy Vim users telling the rest of us how they are so happy with Vim and they can't understand how anyone can do anything without it... so I thought I should point out I feel extremely productive o…

So if I understand you correctly you're angry that people choose to work in a way that you think is unnecessary and that they're just doing it to show off. I can't speak for other vim users but I think it's pretty obvious to us how other users work without vim and we know you can be productive without it. Personally I make a point of not telling people to learn vim but equally I think, for example, not having a short…

To win what? This is not a contest or even a debate where one point of view may prevail... we're just expressing our opinions about Vim and its alternatives here. Obviously, if you like Vim, great! But it seems to me you're the emotional one if you find it necessary to question anyone pointing out they believe Vim is not a good tool at all (it promotes modals, which should have died as soon as they became unnecessary due to hardware improvements as they are objectively harder to use) and wondering why it's still somewhat popular.

Re: How Did Vim Become So Popular?

#466

Post by arvinsim »

doix wrote: post #355
jng wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

... and Jetbrains IDEs support a plugin called IdeaVIM that provides pretty solid vi/vim emulation.

IdeaVim is the uncanny value of vim for me. It's so close to being actual vim, but every now and then it does something unexpected and it completely throws me off. I recorded a macro to change shouldBe([true|false]) to shouldBe[True|False](). Pretty simple: qqf(ds(~$a() q But the vim-surround plugin emulation doesn't work properly with macros, so it'd get stuck and instead of just doing n@@ , I'd have to do n@@( , i.…

Some people are satisfied with the modal editing paradigm of Vim that they don't need its advanced features.

Re: How Did Vim Become So Popular?

#467

Post by vmchale »

> But what kept Vim in the loop is the compatibility with almost everything you can think about. Wherever you SSH today, you can start the Vim session, or at least Vi session.

Also the fact that it works over ssh. Emacs does too I think, but e.g. JQt and DrRacket do not!

Re: How Did Vim Become So Popular?

#468

Post by nice_byte »

1_player wrote: post #373
eddieoz wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think they are just being posers. When we compare the efficiency of debugging (p. ex.) it is clear who can find the problem fast. Today if I'm conducting an interview and the someone tries to convince me he/she is a good programmer and just use vi/vim, I need to rethink my decision because it can compromise the whole project. I'm not saying they are not good, but having the capability of fast debugging and solving…

I don't get it. Are you saying vim users are bad programmers and bad at debugging?

he's saying vim users are hampering themselves.

Re: How Did Vim Become So Popular?

#469

Post by nice_byte »

vim has stolen years of productivity from me. i've listened to loudmouthed vim advocates, tweaked my editor settings, played with plugins. but the problems that i needed to solve - code navigation, autocomplete, debugging - were all easily solved by switching to visual studio. nowadays i use vs with the vsvim extension (years of vim trauma have burned the key bindings into my muscle memory) and am much more productive with that setup than with the janky vim config from my uni days.

Re: How Did Vim Become So Popular?

#470

Post by maccard »

mmkos wrote: post #284
cyberdrunk wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IDE has syntactic understanding of your code, which allows you to navigate your whole codebase as if it's one big hypertext document (invalueable especially when learning new code). Also, the syntactic understanding allows you to do one-click fairly complex refactorings with guarantees that nothing will get broken (at least it works for sane languages, like Java. I don't know how well it works for C/C++, where prepro…

I have mainly used vim for development and I can navigate my codebase just as seamlessly with ctags-generated indexes. I'd agree on vim being of limited utility when it comes to automated refactoring (it's a text editor after all), but beyond changing the names or extracting functions what can an IDE do for you in this respect?

My build tool spat out a 700MB compile_commands.json file, which the C++ language server turned into 25k files. None of the language server implementations were able to process even a go to file on the code.

it takes about 15 minutes for Visual Studio (well, visual assist) to generate the index for the project, and then the navigation is instant. I've tried a few times over the last few years with various language server and clients, and my experience has been the same pretty much every time.

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