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I hope I didn't give the impression I think Vim is terrible. If I did, I wouldn't have said at the beginning that I'd moved to it completely. I think it's just

I hope I didn't give the impression I think Vim is terrible. If I did, I wouldn't have said at the beginning that I'd moved to it completely. I think it's just suffered under the weight of it's age, where defaults, audiences and expectations were different. What I found interesting was that the things that turned me off were really easily solved; there's nothing wrong with the core of Vim at all. It's just window-dressing issues that someone with more skills than I would be able to solve relatively easily. I wouldn't call myself a Rubyist (I like Scala more), but I'd prefer the hipster tag to loser ;) I actually don't think depending on bundles and snippet features is bad at all. I think that indicates the flexibility of TextMate from first boot, and it means users are getting to the power the editor is providing, rather than skimming across the top. But when I watch a Vim pro though, it's light years faster than how quickly I can move around. As the other commenter mentioned, they do have highly customized .vimrc's and such to get to that place though.

bjg 16y ago
Just FYI my comment wasn't really a personal attack on you or your post. I was talking more in general, I've seen several within the last week through many different channels. Vim with sane defaults was create a few years ago, it's called cream http://cream.sourceforge.net http://cream.sourceforge.net It didn't really take off, at least as far as I know.
mightybyte 16y ago
The problem here is that no matter how much you like vim, when you argue against the most important paradigm (defaulting to normal mode) that makes vim so powerful, the people who understand and appreciate this feature will assume that you don't like vim itself. And then you'll get people saying that you're utterly clueless. Vim is a tool. Let me say that again. VIM IS A TOOL. It's purpose in life is not to be easy to use or to garner the biggest user base. It's purpose in life is to make text editing as efficient as possible. That means that you default to normal mode. Period. If you don't live in normal mode, then you just don't grok vi(m). I'm not sure what's different about our use cases, but I find the vim defaults to be quite reasonable. I have a .vimrc file, but pretty much consists of syntax highlighting and tabstop settings. And I differ from the mainstream here anyway.

bjg 16y ago

Just FYI my comment wasn't really a personal attack on you or your post. I was talking more in general, I've seen several within the last week through many different channels. Vim with sane defaults was create a few years ago, it's called cream http://cream.sourceforge.net http://cream.sourceforge.net It didn't really take off, at least as far as I know.

mightybyte 16y ago

The problem here is that no matter how much you like vim, when you argue against the most important paradigm (defaulting to normal mode) that makes vim so powerful, the people who understand and appreciate this feature will assume that you don't like vim itself. And then you'll get people saying that you're utterly clueless. Vim is a tool. Let me say that again. VIM IS A TOOL. It's purpose in life is not to be easy to use or to garner the biggest user base. It's purpose in life is to make text editing as efficient as possible. That means that you default to normal mode. Period. If you don't live in normal mode, then you just don't grok vi(m). I'm not sure what's different about our use cases, but I find the vim defaults to be quite reasonable. I have a .vimrc file, but pretty much consists of syntax highlighting and tabstop settings. And I differ from the mainstream here anyway.