I was hoping some of you would give good reasons not to use it. But now I have to go dedicate time to become fluent since it is clearly worth it.
How Did Vim Become So Popular?
61–70 of 507 posts
Re: How Did Vim Become So Popular?
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
Same here, and then i discovered EVIL, the vi layer for emacs. The best of all worlds: Vim text manipulation grammar over the emacs engine.
Alas, the emacs install base is fraction of vi/vim.
I've always assumed the opposite with how people say emacs is a nice OS and poor editor... What does Vim over emacs?
Re: How Did Vim Become So Popular?
#63System administrators started using it because it's one of the best non-GUI editors (along with emacs), so it had this mystique around it. Those who knew VIM/emacs were surely hackers! And so programmers picked up on that and using VIM/emacs is a sign that you're cool.
Re: How Did Vim Become So Popular?
#64in TRS-80 BASIC, you could go `EDIT 100` and bring up a line 100 in a line editor, vi sort of reminded me of that when I was learning it something like 25 years ago. It is still my main code editor.
25 years ago was 1995
Re: How Did Vim Become So Popular?
#65I started using emacs in the early 90s and got really into it during uni, studying CS a couple of years later. In mid 2000s I ended up in sysadmin work in a mixed Unix-environment (Tru64, AIX, Solaris, Linux) in a group where all other used (some Vi(m)-variant).
I tried to get work done with emacs but failed due to various special characters always getting mangled in different ways over different terminals on different platforms and after a couple of months I gave in and started using Vim instead.
I finally understood that Vim had two essential properties that other editors lacked in this case.
1) It works well in environments where special characters will get mangled in various ways over different platforms. As long as ESC works, vim will do the work just fine. 2) The modes makes it very reliable to use when you have to make specific operations in exact places in text-files. This alone should make it the goto editor for sysadmins where you often have to make just a few character changes to a configuration file and be sure you do not change anything else.
A third reason when starting the work was also that Vim came by default on all out platforms so we knew it existed there and it was a nightmare trying to get approval for extra packages to be installed, but the first two reasons are what keeps me coming back to Vim whenever I need to do some text-file surgery.
Re: How Did Vim Become So Popular?
#66Because one does not simply exit VIM.
Re: How Did Vim Become So Popular?
#67For me it is being able to efficiently navigate a file without leaving the home row (Gotta learn touch typing first). Once you understand the commands follow a composable grammar it is really like a superpower for dancing around text. „Go down 5 lines, move right two word, replace the contents of the brackets“. I don‘t use the actual editor all that often but have vim mode enabled in all my „real“ editors like VSCode…
If that was a genuine question, I have coworkers who just embraced their IDE shortcuts (IntelliJ and Eclipse can do all the things vim can with weirder shortcuts and no vim mode) or they use emacs / emacs-style shortcuts
Re: How Did Vim Become So Popular?
#68Speaking personally, I've been a professional developer for almost decade and even in my relatively short career I've seen a lot of technologies come and go. I was reluctantly roped into it by my first boss, an enthusiastic Vim advocate. And since, almost nothing else (save for maybe git) beat learning vim from a return on investment perspective. From the default mac OS installation to some old Fedora box that has no…
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
Re: How Did Vim Become So Popular?
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
Same here, and then i discovered EVIL, the vi layer for emacs. The best of all worlds: Vim text manipulation grammar over the emacs engine.
Alas, the emacs install base is fraction of vi/vim.
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
Re: How Did Vim Become So Popular?
#70In my opinion, the best feature of Vi(m) is its ubiquity.
Also, it is fast and reliable.
That said, I never bothered learning many commands, only the very basic ones, I spend much more time thinking than typing anyway and I always felt the productivity gains to be marginal.