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Vis: A Vim-Like Text Editor

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Re: Vis: A Vim-Like Text Editor

#71

Post by gcr »

sebastic wrote: post #46

You won't do it. You're too lazy and there is no immediate motivation for doing something like that.

(a meta-comment: please don't call people 'lazy' on hackernews.

We're all here specifically because we enjoy thinking about the tools we use.

It's like telling an artist not to paint a picture because they won't ever be able to capture the scene they want in the right way, or telling a student to they shouldn't bother trying their homework because they won't get every question right.)

Re: Vis: A Vim-Like Text Editor

#72

Post by adrusi »

benbenolson wrote: post #59
mbrock wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can we please try to stop talking about this specific language ecosystem as an awful deplorable hell hole or whatever?

It's not node.js that's horrible: it's great for what it does (web development). When taken out of that use case, it's awful, because it's simply not meant to do systems programming or to make local applications. It's kind of like people who knock Perl: it's made specifically for text parsing, nothing more, and too many people use it for much more. Since it's not meant for more complex things, it fails, understandabl…

> It's kind of like people who knock Perl: it's made specifically for text parsing, nothing more, and too many people use it for much more.

Perl 1 and 2 I think really were specifically for test processing, but it is neither widely regarded as a text processing language by its users, nor would someone learning the language notice that it's particularly geared toward text processing. Perl is hated on because it's a language that turned the dynamic up to eleven and embraces multiple ways of doi g something which causes ecosystem fragmentation, and because perl 5 predates a lot of now-widespread conveniences.

Re: Vis: A Vim-Like Text Editor

#73

Post by pka »

kromem wrote: post #56
irremediable wrote: post #38

One of these days, I'm going to sit down and try out this, emacs-evil, and neovim. Side-by-side. Need to figure out which one I like most.

I just switched from vim to neovim to evil. I can't see myself ever going back. (Neovim was basically just vim with async support, and terminals, but as a tmux user, that didn't really grab my attention). There's a lot more polish in the integrations for emacs than vim, likely as a result of literally everything in the editor being a function call that can be hooked into. The only thing I miss is solid tab functional…

I tried out evil some time ago, and while it was very nice, it glitched out regularly - I would (mis)type a key combination and suddenly I'm dropped to Emacs and feel completely lost. Has this happened to you?

On a side note, one of those days I'll just have to drop everything for 2 weeks and just learn Emacs.

Re: Vis: A Vim-Like Text Editor

#74

Post by mbrock »

benbenolson wrote: post #59
mbrock wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can we please try to stop talking about this specific language ecosystem as an awful deplorable hell hole or whatever?

It's not node.js that's horrible: it's great for what it does (web development). When taken out of that use case, it's awful, because it's simply not meant to do systems programming or to make local applications. It's kind of like people who knock Perl: it's made specifically for text parsing, nothing more, and too many people use it for much more. Since it's not meant for more complex things, it fails, understandabl…

I think that's still a lot of blanket judgments that programmers who can and have built other things with Node than web things, and with Perl than text monging tools, have to disagree with.

Node, for example, is a high-performing and fast-starting interpreter for a dynamic language with a base runtime that includes good tools for building network servers, system utilities, etc. There are many, many uses for which it's just great.

So when you say that Node is "awful" for anything except "web development" it's just inviting disagreement. Why make this kind of strong value judgment about a general purpose tool?

Re: Vis: A Vim-Like Text Editor

#75

Post by rauljara »

aoloe wrote: post #61
loudmax wrote: post #50

Kudos to the developers for listing non goals. Too many software projects lose focus and become bloated because they take on features that are secondary to the main purpose. Projects may refrain from listing non goals for fear of excluding people who may want some of those features. And looking at the list, there are some pretty nice features excluded. For example network support, or editing compressed or tar files.…

concerning vimdiff: one of the goal is to get vis to also work in server mode and be embeddable. it should then be possible to create a diff tool that uses vis for the editing.

That sounds fantastic.

Very often I find myself editing outside of vim and wishing vim style editing were there. Recreating optional vim key bindings for every app that has text is clearly not realistic. Getting as many things inside of vim as possible is just tantalizing enough that a lot of people (myself included) try it. It's better than nothing, but results in some very hacked together tools.

Embedding vim (or in this case, vis) inside of other things would be a much better solution.

Re: Vis: A Vim-Like Text Editor

#76

Post by burkaman »

benbenolson wrote: post #59
mbrock wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can we please try to stop talking about this specific language ecosystem as an awful deplorable hell hole or whatever?

It's not node.js that's horrible: it's great for what it does (web development). When taken out of that use case, it's awful, because it's simply not meant to do systems programming or to make local applications. It's kind of like people who knock Perl: it's made specifically for text parsing, nothing more, and too many people use it for much more. Since it's not meant for more complex things, it fails, understandabl…

"I think what the comment was trying to point out"

It's easy to understand what the comment was trying to point out, because there are similar comments in ~80% of HN discussions. That's the issue.

Re: Vis: A Vim-Like Text Editor

#77

Post by cyphar »

ageofwant wrote: post #29

Excellent. The more vim the better. I would like to see many of the core vim patterns replicated in other editors: - modal over chords - text objects - the vim "language" which ties it together - all the other good stuff, did I mention text objects ? There is a reason vim has more users today then ever before: once you learn the deceptively simple language you can have deep conversations with your editor.

I actually like the fact that NeoVim is working on VimL to Lua translation so you can write plugins in Lua. Emacs has had LISP from the beginning. Maybe we can soon fight back with a real programming language.

Re: Vis: A Vim-Like Text Editor

#79

Post by adrusi »

pka wrote: post #69
benbenolson wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not node.js that's horrible: it's great for what it does (web development). When taken out of that use case, it's awful, because it's simply not meant to do systems programming or to make local applications. It's kind of like people who knock Perl: it's made specifically for text parsing, nothing more, and too many people use it for much more. Since it's not meant for more complex things, it fails, understandabl…

That's because it's a waste of time to write a program in a primitive language like C when you don't end-of-the-world absolutely need performance/hard realtime guarantees; even then it's a better idea to only write the 5% performance-critical parts in C/asm and the rest in a saner high-level language. C is definitely the wrong choice for a complex data-structure processing piece of software like a text editor. Even t…

There are more concerns than performance. The choice of C here is a philosophical one. Vis seems to come from the same school of thought as the Suckless projects, where the unix design principles are worshipped. People who are interested in that kind of stuff are also usually fans of writing in C, simply because C is the most Unix of languages: Makefiles control the build, which allows trivial integration of external tools into the build process, function names match 1:1 with the labels in the produced object files, no name mangling, documentation comes in man pages.

But really, a text editor is something C is quite well suited to. Javascript wouldn't bring much to the table, and you'd have to jump through hoops for something like mmap.

Re: Vis: A Vim-Like Text Editor

#80

Post by jdc0589 »

benbenolson wrote: post #59
mbrock wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can we please try to stop talking about this specific language ecosystem as an awful deplorable hell hole or whatever?

It's not node.js that's horrible: it's great for what it does (web development). When taken out of that use case, it's awful, because it's simply not meant to do systems programming or to make local applications. It's kind of like people who knock Perl: it's made specifically for text parsing, nothing more, and too many people use it for much more. Since it's not meant for more complex things, it fails, understandabl…

I still like node for writing utility CLIs as well, which I find myself doing A LOT these days. To be totally fair, that's mainly because of the excellent feature rich CLI modules out there (yargs, commander, etc...); but, I've found I want my CLI utilities to be in an interpreted language, and node just fits the bill pretty well for that.
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