[HN Gopher] How Did Vim Become So Popular?
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How Did Vim Become So Popular?
Author : nikolalsvk
Score : 30 points
Date : 2020-06-30 11:46 UTC (11 hours ago)
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(TXT) w3m dump (pragmaticpineapple.com)
| Spooky23 wrote:
| Back in ye olden tymes, you could count on some variant of it
| being everywhere. It's lightweight, ubiquitous, and powerful.
| It's way more powerful than default Windows tools.
|
| There's a steep curve, but if you can handle it and learn a
| couple of things (%s//g) being one of them, you'll get people
| hooked. Then the olds shame the young staff to use it.
|
| The muscle memory aspect is significant too. I'm a suit now, but
| can still work magic with Vi years later. The faculty at my
| college pushed emacs hard, but customizations are missing on
| foreign machines, and the key combos were too awkward on normal
| keyboards (for me) and the skills wore off.
| slim wrote:
| real answer : because redhat and debian had replaced elvis with
| vim as the default vi early on. I don't remember the exact drama,
| but maybe something to do with the license.
| enriquto wrote:
| elvis was great! The simple monocrhome color schemes were
| beautiful, and it had a snappiness (even on a 486 back then)
| that I'm still missing nowadays.
| codezero wrote:
| I know how I first encountered vi... it was probably 1994 or
| 1995... (Wiki looks like maybe 1994 was first intel release, so
| that tracks) - and I had only used Linux up to that point and had
| never really used an editor other than pico (now nano, which was
| the editor for the pine email client!).
|
| I thought playing with Solaris would be "cool" so I installed it
| and couldn't get it on my network because I needed to edit the
| /etc/resolv.conf to add host resolution, but there was no pico
| editor!
|
| I ended up digging into manual pages to figure out how to use
| vim, and over the course of getting the system set up I got
| pretty comfortable with a lot of the patterns vim let me make
| faster, they are mostly things I might run in a shell like grep
| or awk, but I can do it without shelling out, so that was a
| bonus.
|
| edited: now that I think of it, I bet I was not using vim, just
| vi - so the relevance to this article might not be quite on.
| kevarh wrote:
| Vi (and ed) are the only text editors required to be included in
| the POSIX spec. A base Unix (and most Linux) installs will have
| some version of vi or vim installed by default.
|
| If I'm working on someone else's box this pretty much guarantees
| I can edit files with my basic vi knowledge without having to
| install a different editor.
| bsdz wrote:
| Something I've come to rediscover is how good vi/vim is on a slow
| network connection. Our sharp networking team route me from
| London to Sydney so I can remote back to my London PC.
|
| Seeing what you type several seconds after you typed it is
| reminiscent of the 90s and dial up connections.
|
| Having familiar vi keybindings in so many applications these days
| has been a productivity saver.
| microtherion wrote:
| One editor which used to be great at this is sam, which was
| explicitly designed to work across slow links, by being split
| into a frontend running locally, and a backend being run on the
| target host: http://sam.cat-v.org
| tenebrisalietum wrote:
| Disappointed the article went straight from punch cards to video
| terminals without mentioning teletypes.
|
| > Having that thing show up on computers in those days was pretty
| tricky, and some considered it a resource hog.
|
| Well in the 60's and 70's, you didn't necessarily even have a
| display, you might be using a physical teletype. `ed` is built
| for that.
|
| Even when you had a display, it could be slow. The VT05 from
| 1970, only went up to 2400 baud. And if you were using a modem
| back then I think you were definitely most likely connected at
| 300 baud or below.
| reaperducer wrote:
| Or the display might be a single line of 16-segment LEDs for
| interacting with the machine, and "output" was on paper.
| Another reason to keep the visuals to a minimum.
| amelius wrote:
| > What I am trying to say that vim is an effort of over half a
| century of good idea accumulation, putting lots of effort into
| being backward compatible.
|
| I wonder what Vi(m) would be like if it were redesigned from
| scratch.
| haberman wrote:
| I hear good things about https://kakoune.org/. But I have 20
| years of muscle memory for vi keybindings, and they're well-
| established enough that you can even use them in other editors
| like VSCode. So I'm wary of training my fingers to do something
| else that only works in one editor.
| StephenAmar wrote:
| Isn't that what neovim is trying to do?
| BlackFingolfin wrote:
| AFAIK it still tries to stay mostly compatible with regards
| to how it is controlled, doesn't it? So while the internals
| are perhaps new, the frontend is not.
|
| But I think Kakoune https://kakoune.org would fit the bill
| chongli wrote:
| Kakoune is definitely an attempt at redoing the vim concept
| from scratch. I spent a few weeks trying it out and
| attempting to get used to it. Ultimately, I came away from
| it feeling disappointed.
|
| I think the basic premise of multiple cursors editing as a
| preferred model (which is what Kakoune does) is flawed.
| Why? Because large-scale scale changes are the exception,
| not the rule. By emphasizing multiple cursors, Kakoune
| actively makes it harder to do the normal thing people do
| in a text editor: jump around a file and make specific
| edits to individual lines. Instead, a bunch of normal
| movement commands (such as forward and backward search)
| leave extra cursors in your wake, forcing you to press an
| extra key to dismiss them otherwise you'll get erroneous
| edits that might not even be visible from where you are in
| the buffer. This is not a good thing.
|
| The other basic premise that Kakoune addresses (that vim
| commands lack visual feedback) is not even an issue for
| experienced vim users who type commands quickly from muscle
| memory. The edits happen when the command finishes and you
| don't get distracted by intermediate results. For global
| substitution, you can always append the `c` flag to add a
| confirmation prompt to each substitution. That alone
| obviates much of the motivation for Kakoune's model.
| smabie wrote:
| Probably something like spacemacs.
| smitty1e wrote:
| Emacs + vim really are the peanut butter and chocolate of
| getting stuff done.
| smabie wrote:
| I really want to give spacemacs a try, but unfortunately
| I've just been using traditional emacs for far too long. vi
| does seem to have a much better editing model than emacs.
| The tools Emacs has for buffer navigation and editing have
| always struct me as incredibly primitive.
| qroshan wrote:
| If you like emacs, switch to doom emacs. spacemacs
| development is almost dead
| boogies wrote:
| I've been loving vis1, a hybrid between traditional vi and
| sam2, a text editor Rob Pike designed from close to scratch.
|
| (Edit) I learned vim a little bit over a year ago, switched to
| neovim soon after, tried kakuone for a few days and didn't like
| losing so much muscle memory because of the verb-noun order
| reversal, switched to vis a few months ago and don't plan to
| switch back.
|
| 1: https://github.com/martanne/vis 2:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_(text_editor),
| http://sam.cat-v.org/
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| vis comes to mind (https://github.com/martanne/vis), although
| perhaps something even more aggressively plugin-first would be
| even better
| okasaki wrote:
| Probably because it was the default editor in a bunch of Linux
| distributions.
| luxurytent wrote:
| Isn't Pico the usual default?
| tingletech wrote:
| on more consumer grade distros I've had to `export EDITOR=vi`
| before to get vi to come up for things like `crontab -e` and
| for `git` messages. But it is the default on most systems
| I've come across personally.
| wadkar wrote:
| I have seen nano to be the default for most debian and fedora
| derived distributions from early 2000s. Not sure if things
| changed in late teens. Or maybe I am misremembering things.
| asveikau wrote:
| And that because vi was present and popular on commercial Unix.
| duckfruit wrote:
| Speaking 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 not been patched since the early
| 2000s, Vim (or its simpler brother Vi) has always been there!
|
| And once I got used to it, I couldn't really imagine using
| computers any other way. I'd go so far as to say that the 'home
| row' concept of vim is the ergonomic ideal of keyboard based
| computing, and I now try to mimic that behavior everywhere -- the
| vimium extension in chrome, various vim plugins for vs code and
| sublime etc. If you're on the fence, I'd urge you to give in!
| pphysch wrote:
| It was there, and it was (and still is) good enough.
| vowelless wrote:
| Vim (bindings/modality - ESC mapped to CAPS) are good for my
| hands. I don't get tired. Before vim my hands would get tired
| after some time. Now it feels like I can keep going forever.
|
| Now I use vim for everything and it's bindings in my browser,
| email client, todo list app, etc.
| aarong11 wrote:
| Because nobody knows how to quit
| TenJack wrote:
| Ah early web development nostalgia.
| tingletech wrote:
| in 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.
| mtippett wrote:
| We also need to understand that a subset of vi features is part
| of the POSIX standard, so any POSIX system will need to have
| "vi". vim is the logical choice there.
|
| So as a result vim has become the reference implementation for
| the POSIX vi featureset.
| catalogia wrote:
| All of vi is specified by POSIX, but vi is only a subset of
| vim.
| ur-whale wrote:
| To me at least, the answer is and always has been: speed.
| halotrope wrote:
| For 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 or
| JetBrains Suite. I am often wondering how people do edit source
| efficiently without vim mode but I am too shy to ask.
| boogies wrote:
| Some people use trackballs or pads with their thumbs, or
| trackpoints.
| gt2 wrote:
| Long time vim lover here as well, but I guess I hear often that
| for a lot of folks, input isn't the bottleneck.
| johannes1234321 wrote:
| I don't see it as a bottleneck, but focus. Not searching for
| the mouse or something or stretching fingers to Edit with
| Meta Alt Control and Shift etc. but fingers where they feel
| comfortable efficiently browsing the files.
| halotrope wrote:
| Yes I hear that as well. IMHO most of the time is thinking
| but when I want to move stuff from my brain to my screen I
| prefer maximum bandwidth and not having to consciously think
| about it. To each their own I guess.
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(page generated 2020-06-30 23:00 UTC)