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vi is less unintuitive, as I noted above. There's also much less, which is really helpful.

by kick 6y ago

pvg 6y ago
vi is less unintuitive, as I noted above. I am having trouble finding that in your long comment. The initial experience of using vi and emacs are hardly different in some fundamental way so either being unintuitive seems like a poor way to explain their respective popularity (or lack thereof).
- kick 6y ago
  You read a little bit more and eventually get to cursor control. Wow, somehow they managed to pick the only possible thing less intuitive than 'hjkl'! The initial experience of vi is that you learn six keys to press to make it do things, and go from there. Emacs is significantly more complex than that, starting out. It's definitely not intuitive, but it's an order of magnitude of difference from Emacs, which could be described as anti-intuitive.
  - pvg 6y ago
    Vi has text input modality, unlike essentially, well, anything. It's an entirely different model of operation which it shares with no current software and hasn't for a quarter century. It's strange to be talking about the UI details of vi/emacs (both, by current standards, about equally super-weird) when the article itself is a kind of perfect vignette of the organizational dysfunction of the group that maintains emacs.
    - kick 6y ago
      'press i and then basically everything works as you'd expect' is pretty simple; it's got a significantly-smaller barrier to entry than Emacs, and breaks fewer core-assumptions. Is that agreeable to you? The thread on the mailing list was basically guesses as to why Emacs has lost popularity & methods of regaining it, and the lwn article is primarily focused on just relaying it. The thread itself doesn't point to all that much dysfunction, in my opinion.
      - kgwgk 6y ago
        > 'press i and then basically everything works as you'd expect' is pretty simple If that means that you can press letters in they keyboard and see them appear in the screen that’s also true in Emacs... and you don’t even have to press ‘i’ for things to start working as expected.
        kick 6y ago
        Emacs breaks assumptions of the operating system; vi does not.
        fhennig 6y ago
        What does that mean? In vi if I press "i" I can't use the arrow keys to navigate the text as normal. In emacs I can. I'd say using the arrow keys for navigation in text fields is a very widely accepted functionality. So isn't it vi breaking the expected behavior here?
      - pvg 6y ago
        'press i and then basically everything works as you'd expect' is pretty simple; it's got a significantly-smaller barrier to entry than Emacs, and breaks fewer core-assumptions. Is that agreeable to you? It's not. Maybe we're talking about completely different things because I'm not following this at all, just like the other responder downthread. For decades, GUI text entry has been modeless. Larry Tessler one of the GUI's pioneers and prophets (PBUH) had a 'NO MODES' license plate and the idea remains a central theme in UI design. Vi doesn't do that. It does this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vim_(text_editor)#Modes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vim_(text_editor)#Modes I don't mean to debate the merits of this design but in terms of 'breaking core assumptions, vi 'breaks the core assumption' of typing text into a computer. It's not, per Winnfield, the same ball park, same league or even the same sport.

vi is less unintuitive, as I noted above. There's also much less, which is really helpful.

by kick 6y ago

vi is less unintuitive, as I noted above. There's also much less, which is really helpful.

pvg 6y ago

vi is less unintuitive, as I noted above. I am having trouble finding that in your long comment. The initial experience of using vi and emacs are hardly different in some fundamental way so either being unintuitive seems like a poor way to explain their respective popularity (or lack thereof).

kick 6y ago
You read a little bit more and eventually get to cursor control. Wow, somehow they managed to pick the only possible thing less intuitive than 'hjkl'! The initial experience of vi is that you learn six keys to press to make it do things, and go from there. Emacs is significantly more complex than that, starting out. It's definitely not intuitive, but it's an order of magnitude of difference from Emacs, which could be described as anti-intuitive.
- pvg 6y ago
  Vi has text input modality, unlike essentially, well, anything. It's an entirely different model of operation which it shares with no current software and hasn't for a quarter century. It's strange to be talking about the UI details of vi/emacs (both, by current standards, about equally super-weird) when the article itself is a kind of perfect vignette of the organizational dysfunction of the group that maintains emacs.
  - kick 6y ago
    'press i and then basically everything works as you'd expect' is pretty simple; it's got a significantly-smaller barrier to entry than Emacs, and breaks fewer core-assumptions. Is that agreeable to you? The thread on the mailing list was basically guesses as to why Emacs has lost popularity & methods of regaining it, and the lwn article is primarily focused on just relaying it. The thread itself doesn't point to all that much dysfunction, in my opinion.
    - kgwgk 6y ago
      > 'press i and then basically everything works as you'd expect' is pretty simple If that means that you can press letters in they keyboard and see them appear in the screen that’s also true in Emacs... and you don’t even have to press ‘i’ for things to start working as expected.
      - kick 6y ago
        Emacs breaks assumptions of the operating system; vi does not.
        fhennig 6y ago
        What does that mean? In vi if I press "i" I can't use the arrow keys to navigate the text as normal. In emacs I can. I'd say using the arrow keys for navigation in text fields is a very widely accepted functionality. So isn't it vi breaking the expected behavior here?
    - pvg 6y ago
      'press i and then basically everything works as you'd expect' is pretty simple; it's got a significantly-smaller barrier to entry than Emacs, and breaks fewer core-assumptions. Is that agreeable to you? It's not. Maybe we're talking about completely different things because I'm not following this at all, just like the other responder downthread. For decades, GUI text entry has been modeless. Larry Tessler one of the GUI's pioneers and prophets (PBUH) had a 'NO MODES' license plate and the idea remains a central theme in UI design. Vi doesn't do that. It does this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vim_(text_editor)#Modes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vim_(text_editor)#Modes I don't mean to debate the merits of this design but in terms of 'breaking core assumptions, vi 'breaks the core assumption' of typing text into a computer. It's not, per Winnfield, the same ball park, same league or even the same sport.