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Why I Still Use Vim

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Re: Why I Still Use Vim

#81

Post by primitivesuave »

Most people in CA prefer to drive a car rather than ride a bike. Bikes use far fewer resources to accomplish the same thing as a car (go from point A to B), but most people like to have the option of turning on the AC, playing music, and all the other add-ons that a car can bring to the experience.

I personally choose to bike, but if I started making charts about the relative energy consumption of the two, I'd reach a similarly obvious conclusion. If I used those charts to convince people to start biking, I doubt I'd be very successful, since people usually have strong preferences to one over the other.

One difference in this analogy is that cars pollute, whereas I couldn't care less how much memory your computer is using because it has practically zero impact on the environment or anyone other than yourself.

Re: Why I Still Use Vim

#82

Post by Klathmon »

nnq wrote: post #71
Klathmon wrote: post #6

These kinds of comparisons always seemed a bit silly to me. It's like complaining that opening a 6MB file in windows took over 3GB on my system! (ignoring that most of that is the OS getting ready to do other things, and enabling the OS to do things other than opening and reading a 6MB file). Yes, Atom isn't the most resource friendly editor out there, and nobody is claiming it is. But it is one of the more capable e…

Being electron/browser based is not and excuse for such horrific resource usage ... Visual Studio Code is also electron based and it's extremely lightweight (ram) and responsive on even the most underpowered machines I've ran it on. The problem is getting people that only have experience writing web apps to develop what is practically an IDE ... The good part is that this will teach frontend web developers a lot of t…

VS Code fairs quite similar to Atom in many tests in the linked article. But it does that by restricting what plugins can and can't do, and by integrating a large number of the functionality itself.

I prefer to have the choice of multiple plugins each with their own tradeoffs, so I sacrafice some speed for it, but that choice can more than make up for it in many cases.

And as for you claiming that web developers shouldn't be writing an IDE, feel free to contribute if you see any easy gains.

Re: Why I Still Use Vim

#83

Post by bigato »

willvarfar wrote: post #52

I recall the Turbo Pascal text-mode IDE that left enough space to actually run the programs you were developing. The machines had 640KB RAM, and I think the IDE was using perhaps as much as 100KB. I recall using fully-featured GUI IDEs like VB, VC++ etc on machines with whopping 64MB RAM, and having enough space left to actually run the programs you were developing. I have a laptop now with 16GB RAM. The other day I…

Great comment for historical perspective. But just out of curiosity, why did you need to edit a log file?

Re: Why I Still Use Vim

#84

Post by _pmf_ »

mugsie wrote: post #16
Klathmon wrote: post #6

These kinds of comparisons always seemed a bit silly to me. It's like complaining that opening a 6MB file in windows took over 3GB on my system! (ignoring that most of that is the OS getting ready to do other things, and enabling the OS to do things other than opening and reading a 6MB file). Yes, Atom isn't the most resource friendly editor out there, and nobody is claiming it is. But it is one of the more capable e…

Except that sublime does all of that, supports plugins written in python, and doesn't screen tear, and leaves me some RAM for other things

I wanted to agree with you and write a snide remark about Atom, but then I checked RAM usage of an empty Sublime Text 3 instance on 64 bit Linux, and it was at about 136 MB, so there's that.

Re: Why I Still Use Vim

#85

Post by jimktrains2 »

swaincreates wrote: post #64

Blah blah this is ridiculous! Electron is horrible... blah blah... who cares? My macbook runs this fine and Atom is nice, blah blah, I switched to VS Code and its kinda nice, blah blah I tried this and went back to sublime... blah blah :q

People without copious amounts of memory?

Re: Why I Still Use Vim

#86

Post by raulk »

Klathmon wrote: post #6

These kinds of comparisons always seemed a bit silly to me. It's like complaining that opening a 6MB file in windows took over 3GB on my system! (ignoring that most of that is the OS getting ready to do other things, and enabling the OS to do things other than opening and reading a 6MB file). Yes, Atom isn't the most resource friendly editor out there, and nobody is claiming it is. But it is one of the more capable e…

You're right in some of your comments, as is the author. At the end of the day, this kind of articles/outcry pushes the dev team to strive and shift focus to painpoints that may have not been a priority before (performance). I see it as a healthy sign in OSS communities.

Kinda like a hormetic stimulus: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hormesis

Re: Why I Still Use Vim

#87

Post by Matthias247 »

ceronman wrote: post #75

> Code requires a whopping 349 megabytes in order to open a 60 byte file. Atom comes in at 256 megabytes. Where Vim “only” needs 5 megabytes, which is still kind of high, but representative of an average configuration These numbers seem off. I just tested it and my VS Code uses 39MB of memory for loading a bunch of Python files and having a few plugins activated. Where are these numbers coming from? How was this test…

You need to be careful, because Code launches multiple subprocesses which you would all need to add up. I remember something around 250MB for basic file editing, which is fine for me.

Re: Why I Still Use Vim

#88

Post by sebastianconcpt »

I see large files as data to process instead of editing. Those sizes are unmanageable for editing. Doing an exceptional hack is fine, but normal workflow? If a file has more than 200 lines isn't time to think refactoring some component to aother file, and so on? Said that, I find Atom to be a good toot but also scandalous as pointed by the article. For me becomes a non-issue because I never find myself needing to edit such large files.

Re: Why I Still Use Vim

#89

Post by jimktrains2 »

tombh wrote: post #34
annabellish wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But then what's... the point? That vim has a rich and expressive language for text navigation and manipulation is the only thing that sets it apart from more modern competitors.

That was the part of the sentiment of the quote - the point is that Vim is notable for 2 distinct, but unfortunately inseparable, reasons; 1. Modal editing. 2. One of the most ubiquitous, lightweight, stable and extensible editors in existence. I just want there to be at least a semblance of a possibility to separate these 2 things.

Have you tried emacs?

Re: Why I Still Use Vim

#90

Post by [deleted] »

bigato wrote: post #74
Klathmon wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's ~850MB, and it's only at that level when using it outside it's intended purpose. Atom was not designed to open 6MB XML files. If that makes it worthless for you, that's okay, but for some of us it doesn't matter. I'm never going to open a 6MB XML file, I might open a 1MB JS file, but that is extremely rare. Earlier in the article, it shows that opening a 60 byte file only used 250MB, and that's more than reasona…

> Earlier in the article, it shows that opening a 60 byte file only used 250MB, and that's more than reasonable to me. Reading that this early in the morning made me feel like I woke up in a parallel universe.

[deleted]
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