Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

20 Years of Vim

contextualize.ai

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 81 posts

Re: 20 Years of Vim

#51

Post by loeg »

rob74 wrote: post #47
rangerelf wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of all those are gui based, when running a small Slackware setup without X none of those are available.

You might be surprised to learn that the original version of Vim (on the Amiga: https://www.reddit.com/r/amiga/comments/l5j53m/the_text_edit... ) was a GUI based application! Ok, it didn't have much in the way of an actual GUI, but it ran in a window which wasn't the shell/CLI window. I guess the actual reason why Vim is a console application on Linux is the lack of a "standard" GUI framework.

> I guess the actual reason why Vim is a console application on Linux is the lack of a "standard" GUI framework.

gvim (for GTK/Gnome) is an official part of vim!

Re: 20 Years of Vim

#52

Post by loeg »

eimrine wrote: post #46
loeg wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're all GUIs. Most people using computers in the late 2000s were using GUIs, not X-less Slackware. You asked what "normal" was -- this is normal.

Using GUI doesn't mean not using CLI.

This is not responsive to my comments.

Re: 20 Years of Vim

#53

Post by [deleted] »

mekster wrote: post #17
mpereira wrote: post #2

I used data from the Vim git repository to create an annotated chart of some of the main moments in the last 20 years of Vim development. Vim was the first text editor I've ever used (back in 2008), and it shaped the way I interact with computers forever. I'm grateful to all maintainers, and to Bram for creating it and shepherding it through all these decades. The annotations are interactive, so if you hover them you…

> Vim was the first text editor I've ever used (back in 2008) How could anyone skip any other more "normal" editors and jump right into Vim?

[deleted]

Re: 20 Years of Vim

#54

Post by xwdv »

Eddygandr wrote: post #50
bee_rider wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I bet you are right. But, I also think there’s enough leeway in the idea of “using a tool” to not be surprised that somebody doesn’t count a one-off use of notepad. And I think there must exist at least some people who really never used notepad. Nowadays I only assume someone between, like, 30 and 50 will inherently have to have used Windows at some point. Outside that range, you might get graybeards who were around…

Do you really think people younger than 30 won’t be using Windows in school or at home?

They will use it, but they don’t know it’s Windows or what an OS is. They’ll just say it’s a Microsoft computer or PC. Or “not Apple”. Maybe even Android.

Re: 20 Years of Vim

#55

Post by xwdv »

pawelduda wrote: post #26
Icathian wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder why that is. Just a bigger tent, with some of the benefits being committed back to vim? More pressure to bring in features from neovim pushing the pace faster? I'd be curious to hear an explanation if anyone has one.

IIRC there was pushback from vim devs to implement async, so neovim did it. Shortly after async also made it to vim

Just goes to show when devs push back, push harder.

Re: 20 Years of Vim

#56

Post by bluenose69 »

zabzonk wrote: post #22

for me, it is more like "40+ years of vi". vim is simply the best version of all of the vi-based editors that i have used, across many platforms. vim is brilliant (and i am very sad to hear of the author's death), but i think we really owe it all to bill joy.

Same for me: vi (later vim, later neovim) since the late 1970s. I used ed in the early days, too, and that may be why I love the fact that vi* lets me type ":" to do powerful things.

Re: 20 Years of Vim

#57

Post by orhmeh09 »

pmoriarty wrote: post #42
rangerelf wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Vim in '95 was a breath of fresh air: improved feature set over plain vi and still zippy.

There were a bunch of other vi alternatives back in that day. vim was just the one that wound up becoming the most popular. nvi and vile were two names that spring to mind, but I know there were others. Looks like vile itself started in 1992: https://invisible-island.net/vile/

nvi came standard on FreeBSD at least through 5.x, iirc.

Re: 20 Years of Vim

#58

Post by pydave »

kazinator wrote: post #45

Vim goes back to 1988, publicly released in 1991. I've been using it for 29 years now. The last 20 years don't mean anything; the Vim codebase is too much of a dumpster fire for anything significant to happen in that time span. They had to fork an entire parallel command set to implement "location lists" (new in Vim 7, I think) which are exactly like the "quickfix list". Most of the difference are that location list…

> Your keybinding to go to the next quickfix item doesn't work in a location list because it uses :cn^M, but the location list wants :ln^M or whatever.

Navigating quickfix and location lists is global, so a single common command wouldn't make sense (you can use `:cn` from any window -- even if the quickfix is not visible). However, you could use a `` map to use the same key to navigate within loclist/quickfire windows.

> The only explanation for this ridiculous state of affairs must be that it was too difficult to extend quickfix lists to do the things that location lists do.

Their entire concept is to be what quickfix isn't: instead of a global list, it's a list that's tied to a window. I can't think of features that a loclists have but quickfix doesn't unrelated to their nonglobal nature.

I can't claim vim's code is easy to understand, but this is not a fair complaint.

Re: 20 Years of Vim

#59

Post by lachlan_gray »

kazinator wrote: post #45

Vim goes back to 1988, publicly released in 1991. I've been using it for 29 years now. The last 20 years don't mean anything; the Vim codebase is too much of a dumpster fire for anything significant to happen in that time span. They had to fork an entire parallel command set to implement "location lists" (new in Vim 7, I think) which are exactly like the "quickfix list". Most of the difference are that location list…

You could maybe switch to a block cursor when you’re in visual mode with

let &t_SI = "\e[6 q" and

let &t_EI = "\e[2 q"

in some auto commands to sort of address this

Re: 20 Years of Vim

#60

Post by IshKebab »

rangerelf wrote: post #38
loeg wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Notepad++ (Windows, 2003) / gedit (GNOME, 1998) / kwrite/kate (KDE, 2001) all existed in 2008 and are totally fine basic text editors for source code. I remember editing PHP in a more obscure editor (SciTE, 1999) on Windows in the early 2000s.

Most of all those are gui based, when running a small Slackware setup without X none of those are available.

How many people's first experience of computers is a small Slackware setup without X? This thread is hilarious.
Post reply on HN