7 ms·

The Great Vim / Textmate Debate: Opinion #56 - How to make Vim more accessible

50 points by Lewisham 16y ago

sigzero 16y ago
I did not know there was a "great" debate between Textmate and Vim. I would expect the camps to be rather far apart. It would be nice if the "new" version of Textmate would come out. It seems to be floundering.
- bitboxer 16y ago
  More and more people are switching to Vim at the moment. Especially in the Ruby On Rails community.
- dasil003 16y ago
  I think it's just a hot topic currently in the Ruby community because there is so much blogging and memes take hold faster than in other developer communities. That said, I am a ruby developer on OS X, and I have been using TextMate as my primary editor even though I cut my teeth on basic vi usage 15 years ago. The fact that TextMate 2 is suffering serious second-system syndrome is undoubtedly a big part of why Vim is getting so much mindshare. TextMate is an amazing editor, and in my (limited) experience, certainly one of the few in the last 2 decades to even attempt to challenge emacs/vim on their own turf (ie. lightweight powerful editors). But ultimately I think a one-developer closed source model will never be able to create a third truly great editor. The main factors driving me towards vim are maturity and general editing optimality. Maturity because vim has been around and is open source, so millions of wrinkles have been ironed out: very few crashing bugs, good performance on large files, handles edge cases well and has settings for probably anything you'd ever need, etc. Optimality because vi attempts to allow editing with the fewest number of keystrokes. Becoming fluent in vi means that for any type of text editing you can make any desired change in a near optimal number of keystrokes. It's a pretty safe bet that no one will ever come up with a more optimal editor for such a wide range of tasks. Sure IDEs have a high local maxima, but they fall off quickly as you jump to files that fall outside known semantics. TextMate gives you a middle ground for writing quick snippets and commands, but I'm starting to question the long term value of that versus the benefits of universal availability and just taking some time to find good plugins for various language-specific development.
  - Lewisham 16y ago
    I definitely felt somewhat pushed by the mythical creature that TextMate 2 is. This isn't to say I have any outstanding critical issues with TextMate as it is, more that I feel like I've plateaued with it, but I know there's a faster way of doing things by watching Vim masters at work. Katz's post was the catalyst to pushing me to actually go and try it; he seemed like he was a similar mindset to me, and his success spurred me on.
- rimantas 16y ago
  I use both (plus Netbeans occasionally). I wish Textmate had vim mode (I got vim plugin for Netbeans).
zmmz 16y ago
Regarding the plugin issue, the solution is already around, .vba files: http://vimdoc.sourceforge.net/htmldoc/pi_vimball.html http://vimdoc.sourceforge.net/htmldoc/pi_vimball.html Actually, the doc says that you need to do the following: vim someplugin.vba :so % :q With macVim, I found that simply double clicking the .vba in finder does everything needed.
gfodor 16y ago
Defaults: Agreed, though those of us who have been on vim for a long time obviously have a .vimrc we carry around. It'd be nice to have a better set of defaults. Plugins: Vimballs already solve this problem largely. Automatically in insert mode: Oh gosh no. The only case where you'd want to start in insert mode, I'd guess, is a new file. If you're opening an existing file, you're not going to start wanting to type at the beginning of it. Generally the first command in a file is a search or jump to line. The author mentioned that he wanted a plugin that can quickly comment a line. There's more than a few ways to do this manually in vim that is quick. For example, to comment a block: ^<ctrl-v><n>jI# <ctrl-[> where <n> is the number of lines to comment. You can also easily write a command in your vimrc to comment the current line in one keystroke.
- wwortiz 16y ago
  Thanks for that tip I would just have Visual mode, select lines, I, and then #, Esc Esc I need like a vim tip a day or something to show me more of these tricks.
  - cgs1019 16y ago
    The vim users mailing list is extremely lively and full of little tidbits like this. I highly recommend following it.
    - gnosis 16y ago
      You might also be interested in #vim on freenode. Get all your questions answered in real time.
      - Davertron 16y ago
        I second this, the people in #vim are awesome and usually very quick to answer your questions. It's also one of the friendliest channels I've been in, for what it's worth.
  - fragmede 16y ago
KaeseEs 16y ago
Does vimtutor not come with MacVim? It would have alleviated some of his issues.
jrockway 16y ago
Sounds like the "more accessible" version of Vim is Emacs.
telemachos 16y ago
A few people have mentioned vimballs as a plugin solution. There are (at least) two other potential solutions for plugin handling: Pathogen and Vimana. Pathogen is what the blog author is actually using already, but he didn't realize it initially. He refers to a .vim repo on Github that "does some magic where [it] puts each plugin in its own directory under /~.vim/bundles/." What he describes here is based on Tim Pope's Pathogen: basically a plugin to manage all other plugins. I've been using Pathogen for a bit now, and it's excellent. Another solution is Cornelius Lin's Vimana, which I've heard very good things about, but I haven't tried. Some links below. http://github.com/tpope/vim-pathogen http://github.com/tpope/vim-pathogen http://tammersaleh.com/posts/the-modern-vim-config-with-pathogen http://tammersaleh.com/posts/the-modern-vim-config-with-path... http://ithaca.arpinum.org/2010/06/28/vim-updates.html http://ithaca.arpinum.org/2010/06/28/vim-updates.html http://github.com/c9s/Vimana http://github.com/c9s/Vimana
- xtho 16y ago
  There are other similar solution for handling "bundles" (or plugins distributed as git repositories): tpugin (on demand path manipulation): http://github.com/tomtom/vimtlib/blob/master/macros/tplugin.vim http://github.com/tomtom/vimtlib/blob/master/macros/tplugin.... scriptmanager: http://github.com/MarcWeber/vim-addon-manager http://github.com/MarcWeber/vim-addon-manager
bjg 16y ago
Warning: Mini Rant It's funny that out of nowhere, all these ruby developers jump on the band wagon after reading a few blog posts. Then they immediately complain about it being so terrible. The original version of vi was written in 1976. The first version of vim was released in 1991. The 19/34 year old defaults of vim/vi aren't good enough for the hipster rubyists. However they seemed to be just fine for the hundreds or even thousands of systems developers and hackers who developed the foundation for the systems the take for granted. Rubyists are the loudest, most complaining, annoying group of egotistical developers to have ever existed. Vim is an editor, not emacs, not Textmate. There is no reason to use it or blog about it, or utter it's name if you don't think it fit's your work flow. Really, 99% of people don't care about your opinion on vim at all. Also a small observation: Every Textmate user I have ever met (who all also happen to be rubyists) depends too much on "bundles" and snippet features.
- rue 16y ago
  > The 19/34 year old defaults of vim/vi aren't good enough for the hipster rubyists. However they seemed to be just fine for the hundreds or even thousands of systems developers and hackers who developed the foundation for the systems the take for granted. Yes, because as we know these hackers have empty .vimrc files. No sirree, just the defaults thanks!
  - bjg 16y ago
    That is a very true point. However, as you are point out, every body has a .exrc/.vimrc In my useless opinion the current defaults are as general as they can be. I believe they are currently set so that both 20 year veterans and beginners can use any instance of vim if they happen to be without their favorite .vimrc config.
  - blasdel 16y ago
    I do. The only time I set a .vimrc is on Debian-derived distros where they don't set nocompatible or syntax on. vi has good defaults. If I used emacs, I'd have to drag around my config everywhere to set usable keybindings. With vi and vim I can just use the defaults everywhere.
bonaldi 16y ago
I wonder what things would have been like if they'd used BBEdit for that Rails screencast, way back when.
jarin 16y ago
Funny timing, I just started my annual "gonna try to switch from TextMate to vim" last night. It seems like every time I do this the amount of time I use vim gets longer and longer (went from a few days to a week to a few weeks to a month). Every time I learn more and more things that make me edge toward switching to vim full-time. I've got pretty much all the basics down, and I think I might stick to it this time. The things that are helping me out the most this time are: increasing my system key repeat rate, lowering the repeat delay, and buying PeepOpen http://peepcode.com/products/peepopen http://peepcode.com/products/peepopen
- planckscnst 16y ago
  For the next step, I highly recommend Vimperator plugin for Firefox. It uses Vim keybindings and really gets your fingers used to using the letters for commands instead of ctrl+keys.
Ramone 16y ago
So I know this won't be popular, but I've got to say it. I'm baffled at these text editor debates. It's almost like developers think that code-input is a significant part of their job. It's not. It's just some accidental complexity that goes with the territory. Speeding up your text-wrangling ability won't do anything to help you be a better/faster developer. I use vim all the time (as well as a bunch of others) and yes of course it was an unnecessary pain-in-the-ass to learn. It's all mindless rote learning that doesn't prove anyone's smarter than anyone else either. My theory is that people won't admit this because they're already invested and on the other side of the steep learning curve. The bottom line is that there's no editor that will make you a better programmer. If you're worried about quick input, you're probably banging out boilerplate and not working at the right level of abstraction.
- Lewisham 16y ago
  Oh, I absolutely agree it's accidental complexity and won't make you a better developer, but we can always optimize, no? Is there a really good reason to choose Python over Ruby? Usually not, but some people do take a lot of time thinking about such things :) I personally find the ecosystem of software development interesting, I enjoy debates about minuscule language features or text editors or design patterns. I am not really sure why; maybe I think it exposes the variety of the discipline, and I think it might make you a more well-rounded programmer if you take in that wider view. It's hard to put my finger on and verbalize.
- tel 16y ago
  Totally disagree. The kind of shoe you wear is conceptually orthogonal to your job of walking from one place to another. Practically, however, your choice will drastically impact your comfort, walking range, and possibly even overall health. So pick an editor (or set of editors) that fits, is comfortable, and lets you walk, run, jog, and sprint.
  - Ramone 16y ago
    I actually agree with everything you've said there. I just don't think the top editors are different enough in feature-set to make it matter much. Your choice of text editor is just a micro-optimization. As much as I'd like, there isn't one that will turn me into the code-whisperer.
swah 16y ago
But Vim is IMO ugly. Even Emacs looks so much better.. Vim is so.. character based.
Ayjay 16y ago
I recently converted from various other graphical IDE's (Visual Studio and Eclipse) to start using exclusively Vim to develop with, and I'm loving it. I don't think it really needs to be made more accessible, but what would have been AWESOME would be to have known about vim-tutor. I only just found out about it after I've spent a few weeks working in Vim, and have largely passed the time when vim-tutor would have helped. It REALLY should be on the main vim screen, not in the help. Maybe I'm weird in that I have an inherent distrust the help in open source apps. Most of the times, they seem to be archaic, and targeted at the very advanced users (see man pages). Thankfully, I've passed the initial stumbling-around period, and now know that the help is actually written in a very readable format. Maybe all that needs to happen is for that to be better communicated. -- Ayjay on Fedang
telemachos 16y ago
A sidenote, but for people who are following the Vim 7.3 betas, 7.3e (which is meant to be the last beta - this is last call for problems) was out yesterday. I've been using 7.3 a little, and persistent undo (undo history between editing sessions) is very nice. Announcement and how to get it: http://xrl.us/bhvizi http://xrl.us/bhvizi
carussell 16y ago
This was all the proof I had previously needed that Vim wasn’t for me; the only command I ever learnt previously was :!q. I guess he wrote a shell script at ~/bin/q that killed Vim processes?

50 points by Lewisham 16y ago

I did not know there was a "great" debate between Textmate and Vim. I would expect the camps to be rather far apart. It would be nice if the "new" version of Textmate would come out. It seems to be floundering.

bitboxer 16y ago
More and more people are switching to Vim at the moment. Especially in the Ruby On Rails community.
dasil003 16y ago
I think it's just a hot topic currently in the Ruby community because there is so much blogging and memes take hold faster than in other developer communities. That said, I am a ruby developer on OS X, and I have been using TextMate as my primary editor even though I cut my teeth on basic vi usage 15 years ago. The fact that TextMate 2 is suffering serious second-system syndrome is undoubtedly a big part of why Vim is getting so much mindshare. TextMate is an amazing editor, and in my (limited) experience, certainly one of the few in the last 2 decades to even attempt to challenge emacs/vim on their own turf (ie. lightweight powerful editors). But ultimately I think a one-developer closed source model will never be able to create a third truly great editor. The main factors driving me towards vim are maturity and general editing optimality. Maturity because vim has been around and is open source, so millions of wrinkles have been ironed out: very few crashing bugs, good performance on large files, handles edge cases well and has settings for probably anything you'd ever need, etc. Optimality because vi attempts to allow editing with the fewest number of keystrokes. Becoming fluent in vi means that for any type of text editing you can make any desired change in a near optimal number of keystrokes. It's a pretty safe bet that no one will ever come up with a more optimal editor for such a wide range of tasks. Sure IDEs have a high local maxima, but they fall off quickly as you jump to files that fall outside known semantics. TextMate gives you a middle ground for writing quick snippets and commands, but I'm starting to question the long term value of that versus the benefits of universal availability and just taking some time to find good plugins for various language-specific development.
- Lewisham 16y ago
  I definitely felt somewhat pushed by the mythical creature that TextMate 2 is. This isn't to say I have any outstanding critical issues with TextMate as it is, more that I feel like I've plateaued with it, but I know there's a faster way of doing things by watching Vim masters at work. Katz's post was the catalyst to pushing me to actually go and try it; he seemed like he was a similar mindset to me, and his success spurred me on.
rimantas 16y ago
I use both (plus Netbeans occasionally). I wish Textmate had vim mode (I got vim plugin for Netbeans).

zmmz 16y ago

Regarding the plugin issue, the solution is already around, .vba files: http://vimdoc.sourceforge.net/htmldoc/pi_vimball.html http://vimdoc.sourceforge.net/htmldoc/pi_vimball.html Actually, the doc says that you need to do the following: vim someplugin.vba :so % :q With macVim, I found that simply double clicking the .vba in finder does everything needed.

gfodor 16y ago

Defaults: Agreed, though those of us who have been on vim for a long time obviously have a .vimrc we carry around. It'd be nice to have a better set of defaults. Plugins: Vimballs already solve this problem largely. Automatically in insert mode: Oh gosh no. The only case where you'd want to start in insert mode, I'd guess, is a new file. If you're opening an existing file, you're not going to start wanting to type at the beginning of it. Generally the first command in a file is a search or jump to line. The author mentioned that he wanted a plugin that can quickly comment a line. There's more than a few ways to do this manually in vim that is quick. For example, to comment a block: ^<ctrl-v><n>jI# <ctrl-[> where <n> is the number of lines to comment. You can also easily write a command in your vimrc to comment the current line in one keystroke.

wwortiz 16y ago
Thanks for that tip I would just have Visual mode, select lines, I, and then #, Esc Esc I need like a vim tip a day or something to show me more of these tricks.
- cgs1019 16y ago
  The vim users mailing list is extremely lively and full of little tidbits like this. I highly recommend following it.
  - gnosis 16y ago
    You might also be interested in #vim on freenode. Get all your questions answered in real time.
    - Davertron 16y ago
      I second this, the people in #vim are awesome and usually very quick to answer your questions. It's also one of the friendliest channels I've been in, for what it's worth.
- fragmede 16y ago

KaeseEs 16y ago

Does vimtutor not come with MacVim? It would have alleviated some of his issues.

jrockway 16y ago

Sounds like the "more accessible" version of Vim is Emacs.

telemachos 16y ago

A few people have mentioned vimballs as a plugin solution. There are (at least) two other potential solutions for plugin handling: Pathogen and Vimana. Pathogen is what the blog author is actually using already, but he didn't realize it initially. He refers to a .vim repo on Github that "does some magic where [it] puts each plugin in its own directory under /~.vim/bundles/." What he describes here is based on Tim Pope's Pathogen: basically a plugin to manage all other plugins. I've been using Pathogen for a bit now, and it's excellent. Another solution is Cornelius Lin's Vimana, which I've heard very good things about, but I haven't tried. Some links below. http://github.com/tpope/vim-pathogen http://github.com/tpope/vim-pathogen http://tammersaleh.com/posts/the-modern-vim-config-with-pathogen http://tammersaleh.com/posts/the-modern-vim-config-with-path... http://ithaca.arpinum.org/2010/06/28/vim-updates.html http://ithaca.arpinum.org/2010/06/28/vim-updates.html http://github.com/c9s/Vimana http://github.com/c9s/Vimana

xtho 16y ago
There are other similar solution for handling "bundles" (or plugins distributed as git repositories): tpugin (on demand path manipulation): http://github.com/tomtom/vimtlib/blob/master/macros/tplugin.vim http://github.com/tomtom/vimtlib/blob/master/macros/tplugin.... scriptmanager: http://github.com/MarcWeber/vim-addon-manager http://github.com/MarcWeber/vim-addon-manager

bjg 16y ago

Warning: Mini Rant It's funny that out of nowhere, all these ruby developers jump on the band wagon after reading a few blog posts. Then they immediately complain about it being so terrible. The original version of vi was written in 1976. The first version of vim was released in 1991. The 19/34 year old defaults of vim/vi aren't good enough for the hipster rubyists. However they seemed to be just fine for the hundreds or even thousands of systems developers and hackers who developed the foundation for the systems the take for granted. Rubyists are the loudest, most complaining, annoying group of egotistical developers to have ever existed. Vim is an editor, not emacs, not Textmate. There is no reason to use it or blog about it, or utter it's name if you don't think it fit's your work flow. Really, 99% of people don't care about your opinion on vim at all. Also a small observation: Every Textmate user I have ever met (who all also happen to be rubyists) depends too much on "bundles" and snippet features.

rue 16y ago
> The 19/34 year old defaults of vim/vi aren't good enough for the hipster rubyists. However they seemed to be just fine for the hundreds or even thousands of systems developers and hackers who developed the foundation for the systems the take for granted. Yes, because as we know these hackers have empty .vimrc files. No sirree, just the defaults thanks!
- bjg 16y ago
  That is a very true point. However, as you are point out, every body has a .exrc/.vimrc In my useless opinion the current defaults are as general as they can be. I believe they are currently set so that both 20 year veterans and beginners can use any instance of vim if they happen to be without their favorite .vimrc config.
- blasdel 16y ago
  I do. The only time I set a .vimrc is on Debian-derived distros where they don't set nocompatible or syntax on. vi has good defaults. If I used emacs, I'd have to drag around my config everywhere to set usable keybindings. With vi and vim I can just use the defaults everywhere.

bonaldi 16y ago

I wonder what things would have been like if they'd used BBEdit for that Rails screencast, way back when.

jarin 16y ago

Funny timing, I just started my annual "gonna try to switch from TextMate to vim" last night. It seems like every time I do this the amount of time I use vim gets longer and longer (went from a few days to a week to a few weeks to a month). Every time I learn more and more things that make me edge toward switching to vim full-time. I've got pretty much all the basics down, and I think I might stick to it this time. The things that are helping me out the most this time are: increasing my system key repeat rate, lowering the repeat delay, and buying PeepOpen http://peepcode.com/products/peepopen http://peepcode.com/products/peepopen

planckscnst 16y ago
For the next step, I highly recommend Vimperator plugin for Firefox. It uses Vim keybindings and really gets your fingers used to using the letters for commands instead of ctrl+keys.

Ramone 16y ago

So I know this won't be popular, but I've got to say it. I'm baffled at these text editor debates. It's almost like developers think that code-input is a significant part of their job. It's not. It's just some accidental complexity that goes with the territory. Speeding up your text-wrangling ability won't do anything to help you be a better/faster developer. I use vim all the time (as well as a bunch of others) and yes of course it was an unnecessary pain-in-the-ass to learn. It's all mindless rote learning that doesn't prove anyone's smarter than anyone else either. My theory is that people won't admit this because they're already invested and on the other side of the steep learning curve. The bottom line is that there's no editor that will make you a better programmer. If you're worried about quick input, you're probably banging out boilerplate and not working at the right level of abstraction.

Lewisham 16y ago
Oh, I absolutely agree it's accidental complexity and won't make you a better developer, but we can always optimize, no? Is there a really good reason to choose Python over Ruby? Usually not, but some people do take a lot of time thinking about such things :) I personally find the ecosystem of software development interesting, I enjoy debates about minuscule language features or text editors or design patterns. I am not really sure why; maybe I think it exposes the variety of the discipline, and I think it might make you a more well-rounded programmer if you take in that wider view. It's hard to put my finger on and verbalize.
tel 16y ago
Totally disagree. The kind of shoe you wear is conceptually orthogonal to your job of walking from one place to another. Practically, however, your choice will drastically impact your comfort, walking range, and possibly even overall health. So pick an editor (or set of editors) that fits, is comfortable, and lets you walk, run, jog, and sprint.
- Ramone 16y ago
  I actually agree with everything you've said there. I just don't think the top editors are different enough in feature-set to make it matter much. Your choice of text editor is just a micro-optimization. As much as I'd like, there isn't one that will turn me into the code-whisperer.

swah 16y ago

But Vim is IMO ugly. Even Emacs looks so much better.. Vim is so.. character based.

Ayjay 16y ago

I recently converted from various other graphical IDE's (Visual Studio and Eclipse) to start using exclusively Vim to develop with, and I'm loving it. I don't think it really needs to be made more accessible, but what would have been AWESOME would be to have known about vim-tutor. I only just found out about it after I've spent a few weeks working in Vim, and have largely passed the time when vim-tutor would have helped. It REALLY should be on the main vim screen, not in the help. Maybe I'm weird in that I have an inherent distrust the help in open source apps. Most of the times, they seem to be archaic, and targeted at the very advanced users (see man pages). Thankfully, I've passed the initial stumbling-around period, and now know that the help is actually written in a very readable format. Maybe all that needs to happen is for that to be better communicated. -- Ayjay on Fedang

telemachos 16y ago

A sidenote, but for people who are following the Vim 7.3 betas, 7.3e (which is meant to be the last beta - this is last call for problems) was out yesterday. I've been using 7.3 a little, and persistent undo (undo history between editing sessions) is very nice. Announcement and how to get it: http://xrl.us/bhvizi http://xrl.us/bhvizi

carussell 16y ago

This was all the proof I had previously needed that Vim wasn’t for me; the only command I ever learnt previously was :!q. I guess he wrote a shell script at ~/bin/q that killed Vim processes?