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It's unfortunate to see that the group who named their extension "Vim" is being recognized as more or less the official recommendation for Vim emulation, despit

It's unfortunate to see that the group who named their extension "Vim" is being recognized as more or less the official recommendation for Vim emulation, despite being not so good. The last time that I did a survey of feature completeness, performance, and code quality, the author of the amVim extension had a much better showing across the board--and more active involvement in VSCode extension APIs themselves. Perception and naming do matter.

Analemma_ 10y ago
I haven't used the Vim extensions specifically, but in the extension "store", you can see number of downloads and an average star rating. Is the "bad" Vim plugin not getting downvoted?
- carussell 10y ago
  The point isn't that the VSCodeVim extension is bad, it's that it isn't good. Having said that, as a project, I would call it a bad one. Last time I commented on this on HN, I pointed out that the VSCodeVim group's extension had three times the number of downloads as the one called amVim. And of course it would. I speculated last time, just like I'm doing here, that this has more to do with the names chosen for the projects and the air of authority they have (VSCodeVim vs amVim) than it does with extension quality. More troubling is that recently the VSCodeVim folks changed their packaging so that it appears under the Vim name in the extension gallery and began using the official Vim logo, too. Not cool.
  - coldtea 10y ago
    Are you the author of the amVim project as its GitHub handle implies? If so, isn't a "full disclosure" needed when speaking of a "competitive" project?
    - detaro 10y ago
      How do you connect "carussell" to https://github.com/aioutecism/amVim-for-VSCode https://github.com/aioutecism/amVim-for-VSCode?
      - coldtea 10y ago
        I connected carussell to the crussell maintaining some fork here: https://gitlab.com/crussell/amVim https://gitlab.com/crussell/amVim as pointed elsewhere. It would certainly be possible that he contributed code to the project given that.
        carussell 10y ago
        Shocker: when I reviewed the code for both projects, I sent fixes to the one that I found to be of high quality. Why is this surprising? And no, I'm not "maintaining some fork"--there's no way to submit patches on GitHub, and the only way to get changes in for most projects hosted there is to throw up a copy of your work as a remote for someone to pull from. My disdain for this workflow is already well-documented.
        coldtea 10y ago
        >Shocker: when I reviewed the code for both projects, I sent fixes to the one that I found to be of high quality. Why is this surprising? Pointing it out doesn't mean it was "surprising". Just that it happened -- and as such, it could be a possible conflict of interest. "Contributor to project X trashes competitive project Y" is a different situation than "Totally unaffiliated with X and Y person, trashes Y". Perhaps there was bad blood between the two projects, a backstory with interacting with them, etc -- in which case it would be good to know, that's why I asked. Now, if there were more technical arguments it wouldn't matter -- they could be evaluated regardless of who tells them --, but your comment was mostly summed to: "they are inferior quality" and "they only succeeded because they use vim's name directly", which doesn't leave much to evaluate.
    - carussell 10y ago
      No.
twblalock 10y ago
I suspect this was a case of first come, first serve. Why should someone be forced to change the name of their extension simply because another extension with a similar name became more popular or better?
joaomoreno 10y ago
The extension has improved quite a bit recently, might wanna check it out again.
johnfn 10y ago
Hi there. I'm one of the authors of the Vim plugin. I'd highly encourage you to try it out again. It has improved quite substantially in the last few months. Nowadays we have a much larger range of commands. We've got visual block mode, incremental search, vimrc support, marks, registers, proper vim undo support, very broad motion support, and quite a bit more. Let me know what you think!
- carussell 10y ago
  I think you should've gotten permission from the Vim folks if your colleagues were going to crib the logo and project name for your own use.
zerr 10y ago
Why would you use VS Code (even with vim keybindings) over vim? Is there something you can't do in vim but can in VS Code?
- Longhanks 10y ago
  To be honest, to setup vim to provide the features VS Code provides out of the box takes a long time and dedication.
  - JBReefer 10y ago
    Can't you store your dotfiles on GitHub and just clone them whenever you need your env? note, I don't do this - I use vanilla vsc for my text editor. I've just seen many who do.
- lucastheisen 10y ago
  I have as yet been unable to get the code completion working. Were you able to?
  - redwards510 10y ago
    If you mean IntelliSense in VS Code, I just got this figured out today! The official docs will walk you through it[1]. Be careful about reading blogs about how to do it, the process has changed from when you used to use "tsd". You need to click the little green light bulb at the bottom right of the editor to create a jsconfig.json file. Then install the typings module with: npm install -g typings then install the language files you want. This will install node completion: typings install dt~node --global Much easier than before! [1] https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/runtimes/nodejs#_great-code-editing-experiences https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/runtimes/nodejs#_great-co...
  - zerr 10y ago
    No, I don't use vim or any similar arcane editor. When I hear someone is happy e.g. with vim, and then I see how they use it (e.g. you can see screencasts from Golang team on youtube) - they just use it as a vanilla plain text editor, slightly better (or worse?) than Notepad.exe. Maybe basic syntax coloring, and that's it, nothing more...
nix0n 10y ago
> the author of the amVim extension i.e. you? https://gitlab.com/crussell/amVim https://gitlab.com/crussell/amVim
- detaro 10y ago
  Just because he has a fork of the code under his username doesn't make him the author. The original repo is clearly linked on the page. And the vast majority of commits seem to be by somebody else. Does not look like the author to me.

Analemma_ 10y ago

I haven't used the Vim extensions specifically, but in the extension "store", you can see number of downloads and an average star rating. Is the "bad" Vim plugin not getting downvoted?

carussell 10y ago
The point isn't that the VSCodeVim extension is bad, it's that it isn't good. Having said that, as a project, I would call it a bad one. Last time I commented on this on HN, I pointed out that the VSCodeVim group's extension had three times the number of downloads as the one called amVim. And of course it would. I speculated last time, just like I'm doing here, that this has more to do with the names chosen for the projects and the air of authority they have (VSCodeVim vs amVim) than it does with extension quality. More troubling is that recently the VSCodeVim folks changed their packaging so that it appears under the Vim name in the extension gallery and began using the official Vim logo, too. Not cool.
- coldtea 10y ago
  Are you the author of the amVim project as its GitHub handle implies? If so, isn't a "full disclosure" needed when speaking of a "competitive" project?
  - detaro 10y ago
    How do you connect "carussell" to https://github.com/aioutecism/amVim-for-VSCode https://github.com/aioutecism/amVim-for-VSCode?
    - coldtea 10y ago
      I connected carussell to the crussell maintaining some fork here: https://gitlab.com/crussell/amVim https://gitlab.com/crussell/amVim as pointed elsewhere. It would certainly be possible that he contributed code to the project given that.
      - carussell 10y ago
        Shocker: when I reviewed the code for both projects, I sent fixes to the one that I found to be of high quality. Why is this surprising? And no, I'm not "maintaining some fork"--there's no way to submit patches on GitHub, and the only way to get changes in for most projects hosted there is to throw up a copy of your work as a remote for someone to pull from. My disdain for this workflow is already well-documented.
        coldtea 10y ago
        >Shocker: when I reviewed the code for both projects, I sent fixes to the one that I found to be of high quality. Why is this surprising? Pointing it out doesn't mean it was "surprising". Just that it happened -- and as such, it could be a possible conflict of interest. "Contributor to project X trashes competitive project Y" is a different situation than "Totally unaffiliated with X and Y person, trashes Y". Perhaps there was bad blood between the two projects, a backstory with interacting with them, etc -- in which case it would be good to know, that's why I asked. Now, if there were more technical arguments it wouldn't matter -- they could be evaluated regardless of who tells them --, but your comment was mostly summed to: "they are inferior quality" and "they only succeeded because they use vim's name directly", which doesn't leave much to evaluate.
  - carussell 10y ago
    No.

twblalock 10y ago

I suspect this was a case of first come, first serve. Why should someone be forced to change the name of their extension simply because another extension with a similar name became more popular or better?

joaomoreno 10y ago

The extension has improved quite a bit recently, might wanna check it out again.

johnfn 10y ago

Hi there. I'm one of the authors of the Vim plugin. I'd highly encourage you to try it out again. It has improved quite substantially in the last few months. Nowadays we have a much larger range of commands. We've got visual block mode, incremental search, vimrc support, marks, registers, proper vim undo support, very broad motion support, and quite a bit more. Let me know what you think!

carussell 10y ago
I think you should've gotten permission from the Vim folks if your colleagues were going to crib the logo and project name for your own use.

zerr 10y ago

Why would you use VS Code (even with vim keybindings) over vim? Is there something you can't do in vim but can in VS Code?

Longhanks 10y ago
To be honest, to setup vim to provide the features VS Code provides out of the box takes a long time and dedication.
- JBReefer 10y ago
  Can't you store your dotfiles on GitHub and just clone them whenever you need your env? note, I don't do this - I use vanilla vsc for my text editor. I've just seen many who do.
lucastheisen 10y ago
I have as yet been unable to get the code completion working. Were you able to?
- redwards510 10y ago
  If you mean IntelliSense in VS Code, I just got this figured out today! The official docs will walk you through it[1]. Be careful about reading blogs about how to do it, the process has changed from when you used to use "tsd". You need to click the little green light bulb at the bottom right of the editor to create a jsconfig.json file. Then install the typings module with: npm install -g typings then install the language files you want. This will install node completion: typings install dt~node --global Much easier than before! [1] https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/runtimes/nodejs#_great-code-editing-experiences https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/runtimes/nodejs#_great-co...
- zerr 10y ago
  No, I don't use vim or any similar arcane editor. When I hear someone is happy e.g. with vim, and then I see how they use it (e.g. you can see screencasts from Golang team on youtube) - they just use it as a vanilla plain text editor, slightly better (or worse?) than Notepad.exe. Maybe basic syntax coloring, and that's it, nothing more...

nix0n 10y ago

> the author of the amVim extension i.e. you? https://gitlab.com/crussell/amVim https://gitlab.com/crussell/amVim

detaro 10y ago
Just because he has a fork of the code under his username doesn't make him the author. The original repo is clearly linked on the page. And the vast majority of commits seem to be by somebody else. Does not look like the author to me.