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Bram Moolenaar Discusses Developing Vim, How He Uses It, and Version 8

234 points by laktak 10y ago

mixedmath 10y ago
I love vim, and I'm always happy to read interviews with the developers who make and manage the tools I use or like. However, I find this article to be somewhat of a mishmash with an uncertain audience. From the title, I had expected this to be a transcript of an interview. But it's not. Thank you for the link. The article also heavily implies that Bram is the sole and only developer, and mentions that vim has had four updates since 2006. Both of these are true only up to extremely narrow interpretation, and not what I would expect from an article purporting to interview and describe a project maintainer and the project.
- Exuma 10y ago
  It's also on a scammy review site for hosting affiliate links, and fake crappy "ratings"
akkartik 10y ago
Has Bram Moolenaar ever publicly acknowledged the influence of Neovim on Vim 8? At the very least, Neovim provided the market research to show that async was worth doing.
- deadbunny 10y ago
  I've not seen anything which is disappointing, the NeoVim team have done a fantastic job at modernising Vim. I've not followed Vim development very closely but the whole async thing did give me a chuckle when I read about it after years of not accepting async patches. A real shame he made it incompatible with the NeoVim async with no real reason.
- tsul 10y ago
  He mentions it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ayc_qpB-93o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ayc_qpB-93o
  - chappi42 10y ago
    At 50:15, 54:00 and 59:10 [edit: also 1:05:15]. The last two are specif about the fork (all quite short).
    - akkartik 10y ago
      Ah, 54:00 is what I was looking for. Thanks.
- owaislone 10y ago
  Neovim is Vim for me and many other users. Vim is irrelevant to me now. The community is rallying behind Neovim and it shows great potential. It just needs to be bundled by major distros so it can be installed on servers with 1 command and that'll be the end of old Vim. Bram has done a tremendous job with Vim but it's time to move on to the Vim of the future.
  - vbezhenar 10y ago
    Why would it be the end of old vim? I've never used neovim and I don't plan to use it, vim is perfectly fine for me, as it is. I guess, most of vim users don't even know of neovim. Sure, it's good to have a choice.
    - hxegon 10y ago
      A lot of other comments make related points that kind of dance around this, but here it is: The major improvements of neovim aren't (directly) user facing. It's a major refactor, which makes it immensely easier to maintain and contribute too. Neovim isn't a vim reinvention, it's a vim renewal.
      - kedean 10y ago
        What I think is interesting here is that Neovim is entirely contrary to the original point of Vim, as presented in the article: a vi available on non-Unix systems. It was portable, so it could be run anywhere. Now Neovim's selling point is that it DOESN'T have all the code that enabled that portability. Not suggesting one way is better or worse, but I think it's interesting.
    - elsjaako 10y ago
      For me the major improvement is that it puts the settings in the .config folder. I like this because I keep my settings in a git repo. The main advantage on the other hand is that my friend stopped bothering me about having to switch to neovim, which I guess is a non-issue for most. Now he's trying to get me on to zsh.
- manaskarekar 10y ago
  Yes, http://www.binpress.com/blog/2014/11/19/vim-creator-bram-moolenaar-interview/ http://www.binpress.com/blog/2014/11/19/vim-creator-bram-moo....
- falcolas 10y ago
  I think that so long as the primary rhetoric from the NeoVim camp is "vim is dead, long live NeoVim", with a dash of disrespect for Bram and his goals of continued platform compatibility and coding style... I personally don't expect such acknowledgement. Doing so might make Bram the 'better person', but I wouldn't blame him if it makes him a bit resentful.
  - hxegon 10y ago
    What? I've seen tarruda and co. explicitly express gratitude and thanks to Bram.
    - falcolas 10y ago
      By critiquing his reluctance to accept patches because he'll be stuck maintaining that code? By forking Vim and removing some compatibility and legacy support features when tarruda's multithreading patch was not accepted? No, the core contributors have not been outright in their criticisms, but IMO the fork itself shows a lack of respect for Bran's work and a lack of willingness to work with him to make Vim better. And now tarruda has stepped back from NeoVim, perhaps recognizing himself the cost that Bram bears. By simply contributing to the tests - one of the outright critiques of Vim itself - they could have brought a lot more confidence to accepting such patches to Vim, but they chose to take their ball and play elsewhere instead. What frustrates me the most is that instead of two branches of Vim that are moderately better (with the future of one of the branches being left behind), we could have had one which was much better.
      - linsomniac 10y ago
        Except that the direction we were moving wasn't one branch that was much better, it feels like it was no improved branches at all. vim7 was a great improvement, and when I show people the time travel capabilities it blows their minds. But that was a long time ago. With the number of people to whom vim is very important, I'm surprised there isn't more results coming out of it. Though maybe it is mostly that the core doesn't need to change and innovation can happen in the plugins? That is certainly true to some extent, but the async stuff was way overdue.
- greenspot 10y ago
  Good point. A recent upvoted post From Reddit's Vim sub [1]: "I am super surprised that everybody talks about Vim 8 but almost nobody mentions that... - Bram Moolenaar did the last major version ten years ago - The recent years of Vim's development were almost stalling - Bram publicly questioned the Neovim team's efforts creating a fork and bringing new essential stuff like async to Vim—he even made kind of fun of them After Neovim came out and has been developed at fast pace, Bram surprisingly presents Vim 8 with the stuff we wanted which before he decided against—all the stuff Neovim did and of course incompatible to the fork. Bram's decision on being incompatible should be challenged and discussed, would love to hear his thoughts. Since no money is involved, his decision feels even more awkward, why not welcome competition or potential contributors, being a team player, work together or merge? Or is it Bram's injured pride, the fear of getting irrelevant with some piece of ancient software? Whatever 'meaningful reasons' Bram chose not to support a fork, now we are left with incompatible Vim variants which damage the entire Vim ecosystem. I guess that most distributions will package Vim 8 with their distributions, just because not everybody has followed all the happenings, and Vim 8 sounds like a solid choice, like going with the mainstream. So, Vim 8 might get the next standard and an awesome fork could die which I find sad. The Neovim team has been disrupting, they went ahead and it's a community developed software which is a huge differentiator to Bram's work and codebase of controversial quality. What are your thoughts? Should we support both versions and should we write plugins for both or focus on one? Or is competition good and the Neovim team will deliver more and prove that still a community developed Neovim will outperform Vim in the long run? Don't get me wrong, this isn't a rant, Bram created with Vim an fantastic piece of software—this is about the question how we should keep competition which helps the entire ecosystem so we don't end up with a dying fork and original Vim's development slowing down again for the next ten years. One idea is that all distributions should either still package old Vim 7.x only to let people decide themselves or always package both Vim 8 and Neovim together. But how should we get there?" [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/vim/comments/52q4ul/about_vim_8_and_how_to_keep_the_vim_ecosystem https://www.reddit.com/r/vim/comments/52q4ul/about_vim_8_and...
clishem 10y ago
No, this is just a clickbait article.
- laktak 10y ago
  I found the article on vim.org: > Nice article about Vim on hostingadvice.com > Releasing version 8.0 and getting close to the 25th birthday inspired the writing of this article. It contains links to relevant info and can be used to convince a friend to start using Vim. (Bram Moolenaar)
mikekchar 10y ago
I was surprised to learn that vim started out on the Amiga. Back in those days I was using DME, by a certain Matt Dillon (of Dragonfly BSD fame, not the actor ;-) ). At the time it was the only editor that could drag me away from Emacs. Ironic that Vim later seduced me away from Emacs again...
- pawadu 10y ago
  Incidentally, the Amiga Workbench Utility disk (or whatever they called it) included a very nice microemacs implementation: http://www.guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/amigaos204 http://www.guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/amigaos204 Suffice to say, I have been a very happy emacs user since then ;)
- mkonecny 10y ago
  Cooincidental, not ironic.
  - mikekchar 10y ago
    Ironic in the sense that I could have been using vim the entire time.
red2awn 10y ago
Too bad most of the new features are already in Neovim.
- kerny 10y ago
  Why is it bad? Competition is always a good thing, and I'm glad that Neovim urged Braam to improve Vim as well. Personally, I'll rather use Vim as it focuses on stability and long-term compatibility. I have a huge respect for Braam for maintaining the project for so long. On the other hand, some of the Neovim's promises are just that, big dreams. Development on Neovim has slowed down and if you look at their git history, you'll see most of their commits are actually upstream patches taken from Vim. I also see a lot of hate towards Vim source code and code styling, which is not that bad and I actually prefer it to Neovim's two spaces per indentation style.
throwaw12ay 10y ago
So, what does he think about Emacs?
- chappi42 10y ago
  There is an answer in the video at 1:06:11. "In some way it's actually nice to have competitor [he is speaking about Neovim] and Emacs has disappeared, so.. [I think, he smiles at this point]".
zeveb 10y ago
> Bram admitted to using other editors on rare occasions, and said he always misses the dot (.) command, which repeats a change several times in different positions, and the ability to record and replay a sequence of commands. > “Just a simple ‘change this text into that text’ can be very laborious without a repeat command,” he said. “I haven’t seen another editor that provides this feature.” Note that emacs has had the repeat command since version 20.3, released 19 August 1998[2]. I suppose that means he's not used it since then … [1] https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_mono/efaq.html#index-Repeating-commands-many-times https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_mono/efaq.htm... [2] https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/EmacsReleaseDates https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/EmacsReleaseDates
- to3m 10y ago
  Have you used vim? . is much closer to running a keyboard macro than it is to C-x z - only you don't have to record anything ahead of time, nor necessarily even realise until afterwards that you might want to reuse what you've just done. There's no precise equivalent in emacs. It's described here: http://vim.wikia.com/wiki/Repeat_last_change http://vim.wikia.com/wiki/Repeat_last_change C-x z is lame by comparison. Like, suppose you just typed in M-d h e l l o, and you press C-x z. It repeats the last command: self-insert-command. So you get an additional o. Thanks, Emacs! More comedy: after you move the cursor, perhaps planning to use C-x z to insert another o elsewhere in the document, C-x z now replays the last cursor movement command. (None of this is illogical, it's simply that C-x z is not, probably, very useful for editing text.) With vim, on the other hand, pressing . would replay the word deletion, followed by the insertion of "hello". And you can use other motion commands to move about the file before repeating it again, allowing you to perform this operation in multiple places.
  - akacase 10y ago
    https://github.com/wyrickre/dot-mode https://github.com/wyrickre/dot-mode, elisp is pretty awesome if you utilize cl-lib and eieio.
greyman 10y ago
I don't know if I am too old or just think differently than vim enthusiasts, but I somehow couldn't bring myself to like vim. Of course that's might be since I can't find motivation to dig into it further. As a developer I use it almost daily when doing something on the server, like editing some config etc., but I somehow always prefer a software, where you do things intuitively without needing to first learn a shortcut for everything. I just prefer Visual Studio or Visual Studio Code from Microsoft when developing code, accepting that I must use mouse and the editing process might take slightly longer. Also, as awkward as it might sound, visually vim looks a bit ugly to me and I never could get fully over it. :-)
- rubenv 10y ago
  > I somehow always prefer a software, where you do things intuitively without needing to first learn a shortcut for everything That doesn't even apply for an IDE. As a vim user I always feel lost in those at first. Any tool with a bit of power will require familiarization. You won't get the most out of that IDE unless you learn it.
- agumonkey 10y ago
  It can vary with time and context. I had a long period where mangling text in high prowess was important to me. Because I was somehow in love with programs, and doing lots of things with my fingers felt good and worthy. Also because I was using Java, very verbose as everybody knows. Some people will love Java and accept its verbosity, I cannot. Now I found out about lisps, ml, or even ruby and suddenly verbosity decreased.. you need less text edition. And even more than that, focusing on algorithms and conceptual structures makes you forget about editing, formatting, or even live check etc. You often think deep beforehand. Then type a few things, because the design is more balanced.
- ptero 10y ago
  In terms of doing things intuitively -- I think (maybe incorrectly) that you mean seeing icons that you can click on to perform a certain action rather than the keyboard command that does the same. If so, that is easy to fix by adding buttons. The problem with this approach is that mouse-driven commands are almost never "mouse-only" -- you still need to move the hands back and forth between keyboard and the mouse (e.g., after you click "save as" you need to type the file name to save to) and this wastes quite a bit of time. But people are different, some prefer it this way and some not. Even on the keyboard-driven side there is a clear divide between those who like single-mode interface of Emacs and those who love Vim and hate the pianist training of Emacs multi-finger actions.
bagrow 10y ago
Anybody using a neovim MacOS app [1]? I'm a huge vim user, but mostly via MacVim [2]. [1] https://github.com/rogual/neovim-dot-app https://github.com/rogual/neovim-dot-app [2] https://github.com/macvim-dev/macvim https://github.com/macvim-dev/macvim
- desireco42 10y ago
  Thanks for posting this, I was looking for something like that :).
- forbidden404 10y ago
  Well, I've been using Vim on iTerm 2 for a long time and have been trying neovim recently, but everything through command line, since it fits better with tmux
- owaislone 10y ago
  I've been very happy with neovim.app but recently switched to VimR. VimR switched to neovim some time ago. Haven't noticed any issues as compared to neovim.app. Both work pretty much the same for me as I don't use VimR's features.
  - mikewhy 10y ago
    Been hearing about VimR, I should really check it out. I've used both Neovim.app and neovim-qt, but for reasons I've forgot, always end up back with MacVim.
- tomku 10y ago
  I use/have used neovim-dot-app, it's pretty nice. It's not quite as polished as MacVim, mostly little things like not having dock menu entries for creating/switching windows. I had to compile from HEAD fairly regularly to fix bugs and keep up with neovim releases. I mostly switched back to MacVim once vim 8 came out.
- molloy 10y ago
  I've been meaning to try neovim, but I'm so in love with evil-mode spacemacs. I only switched to evil-mode recently, but I can already tell that there's no going back from modal editing for me. Can anybody speak for benefits of using neovim over spacemacs?
ghostly_s 10y ago
Does anyone know what vim plugin or feature is pictured in the illustration? The code outline on the right side?
- ward 10y ago
  Looks like tagbar to me https://github.com/majutsushi/tagbar https://github.com/majutsushi/tagbar
- data_hope 10y ago
  http://majutsushi.github.io/tagbar/ http://majutsushi.github.io/tagbar/ ?
LukeLaPira 10y ago
IDK
censored_again 10y ago
Wow, hundreds of developers and 7 newsletters!1!! has Netcraft already confirmed that Vim is obsolete?
- owaislone 10y ago
  Just past month and that too after Neovim lit a fire under Vim. The difference would be much bigger if you check for a period of last 2 years or so. Neovim: https://github.com/neovim/neovim/pulse/monthly https://github.com/neovim/neovim/pulse/monthly Vim: https://github.com/vim/vim/pulse/monthly https://github.com/vim/vim/pulse/monthly I don't know why people feel emotional about Vim. Neovim is just Vim with a breath of fresh air.
  - throwaway88172 10y ago
    And gruseom seems to agree. He is ruling with an iron fist in this thread.
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
- sctb 10y ago
  We've banned this serial troll account. Please don't create accounts to violate the guidelines like this. We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13237170 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13237170 and marked it off-topic. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]

234 points by laktak 10y ago

I love vim, and I'm always happy to read interviews with the developers who make and manage the tools I use or like. However, I find this article to be somewhat of a mishmash with an uncertain audience. From the title, I had expected this to be a transcript of an interview. But it's not. Thank you for the link. The article also heavily implies that Bram is the sole and only developer, and mentions that vim has had four updates since 2006. Both of these are true only up to extremely narrow interpretation, and not what I would expect from an article purporting to interview and describe a project maintainer and the project.

Exuma 10y ago
It's also on a scammy review site for hosting affiliate links, and fake crappy "ratings"

akkartik 10y ago

Has Bram Moolenaar ever publicly acknowledged the influence of Neovim on Vim 8? At the very least, Neovim provided the market research to show that async was worth doing.

deadbunny 10y ago
I've not seen anything which is disappointing, the NeoVim team have done a fantastic job at modernising Vim. I've not followed Vim development very closely but the whole async thing did give me a chuckle when I read about it after years of not accepting async patches. A real shame he made it incompatible with the NeoVim async with no real reason.
tsul 10y ago
He mentions it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ayc_qpB-93o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ayc_qpB-93o
- chappi42 10y ago
  At 50:15, 54:00 and 59:10 [edit: also 1:05:15]. The last two are specif about the fork (all quite short).
  - akkartik 10y ago
    Ah, 54:00 is what I was looking for. Thanks.
owaislone 10y ago
Neovim is Vim for me and many other users. Vim is irrelevant to me now. The community is rallying behind Neovim and it shows great potential. It just needs to be bundled by major distros so it can be installed on servers with 1 command and that'll be the end of old Vim. Bram has done a tremendous job with Vim but it's time to move on to the Vim of the future.
- vbezhenar 10y ago
  Why would it be the end of old vim? I've never used neovim and I don't plan to use it, vim is perfectly fine for me, as it is. I guess, most of vim users don't even know of neovim. Sure, it's good to have a choice.
  - hxegon 10y ago
    A lot of other comments make related points that kind of dance around this, but here it is: The major improvements of neovim aren't (directly) user facing. It's a major refactor, which makes it immensely easier to maintain and contribute too. Neovim isn't a vim reinvention, it's a vim renewal.
    - kedean 10y ago
      What I think is interesting here is that Neovim is entirely contrary to the original point of Vim, as presented in the article: a vi available on non-Unix systems. It was portable, so it could be run anywhere. Now Neovim's selling point is that it DOESN'T have all the code that enabled that portability. Not suggesting one way is better or worse, but I think it's interesting.
  - elsjaako 10y ago
    For me the major improvement is that it puts the settings in the .config folder. I like this because I keep my settings in a git repo. The main advantage on the other hand is that my friend stopped bothering me about having to switch to neovim, which I guess is a non-issue for most. Now he's trying to get me on to zsh.
manaskarekar 10y ago
Yes, http://www.binpress.com/blog/2014/11/19/vim-creator-bram-moolenaar-interview/ http://www.binpress.com/blog/2014/11/19/vim-creator-bram-moo....
falcolas 10y ago
I think that so long as the primary rhetoric from the NeoVim camp is "vim is dead, long live NeoVim", with a dash of disrespect for Bram and his goals of continued platform compatibility and coding style... I personally don't expect such acknowledgement. Doing so might make Bram the 'better person', but I wouldn't blame him if it makes him a bit resentful.
- hxegon 10y ago
  What? I've seen tarruda and co. explicitly express gratitude and thanks to Bram.
  - falcolas 10y ago
    By critiquing his reluctance to accept patches because he'll be stuck maintaining that code? By forking Vim and removing some compatibility and legacy support features when tarruda's multithreading patch was not accepted? No, the core contributors have not been outright in their criticisms, but IMO the fork itself shows a lack of respect for Bran's work and a lack of willingness to work with him to make Vim better. And now tarruda has stepped back from NeoVim, perhaps recognizing himself the cost that Bram bears. By simply contributing to the tests - one of the outright critiques of Vim itself - they could have brought a lot more confidence to accepting such patches to Vim, but they chose to take their ball and play elsewhere instead. What frustrates me the most is that instead of two branches of Vim that are moderately better (with the future of one of the branches being left behind), we could have had one which was much better.
    - linsomniac 10y ago
      Except that the direction we were moving wasn't one branch that was much better, it feels like it was no improved branches at all. vim7 was a great improvement, and when I show people the time travel capabilities it blows their minds. But that was a long time ago. With the number of people to whom vim is very important, I'm surprised there isn't more results coming out of it. Though maybe it is mostly that the core doesn't need to change and innovation can happen in the plugins? That is certainly true to some extent, but the async stuff was way overdue.
greenspot 10y ago
Good point. A recent upvoted post From Reddit's Vim sub [1]: "I am super surprised that everybody talks about Vim 8 but almost nobody mentions that... - Bram Moolenaar did the last major version ten years ago - The recent years of Vim's development were almost stalling - Bram publicly questioned the Neovim team's efforts creating a fork and bringing new essential stuff like async to Vim—he even made kind of fun of them After Neovim came out and has been developed at fast pace, Bram surprisingly presents Vim 8 with the stuff we wanted which before he decided against—all the stuff Neovim did and of course incompatible to the fork. Bram's decision on being incompatible should be challenged and discussed, would love to hear his thoughts. Since no money is involved, his decision feels even more awkward, why not welcome competition or potential contributors, being a team player, work together or merge? Or is it Bram's injured pride, the fear of getting irrelevant with some piece of ancient software? Whatever 'meaningful reasons' Bram chose not to support a fork, now we are left with incompatible Vim variants which damage the entire Vim ecosystem. I guess that most distributions will package Vim 8 with their distributions, just because not everybody has followed all the happenings, and Vim 8 sounds like a solid choice, like going with the mainstream. So, Vim 8 might get the next standard and an awesome fork could die which I find sad. The Neovim team has been disrupting, they went ahead and it's a community developed software which is a huge differentiator to Bram's work and codebase of controversial quality. What are your thoughts? Should we support both versions and should we write plugins for both or focus on one? Or is competition good and the Neovim team will deliver more and prove that still a community developed Neovim will outperform Vim in the long run? Don't get me wrong, this isn't a rant, Bram created with Vim an fantastic piece of software—this is about the question how we should keep competition which helps the entire ecosystem so we don't end up with a dying fork and original Vim's development slowing down again for the next ten years. One idea is that all distributions should either still package old Vim 7.x only to let people decide themselves or always package both Vim 8 and Neovim together. But how should we get there?" [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/vim/comments/52q4ul/about_vim_8_and_how_to_keep_the_vim_ecosystem https://www.reddit.com/r/vim/comments/52q4ul/about_vim_8_and...

clishem 10y ago

No, this is just a clickbait article.

laktak 10y ago
I found the article on vim.org: > Nice article about Vim on hostingadvice.com > Releasing version 8.0 and getting close to the 25th birthday inspired the writing of this article. It contains links to relevant info and can be used to convince a friend to start using Vim. (Bram Moolenaar)

mikekchar 10y ago

I was surprised to learn that vim started out on the Amiga. Back in those days I was using DME, by a certain Matt Dillon (of Dragonfly BSD fame, not the actor ;-) ). At the time it was the only editor that could drag me away from Emacs. Ironic that Vim later seduced me away from Emacs again...

pawadu 10y ago
Incidentally, the Amiga Workbench Utility disk (or whatever they called it) included a very nice microemacs implementation: http://www.guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/amigaos204 http://www.guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/amigaos204 Suffice to say, I have been a very happy emacs user since then ;)
mkonecny 10y ago
Cooincidental, not ironic.
- mikekchar 10y ago
  Ironic in the sense that I could have been using vim the entire time.

red2awn 10y ago

Too bad most of the new features are already in Neovim.

kerny 10y ago
Why is it bad? Competition is always a good thing, and I'm glad that Neovim urged Braam to improve Vim as well. Personally, I'll rather use Vim as it focuses on stability and long-term compatibility. I have a huge respect for Braam for maintaining the project for so long. On the other hand, some of the Neovim's promises are just that, big dreams. Development on Neovim has slowed down and if you look at their git history, you'll see most of their commits are actually upstream patches taken from Vim. I also see a lot of hate towards Vim source code and code styling, which is not that bad and I actually prefer it to Neovim's two spaces per indentation style.

throwaw12ay 10y ago

So, what does he think about Emacs?

chappi42 10y ago
There is an answer in the video at 1:06:11. "In some way it's actually nice to have competitor [he is speaking about Neovim] and Emacs has disappeared, so.. [I think, he smiles at this point]".

zeveb 10y ago

> Bram admitted to using other editors on rare occasions, and said he always misses the dot (.) command, which repeats a change several times in different positions, and the ability to record and replay a sequence of commands. > “Just a simple ‘change this text into that text’ can be very laborious without a repeat command,” he said. “I haven’t seen another editor that provides this feature.” Note that emacs has had the repeat command since version 20.3, released 19 August 1998[2]. I suppose that means he's not used it since then … [1] https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_mono/efaq.html#index-Repeating-commands-many-times https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_mono/efaq.htm... [2] https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/EmacsReleaseDates https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/EmacsReleaseDates

to3m 10y ago
Have you used vim? . is much closer to running a keyboard macro than it is to C-x z - only you don't have to record anything ahead of time, nor necessarily even realise until afterwards that you might want to reuse what you've just done. There's no precise equivalent in emacs. It's described here: http://vim.wikia.com/wiki/Repeat_last_change http://vim.wikia.com/wiki/Repeat_last_change C-x z is lame by comparison. Like, suppose you just typed in M-d h e l l o, and you press C-x z. It repeats the last command: self-insert-command. So you get an additional o. Thanks, Emacs! More comedy: after you move the cursor, perhaps planning to use C-x z to insert another o elsewhere in the document, C-x z now replays the last cursor movement command. (None of this is illogical, it's simply that C-x z is not, probably, very useful for editing text.) With vim, on the other hand, pressing . would replay the word deletion, followed by the insertion of "hello". And you can use other motion commands to move about the file before repeating it again, allowing you to perform this operation in multiple places.
- akacase 10y ago
  https://github.com/wyrickre/dot-mode https://github.com/wyrickre/dot-mode, elisp is pretty awesome if you utilize cl-lib and eieio.

greyman 10y ago

I don't know if I am too old or just think differently than vim enthusiasts, but I somehow couldn't bring myself to like vim. Of course that's might be since I can't find motivation to dig into it further. As a developer I use it almost daily when doing something on the server, like editing some config etc., but I somehow always prefer a software, where you do things intuitively without needing to first learn a shortcut for everything. I just prefer Visual Studio or Visual Studio Code from Microsoft when developing code, accepting that I must use mouse and the editing process might take slightly longer. Also, as awkward as it might sound, visually vim looks a bit ugly to me and I never could get fully over it. :-)

rubenv 10y ago
> I somehow always prefer a software, where you do things intuitively without needing to first learn a shortcut for everything That doesn't even apply for an IDE. As a vim user I always feel lost in those at first. Any tool with a bit of power will require familiarization. You won't get the most out of that IDE unless you learn it.
agumonkey 10y ago
It can vary with time and context. I had a long period where mangling text in high prowess was important to me. Because I was somehow in love with programs, and doing lots of things with my fingers felt good and worthy. Also because I was using Java, very verbose as everybody knows. Some people will love Java and accept its verbosity, I cannot. Now I found out about lisps, ml, or even ruby and suddenly verbosity decreased.. you need less text edition. And even more than that, focusing on algorithms and conceptual structures makes you forget about editing, formatting, or even live check etc. You often think deep beforehand. Then type a few things, because the design is more balanced.
ptero 10y ago
In terms of doing things intuitively -- I think (maybe incorrectly) that you mean seeing icons that you can click on to perform a certain action rather than the keyboard command that does the same. If so, that is easy to fix by adding buttons. The problem with this approach is that mouse-driven commands are almost never "mouse-only" -- you still need to move the hands back and forth between keyboard and the mouse (e.g., after you click "save as" you need to type the file name to save to) and this wastes quite a bit of time. But people are different, some prefer it this way and some not. Even on the keyboard-driven side there is a clear divide between those who like single-mode interface of Emacs and those who love Vim and hate the pianist training of Emacs multi-finger actions.

bagrow 10y ago

Anybody using a neovim MacOS app [1]? I'm a huge vim user, but mostly via MacVim [2]. [1] https://github.com/rogual/neovim-dot-app https://github.com/rogual/neovim-dot-app [2] https://github.com/macvim-dev/macvim https://github.com/macvim-dev/macvim

desireco42 10y ago
Thanks for posting this, I was looking for something like that :).
forbidden404 10y ago
Well, I've been using Vim on iTerm 2 for a long time and have been trying neovim recently, but everything through command line, since it fits better with tmux
owaislone 10y ago
I've been very happy with neovim.app but recently switched to VimR. VimR switched to neovim some time ago. Haven't noticed any issues as compared to neovim.app. Both work pretty much the same for me as I don't use VimR's features.
- mikewhy 10y ago
  Been hearing about VimR, I should really check it out. I've used both Neovim.app and neovim-qt, but for reasons I've forgot, always end up back with MacVim.
tomku 10y ago
I use/have used neovim-dot-app, it's pretty nice. It's not quite as polished as MacVim, mostly little things like not having dock menu entries for creating/switching windows. I had to compile from HEAD fairly regularly to fix bugs and keep up with neovim releases. I mostly switched back to MacVim once vim 8 came out.
molloy 10y ago
I've been meaning to try neovim, but I'm so in love with evil-mode spacemacs. I only switched to evil-mode recently, but I can already tell that there's no going back from modal editing for me. Can anybody speak for benefits of using neovim over spacemacs?

ghostly_s 10y ago

Does anyone know what vim plugin or feature is pictured in the illustration? The code outline on the right side?

ward 10y ago
Looks like tagbar to me https://github.com/majutsushi/tagbar https://github.com/majutsushi/tagbar
data_hope 10y ago
http://majutsushi.github.io/tagbar/ http://majutsushi.github.io/tagbar/ ?

LukeLaPira 10y ago

IDK

censored_again 10y ago

Wow, hundreds of developers and 7 newsletters!1!! has Netcraft already confirmed that Vim is obsolete?

owaislone 10y ago
Just past month and that too after Neovim lit a fire under Vim. The difference would be much bigger if you check for a period of last 2 years or so. Neovim: https://github.com/neovim/neovim/pulse/monthly https://github.com/neovim/neovim/pulse/monthly Vim: https://github.com/vim/vim/pulse/monthly https://github.com/vim/vim/pulse/monthly I don't know why people feel emotional about Vim. Neovim is just Vim with a breath of fresh air.
- throwaway88172 10y ago
  And gruseom seems to agree. He is ruling with an iron fist in this thread.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
sctb 10y ago
We've banned this serial troll account. Please don't create accounts to violate the guidelines like this. We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13237170 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13237170 and marked it off-topic. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
deleted 10y ago
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