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Speaking personally, I've been a professional developer for almost decade and even in my relatively short career I've seen a lot of technologies come and go. I

Speaking personally, I've been a professional developer for almost decade and even in my relatively short career I've seen a lot of technologies come and go. I was reluctantly roped into it by my first boss, an enthusiastic Vim advocate. And since, almost nothing else (save for maybe git) beat learning vim from a return on investment perspective. From the default mac OS installation to some old Fedora box that has not been patched since the early 2000s, Vim (or its simpler brother Vi) has always been there! And once I got used to it, I couldn't really imagine using computers any other way. I'd go so far as to say that the 'home row' concept of vim is the ergonomic ideal of keyboard based computing, and I now try to mimic that behavior everywhere -- the vimium extension in chrome, various vim plugins for vs code and sublime etc. If you're on the fence, I'd urge you to give in!

stragies 6y ago
Same here, and then i discovered EVIL, the vi layer for emacs. The best of all worlds: Vim text manipulation grammar over the emacs engine.
- ed25519FUUU 6y ago
  Alas, the emacs install base is fraction of vi/vim.
  - cyberbanjo 6y ago
    I've always assumed the opposite with how people say emacs is a nice OS and poor editor... What does Vim over emacs?
    - jrumbut 6y ago
      It's not a comment on quality or usefulness, and only indirectly its resource consumption (vi/vim consumes less than emacs in its default configuration), it's really about standards. vi and the ex editor language are part of the POSIX standard and were around early in the history of BSD. See the history here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vi https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vi For a well worn joke on the subject, "Ed is the standard!": https://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/ed-msg.en.html https://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/ed-msg.en.html
    - cat199 6y ago
      this is huge flamewar territory, but this is a bit 'off' question wise - alot of the current state of things is due to historical precedent - some details: - (original) vi was on most unices from the mid-80s onwards out of the box - (gnu/lucid) emacs was an additional install (not getting into other emacs flavors - original teco emacs was fairly small i believe). - original vi just had basic editing and at some point a hardcoded lisp mode, no addons vs gnu emacs which was a programmable editing environment running within a lisp interpreter - remeber in the early days, people built whole custom hardware to be able to run lisp with sufficient complexity (see also: lisp machines, twenex, etc), so using lisp for your editor was in some sense the definition of 'overkill', depending on ones view of what an editor should do - Also, from late-80s->90s era if you wanted a GUI for your text editor you probably used emacs, and real vi never had a gui option - put another way emacs was the only one of the two linked to gui libraries. - vim vs vi: most obvious difference (IMHO) feature wise is that vim adds vimscript, which is an interpreted programming language, so now editing modes are extensible, etc (as was the case in emacs before). detail: vim codebase is not based on vi codebase. since vi was just about everywhere and emacs was a (fairly large) package, you had more general vi knowledge vs emacs 'in the culture' since even an emacs user might need to know vi but not usually the other way around, and so vi (later vim, as linux distros switched their 'default vi' to 'vim') gained more install base by default. Then, people hearing about emacs likely hear the 'vi vs emacs' arguments and never try it since there are now many more choices, they've learned vi, they prefer an IDE, etc (in the old days there was much less choice, main 2 were vi and emacs, and emacs was probably somewhere on your managed LAN somewhere if you wanted to give it a shot) most of the 'vi vs emacs' arguments are rooted in the real-vi vs fsf-emacs era and are basically obsolete in a modern vim era, since everyone is using gui library vim with vimscript, which basically means the same thing in terms of 'bloat' (both editors contain engines to display text in cli or gui mode and embed a language interpreter). Basically what was once valid internet lore kept getting past down, and the 'minimalism' of vim was confused with being 'minimal' in terms of what people meant in the original vi-vs-emacs discussions. Emacs does contain 'non editor' functions e.g. networking, etc, so the core is probably a bit bigger than the core of vim, but when people are still using these comparisons and talking about 'emacs bloat' while their preferred editor is some electron based thing, we've lost a bit of the point/message..
    - harrygeez 6y ago
      I love Emacs and have been using it for years but whenever I want to make a really quick edit, i.e. writing a git commit I almost always reach for vi because by the time Emacs loaded I would've been done committing with vi, at least with a slower machine. I know some people run Emacs in daemon mode, but it's not always convenient to do that This and when I ssh into any machine, I know there will be a vi at the very least
      - Kaze404 6y ago
        > This and when I ssh into any machine, I know there will be a vi at the very least You could use emacs for that. Editing over ssh using TRAMP works perfectly in every case I've used it.
    - alwillis 6y ago
      It’s composability is Vim’s killer feature. This post is what got me started on Vim: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1218390/what-is-your-most-productive-shortcut-with-vim/1220118#1220118 https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1218390/what-is-your-mos...
    - sqrt17 6y ago
      1) vim is easier on your hands if you're on a high-latency connection (i.e. usable in a terminal) and/or get tired of chording (i.e. having to press Ctrl along with random keys). 2) I've found vim's plugin systems (Pathogen, Vundle, vim-plug) vastly more intuitive than Emacs' version with package-install and activating one of several repositories (Milk, ELPA, MELPA, whatever) - you install the same plugin regardless of whether you're using Vundle or vim-plug 3) vim and its packages are vastly easier to configure - this is subjective and may be much improved in Doom Emacs/Spacemacs, but in general vim packages have a bunch of global variables that you can set to a number or a string whereas most emacs packages need you to define elisp functions and/or nontrivial data structures, with no sane defaults to fall back on if you want things just to work
  - the_jeremy 6y ago
    I am also surprised by this. What are you basing it on? For arbitrarily comparable online communities, it looks like emacs.stackexchange.com is twice as active as vi.stackexchange.com
    - unoti 6y ago
      > ...the emacs install base is fraction of vi/vim. > What are you basing it on? ... it looks like emacs.stackexchange.com is twice as active as vi.stackexchange.com A couple of things about this. For myself and many others, the reason I started vi in the first place is it's been installed by default on many kinds of machines. On SCO Unix and AIX from my youth, for example, this was the editor you used on a vanilla install of a machine to get things going. So this is part of why the install base is larger. Another part of why the emacs community is more active is that Vi is just an editor, while emacs is more of a programming language and I daresay nearly an operating system in its own right. Because of the amazing power and flexibility of emacs there's a lot more stuff to discuss for Emacs than Vi.
      - maxlybbert 6y ago
        When I was teaching myself to program, I had a night job in a warehouse. It so happened that the inventory software was on a UNIX server, and we accessed it through a terminal emulator from our windows computer. I discovered one day that I could exit the inventory software and end up with a shell prompt, and that the server had Perl available. My computer books convinced me that emacs was the better editor, but it wasn’t installed on the server. vi was. So I learned vi and Perl on my lunch breaks.
    - rplst8 6y ago
      Vi users RTFM.
    - zorked 6y ago
      Emacs is more complex, and Emacs users do more in Emacs than just edit text. (think org-mode, debugger frontends, mail readers, etc.)
    - 6y ago
  - harrygeez 6y ago
    I love emacs, but I taught myself to use vi because I know when I ssh into a remote server there will have a vi.
    - chupasaurus 6y ago
      Even if it's a Cisco router and there are no text files other than a note.txt 'Here be dragons'
    - davidw 6y ago
      Emacs has an edit-over-ssh mode that's pretty useful.
      - CodeGlitch 6y ago
        Yes Tramp mode.
      - dijit 6y ago
        You can do that in vim via scp like this: vim scp://user@myserver[:port]//path/to/file.txt
- generalk 6y ago
  I've used Emacs for many years, and recently switched to Spacemacs, a set of configs that kind of takes over Emacs and puts a great platform on top of it. I frequently describe Spacemacs as a better vim than vim. Don't get me wrong, I've used vim for ages; I'll never stop editing server config with vi, nor will I stop getting mad when vi is actually vi and not vim. But for a day to day code editor? Spacemacs is astonishingly good. (Of course, Spacemacs is built on top of EVIL, as well as dozens of other packages. On the shoulders of giants, as we say.)
  - Kaze404 6y ago
    Wait until you find out about Doom, which I consider to be all the good of Spacemacs without the crust.
  - alpaca128 6y ago
    The problem with Emacs and all its modifications is that it cannot match Vim's flexible system for custom keybindings. And because of that Evil mode has the same limitation, beside its insistence to prefer using builtin Emacs functionality over emulating Vim behaviour correctly. And the other thing that I could never get used to is that Emacs' terminals can't handle ncurses applications. I usually like to run Vim in a terminal multiplexer and combine it with various terminal utilities when needed, and Emacs doesn't support that - unless you run it in a terminal, but then Evil mode stops working properly... I'm fine with Vim, but I'm glad I tried Emacs for a while because it does have some nice ideas.
    - dima55 6y ago
      M-x ansi-term
    - hellofunk 6y ago
      I have to agree. Emacs w/ Evil is a nice solution and gets almost there, but there are enough edge cases that interfere with the elegance of pure Vim. Everytime you install a new emacs plugin, you have to consider that it will use Emacs keybindings, not Vim, and you jump through hoops to remedy that, or, more often, you find yourself having to mix the emacs ways and the Vim way, which I personally found annoying after awhile. Emacs is awesome and more powerful overall, but actually using Vim is easier -- from setting up keybindings, configuring your vimrc file, it's all quite simple compared to what you can do, and often do, in setting up Emacs. But to be honest they are much closer to each other than either is to a more conventional/modern IDE. They are spiritual siblings for sure.
- b5n 6y ago
  Probably in the minority - I have an extensive custom .emacs.d, but I've kept most of the default emacs bindings. Not only do I find them ergonomic (use the side of your palm for ctrl!), they're also the same bindings you'll find in most terminals. Additionally, emacs does so much more than editing, and having consistent bindings across tasks is really convenient (I'm super lazy :).
  - fivre 6y ago
    just ``` set -o vi ``` problem solved! no more emacs pollution!
robohoe 6y ago
I was in the same boat. First real gig out of college (well besides the stints during college) and I saw how fast my boss flew on his keyboard while editing files in vi/vim. Here I was painfully editing config files in nano while he was flying by with vim. I took the time to learn it and have been using it since. I now try to pass the torch by showing folks on my team the neat things vi/vim can do. People are amazed how much you can do it with just few short keystrokes.
blinding-streak 6y ago
Hated Vi at first. Absolutely loathed it. I was all about emacs. But I gave vi another shot, and I'm so glad I did. The learning curve can be steep, and it's really unintuitive at first (or it was for me). But once it clicks a little bit, and you settle in.. Wow. I felt way more productive using it than any other editor.
- dannycastonguay 6y ago
  (Helpful tip) map caps lock to escape: https://vim.fandom.com/wiki/Avoid_the_escape_key https://vim.fandom.com/wiki/Avoid_the_escape_key
  - the_jeremy 6y ago
    Or if you're on a locked-down computer because your office hates people, ctrl+[ works as well (and is portable to other people's computers)
    - jrockway 6y ago
      You can also do the remapping in hardware. Programmable keyboards are quite popular these days (I built one out of a $3 stm32f103), and they don't rely on the OS to help you do what you want to do. (This is a blessing and a curse. You never have to worry about OS-level hacks to make caps lock a control key, but on the other hand, there is no way in the USB HID protocol to say "send an !". Rather, the keyboard has to synthesize a shift + 1. And what character that actually maps to depends on your OS, because of course it does.)
  - mahmoudhossam 6y ago
    I went one step further and swapped escape and caps lock keys on all my machines and haven't regretted it so far.
    - ncmncm 6y ago
      I cannot remember the last time I wanted to use CapsLock--more than 30 years ago, anyway. By far the most irritating thing about others' keyboards is they have not disabled it yet. Second most is that Ctrl isn't there instead.
licebmi__at__ 6y ago
Definitely, even now as I use emacs, I'm a 100% evil. It's just so natural (once you get it), that I don't know how other bindings (like ctrl-[whatever]) are prevalent in most other software, it's not like they are more memorable or intuitive. Fun story: I was into Free/Libre software as a teen, when I learnt how to move around in vi(m) and in my first tech gig (as a sysadmin), I was interviewed by some greybeard who wanted me to do some maintenance and configuration tasks. I knew the basics of command line environments, but I had never setup LDAP, mail or DNS. So anyway he asked me to setup some repository on yum, and well, at least I knew how to do that. When he saw me using vi commands to quickly edit the file, he stopped the interview, arguing that anybody who was fluent on vi, was obviously a seasoned admin and I got the postion. I never had the guts to tell him otherwise.
- busterarm 6y ago
  It's proof enough that you'll figure it out. Years of interviewing people for my own teams has shown me that understanding your tools (especially to the point of being opinionated about them) is probably the #1 indicator of success.
  - chadcmulligan 6y ago
    What a great test, and it makes sense - a craftsman cares very much about their tools, an average tech will use the first thing that they're taught.
    - busterarm 6y ago
      It's also what's so hard about hiring junior candidates and why so many companies shy away from it. Truly junior hires don't really know the tools yet. You can't really afford to wait for the rare junior who does, so unfortunately it's not as useful a test in that situation. That's why I think OP's "seasoned sysadmin" line is perfectly valid. The junior that knows their tools has already cleared the hardest hurdle for most companies. Everything else is trainable through mentorship, but tools usage requires experience.
forgotmypw17 6y ago
If you like vimium, you may also like qutebrowser. It's built with keyboard bindings from the ground up, and is keyboard-first. I can browse most sites without taking my hands off the home row.
- ausjke 6y ago
  never heard about qutebrowser and it can even play netflix, impressive, it's a little memory hungry though, with just netflix running I saw memory is used almost 1GB, while 30 chrome tabs use 4.5GB
- RMPR 6y ago
  I use both QuteBrowser and Firefox with Vim Vixen, one of the thing that make me reluctant to switch completely are mostly addons, Multi-Container, cookies auto delete, ublock origin, Privacy Badger, ... I can't browse the Internet without those, and the built-in adblocker of QB is unfortunately not that performant. Also, you can't use the keyboard everywhere (thanks to the modern web) Random example off the top of my head: https://questions.wizardzines.com/event-loops.html https://questions.wizardzines.com/event-loops.html
  - The-Compiler 6y ago
    > and the built-in adblocker of QB is unfortunately not that performant With "performant", I assume you mean "how well it works", not "how fast it works"? FWIW a better adblocker is in progress: https://github.com/qutebrowser/qutebrowser/pull/5317 https://github.com/qutebrowser/qutebrowser/pull/5317 > Also, you can't use the keyboard everywhere (thanks to the modern web) Random example off the top of my head: https://questions.wizardzines.com/event-loops.html https://questions.wizardzines.com/event-loops.html Yay... You can always customize the hints.selectors setting to add selectors for those (for websites you use a lot). There are also some thoughts on how to add hints to all elements with a JS click handler, but I haven't had a chance to take a closer look yet: https://github.com/qutebrowser/qutebrowser/pull/4817 https://github.com/qutebrowser/qutebrowser/pull/4817
    - 6y ago
airstrike 6y ago
I dream of the day when Excel will have a vim mode... My life will finally be complete.
- devnonymous 6y ago
  Perhaps you should give sc-im a go. It's no excel but a good enough spreadsheet with vim like keybindings. https://github.com/andmarti1424/sc-im https://github.com/andmarti1424/sc-im
  - airstrike 6y ago
    Thank you!
reactchain 6y ago
100% concur with this. I learnt Vim many years ago and I genuinely don't know what I'd do without it. It's always just there when I ssh into a new server. And the JetBrains suite has an awesome vim mode meaning I can use most (but not all) vim shortcuts with an actual IDE. I don't think vim itself works well as an IDE substitute, and wouldn't use it for hardcore web dev for example - but for quickly editing random files there's nothing that comes close.
- kamaal 6y ago
  >>I don't think vim itself works well as an IDE substitute, and wouldn't use it for hardcore web dev for example - but for quickly editing random files there's nothing that comes close. Exactly my thoughts, you need vim and emacs these days if you want to munge through large amounts of text. The thing is in these days of Kibana and Elastic search. You don't do much of this kind of work anymore. Code is text. But it's not that kind of text where you need your fingers and macros to do much work. Your tool needs to be at least to some extent aware and intelligent of code you are working with, or you end up doing too much work for nothing. If your language doesn't have this kind of tooling and you wish to maintain your application for long, you need to use a better commonly used language. Much of the vim macro work I could put to use is done by black these days. If you are writing too much repeated code, you need to learn to write reusable code. Navigation is one more of those things which could improve if you use intellisense. Bulk of modern day dev work requires working with 2 - 3 tech stacks. The use case for vim, which is writing few key stroke in one attempt to transmit them over super slow internet connections, doesn't exist anymore.
  - RMPR 6y ago
    I'll argue that the IDE is Unix, not vim, I recently started and endeavour to vanilla Vim and I was baffled by what is possible even without plugins, granted I mostly work with C and a bit of Python, but one thing to consider is that most people using Vim come from an IDE background, so horse for course I guess. https://sanctum.geek.nz/arabesque/series/unix-as-ide/ https://sanctum.geek.nz/arabesque/series/unix-as-ide/ Edit: Link
samvher 6y ago
Same experience here. Before learning vim I never expected its interface to make such a difference (it seemed daunting and unergonomic). I think the only other software that has made me feel that way is i3.
m0zg 6y ago
> And since, almost nothing else (save for maybe git) beat learning vim from a return on investment perspective Same here. Love high ROI tools where the rug doesn't get pulled from underneath me ever year or two. Linux console tools, bash, vim, etc. My vim config dates back 20+ years, with only small modifications. I can log in into just about any *nix machine made in the last 30 years and be able to edit text at least somewhat comfortably. It takes me 30 seconds to set up a fresh Linux machine to my liking: clone a repo and run a script to symlink things to the right places in home dir. Done. I can also comfortably work from anywhere in the world over a crappy SSH connection. C++ is the same. Glacial pace of change, skills from 20 years ago are still good with minimal modifications. 20 years from now it'll still be in use and it'll still be about the same. Which is exactly how I like it. Another good thing about these gnarly old tools is that they weed out the dumb and impatient. I strongly suspect Rust is the same way - the learning curve and feature set look formidable. Lesser engineers are unlikely to ever learn it to the extent required to enjoy working in it. There's value in that, so I might learn it as well once they stop screwing with the core libs. I have work to do, I have no patience for such things.
- hellofunk 6y ago
  > C++ is the same. Glacial pace of change, skills from 20 years ago are still good with minimal modifications. 20 years from now it'll still be in use and it'll still be about the same. Which is exactly how I like it. This gave me a bit of a chuckle since any modern serious C++ work is really a different language since 2011. Most of the C++ prior to that are considered anti-patterns now. It's hard moving at a glacial pace; the language gets major evolutions every 3 years.
wirrbel 6y ago
I was interested in programming, don't really know why but the thought fascinated me to be able to instruct a computer to do things you want it to do. So I had tinkered with QBasic and Pascal. A friend of mine went the C/C++ route which lead to us arguing like cat-and-dog (surely out of boredom) about the various benefits. Then we mutually tried out linux and editors. He picked Emacs, so I went with vim. Haven't regretted it ever since.
dastx 6y ago
This is really interesting. I'm quite the opposite. I keep trying to make vim my main devtool but I just can't stay away from a fully fledged ide. At the same time, having heard from literally everyone that once you do get used to it, vim is way faster to do everything in. What advice do you have for someone like me to proper get used it once and for all? Are there any good resources you used to learn all the vim shortcuts?
- beojan 6y ago
  There are a number of vim plugins (like YouCompleteMe [https://ycm-core.github.io/YouCompleteMe/] https://ycm-core.github.io/YouCompleteMe/]) that can turn Vim into an IDE. If that isn't enough, you could try Emacs (yes, I know) with an evil-mode based distribution like DOOM Emacs [https://github.com/hlissner/doom-emacs https://github.com/hlissner/doom-emacs].
- williamdclt 6y ago
  Same as you. I've ended up accepting that whatever the features or the plugins, the UX constraints in terminal editors (1-character unit of space, colors, graphical plugins...) will always be a huge limitation. That's reason enough to convince me to use VSCode or Webstorm with a vim plugin
  - alwillis 6y ago
    MacVim uses the Mac’s graphical goodness to make a pretty slick interface for Vim.
- alwillis 6y ago
  You don’t learn Vim that way. Once you get the Vim grammar, you just flow. Verb-adverb-noun. This helped me back in the day: http://yannesposito.com/Scratch/en/blog/Learn-Vim-Progressively/ http://yannesposito.com/Scratch/en/blog/Learn-Vim-Progressiv...
- majewsky 6y ago
  My advice would be to start with the bare minimum: Using [i] to enter insert mode, [ESC] to get back to command mode, arrow keys to move around in either mode. With this you can use vim like Notepad. Then observe yourself doing stuff and whenever you think "there must be a better way to do X", find out and learn how to do just that. (You would ideally have a cheatsheet on your desk for quick reference. If it's not on there, search the internet.) At this point, it also helps to know about the basic grammar of normal-mode commands: motions as subjects, commands as verbs. Full sentences are either only-motion, command-motion, count-command-motion or command-count-motion. So if you have already learned that "dw" deletes a word, you immediately know that "d2w" or "2dw" deletes two words. There's not much more to it. Just do your actual text editing and if you ever find yourself thinking "there must be a better way to do this", that's another learning opportunity. It's a lot like language learning, really. You can plow through 10,000 vocabulary words in your SRS if you want, but nothing beats actually using the language.
collyw 6y ago
> And since, almost nothing else (save for maybe git) beat learning vim from a return on investment perspective. Interesting. I generally use IDEs Pycharm or Eclipse, or VSCode depending on the language. Do you think I would gain a lot from learning VIM?
- auggierose 6y ago
  No. It's like when somebody wants to learn how to fly, people tell them first to learn how to run really fast.
  - alboy 6y ago
    Nowadays Vim isn't just Vim the text editor but rather a specification for text manipulation. All of the popular IDEs have Vim plugins and the benefits of learning both are perfectly additive.
    - umanwizard 6y ago
      I think your timeline is inverted. vi-style text manipulation has been a thing long before Vim.
      - alboy 6y ago
        I don't think I've claimed otherwise? Still, in my timeline those plugins aren't called IdeaEd or VsEm.
kstenerud 6y ago
I've used vi for 25 years now, starting on a m68k based BSD machine. It's an adequate editor, handy in remote shell sessions and good to know how to use, but I'd MUCH rather use an IDE or a windowed editor with menus and mouse and hotkeys like Sublime. I mean real hotkeys, not emacs. At the end of the day, it takes a certain kind of mind to like vi, and if you're not of that mind, you probably never will be.
- psnosignaluk 6y ago
  I think it depends heavily on what you're doing. My world is full of YAML/HCL/cnf files, and if I'm writing code, Go, where code is for software that runs from the command line, a daemon, or a no frills API/web service. Atom/VSCode and other IDE's were wasted on me, so I found myself gravitating back to Vim for its ease of use for those use cases. That said, vim-bootstrap did save me effort of getting a pretty solid editor out of Vim without having to think too hard about it.
  - heavenlyblue 6y ago
    Of course IDEs are wasted on Go - there’s literally not a single IDE in the world that can find all implementations of an interface in Go.
- necrotic_comp 6y ago
  My argument isn't that vi/vim/neovim are not superior editors but the editing grammar is a superior way of thinking about text. This grammar can be reasonably replicated in any environment, and confusing the grammar for the editor is what makes people make such claims. This is coming from someone who lives in vim for his daily work, likes it, but always finds annoying sharp edges that are hard to reason about and script away.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
mimimi31 6y ago
What has always kept me from learning Vim is my non-English keyboard layout. Many of the default key combinations are impossible or require some serious finger acrobatics. Sure, I could try figuring out a new set of easily reachable and non-conflicting keybindings for my own machines, but much of my motivation for learning it in the first place was being able to work on remote machines more comfortably.
- jgwil2 6y ago
  Interesting point, and a good reminder of how anglocentric the computing world is in some ways. Do localized IDEs typically take this into consideration?
- insertnickname 6y ago
  Try out a US* QWERTY keyboard for a few months. I grew up with non-English keyboards, but then some years ago I got stuck with a US keyboard for half a year, and after that I didn't want to go back. I can easily type the few non-English characters I need with the X.org compose key, so I can easily write in my native language. I assume it would work equally well for any language using a Latin-script alphabet. *) US, not UK. UK QWERTY is trash.
thedracle 6y ago
I think this is the truth for me. I have learned hundreds of tools and IDEs over the years, and nearly every one is defunct and not used any more. Every minute I've invested in learning vim has remained relevant and useful.
agumonkey 6y ago
I like vim, it's efficient. This comes from an emacser. Emacs who shares this trait a bit (albeit rarely installed by default) .. when sublime text was all the rage I saw how emacs had 50% of it builtin and the rest was absorbed in a few monthes. I felt emacs would never fade at that point.

stragies 6y ago

Same here, and then i discovered EVIL, the vi layer for emacs. The best of all worlds: Vim text manipulation grammar over the emacs engine.

ed25519FUUU 6y ago
Alas, the emacs install base is fraction of vi/vim.
- cyberbanjo 6y ago
  I've always assumed the opposite with how people say emacs is a nice OS and poor editor... What does Vim over emacs?
  - jrumbut 6y ago
    It's not a comment on quality or usefulness, and only indirectly its resource consumption (vi/vim consumes less than emacs in its default configuration), it's really about standards. vi and the ex editor language are part of the POSIX standard and were around early in the history of BSD. See the history here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vi https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vi For a well worn joke on the subject, "Ed is the standard!": https://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/ed-msg.en.html https://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/ed-msg.en.html
  - cat199 6y ago
    this is huge flamewar territory, but this is a bit 'off' question wise - alot of the current state of things is due to historical precedent - some details: - (original) vi was on most unices from the mid-80s onwards out of the box - (gnu/lucid) emacs was an additional install (not getting into other emacs flavors - original teco emacs was fairly small i believe). - original vi just had basic editing and at some point a hardcoded lisp mode, no addons vs gnu emacs which was a programmable editing environment running within a lisp interpreter - remeber in the early days, people built whole custom hardware to be able to run lisp with sufficient complexity (see also: lisp machines, twenex, etc), so using lisp for your editor was in some sense the definition of 'overkill', depending on ones view of what an editor should do - Also, from late-80s->90s era if you wanted a GUI for your text editor you probably used emacs, and real vi never had a gui option - put another way emacs was the only one of the two linked to gui libraries. - vim vs vi: most obvious difference (IMHO) feature wise is that vim adds vimscript, which is an interpreted programming language, so now editing modes are extensible, etc (as was the case in emacs before). detail: vim codebase is not based on vi codebase. since vi was just about everywhere and emacs was a (fairly large) package, you had more general vi knowledge vs emacs 'in the culture' since even an emacs user might need to know vi but not usually the other way around, and so vi (later vim, as linux distros switched their 'default vi' to 'vim') gained more install base by default. Then, people hearing about emacs likely hear the 'vi vs emacs' arguments and never try it since there are now many more choices, they've learned vi, they prefer an IDE, etc (in the old days there was much less choice, main 2 were vi and emacs, and emacs was probably somewhere on your managed LAN somewhere if you wanted to give it a shot) most of the 'vi vs emacs' arguments are rooted in the real-vi vs fsf-emacs era and are basically obsolete in a modern vim era, since everyone is using gui library vim with vimscript, which basically means the same thing in terms of 'bloat' (both editors contain engines to display text in cli or gui mode and embed a language interpreter). Basically what was once valid internet lore kept getting past down, and the 'minimalism' of vim was confused with being 'minimal' in terms of what people meant in the original vi-vs-emacs discussions. Emacs does contain 'non editor' functions e.g. networking, etc, so the core is probably a bit bigger than the core of vim, but when people are still using these comparisons and talking about 'emacs bloat' while their preferred editor is some electron based thing, we've lost a bit of the point/message..
  - harrygeez 6y ago
    I love Emacs and have been using it for years but whenever I want to make a really quick edit, i.e. writing a git commit I almost always reach for vi because by the time Emacs loaded I would've been done committing with vi, at least with a slower machine. I know some people run Emacs in daemon mode, but it's not always convenient to do that This and when I ssh into any machine, I know there will be a vi at the very least
    - Kaze404 6y ago
      > This and when I ssh into any machine, I know there will be a vi at the very least You could use emacs for that. Editing over ssh using TRAMP works perfectly in every case I've used it.
  - alwillis 6y ago
    It’s composability is Vim’s killer feature. This post is what got me started on Vim: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1218390/what-is-your-most-productive-shortcut-with-vim/1220118#1220118 https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1218390/what-is-your-mos...
  - sqrt17 6y ago
    1) vim is easier on your hands if you're on a high-latency connection (i.e. usable in a terminal) and/or get tired of chording (i.e. having to press Ctrl along with random keys). 2) I've found vim's plugin systems (Pathogen, Vundle, vim-plug) vastly more intuitive than Emacs' version with package-install and activating one of several repositories (Milk, ELPA, MELPA, whatever) - you install the same plugin regardless of whether you're using Vundle or vim-plug 3) vim and its packages are vastly easier to configure - this is subjective and may be much improved in Doom Emacs/Spacemacs, but in general vim packages have a bunch of global variables that you can set to a number or a string whereas most emacs packages need you to define elisp functions and/or nontrivial data structures, with no sane defaults to fall back on if you want things just to work
- the_jeremy 6y ago
  I am also surprised by this. What are you basing it on? For arbitrarily comparable online communities, it looks like emacs.stackexchange.com is twice as active as vi.stackexchange.com
  - unoti 6y ago
    > ...the emacs install base is fraction of vi/vim. > What are you basing it on? ... it looks like emacs.stackexchange.com is twice as active as vi.stackexchange.com A couple of things about this. For myself and many others, the reason I started vi in the first place is it's been installed by default on many kinds of machines. On SCO Unix and AIX from my youth, for example, this was the editor you used on a vanilla install of a machine to get things going. So this is part of why the install base is larger. Another part of why the emacs community is more active is that Vi is just an editor, while emacs is more of a programming language and I daresay nearly an operating system in its own right. Because of the amazing power and flexibility of emacs there's a lot more stuff to discuss for Emacs than Vi.
    - maxlybbert 6y ago
      When I was teaching myself to program, I had a night job in a warehouse. It so happened that the inventory software was on a UNIX server, and we accessed it through a terminal emulator from our windows computer. I discovered one day that I could exit the inventory software and end up with a shell prompt, and that the server had Perl available. My computer books convinced me that emacs was the better editor, but it wasn’t installed on the server. vi was. So I learned vi and Perl on my lunch breaks.
  - rplst8 6y ago
    Vi users RTFM.
  - zorked 6y ago
    Emacs is more complex, and Emacs users do more in Emacs than just edit text. (think org-mode, debugger frontends, mail readers, etc.)
  - 6y ago
- harrygeez 6y ago
  I love emacs, but I taught myself to use vi because I know when I ssh into a remote server there will have a vi.
  - chupasaurus 6y ago
    Even if it's a Cisco router and there are no text files other than a note.txt 'Here be dragons'
  - davidw 6y ago
    Emacs has an edit-over-ssh mode that's pretty useful.
    - CodeGlitch 6y ago
      Yes Tramp mode.
    - dijit 6y ago
      You can do that in vim via scp like this: vim scp://user@myserver[:port]//path/to/file.txt
generalk 6y ago
I've used Emacs for many years, and recently switched to Spacemacs, a set of configs that kind of takes over Emacs and puts a great platform on top of it. I frequently describe Spacemacs as a better vim than vim. Don't get me wrong, I've used vim for ages; I'll never stop editing server config with vi, nor will I stop getting mad when vi is actually vi and not vim. But for a day to day code editor? Spacemacs is astonishingly good. (Of course, Spacemacs is built on top of EVIL, as well as dozens of other packages. On the shoulders of giants, as we say.)
- Kaze404 6y ago
  Wait until you find out about Doom, which I consider to be all the good of Spacemacs without the crust.
- alpaca128 6y ago
  The problem with Emacs and all its modifications is that it cannot match Vim's flexible system for custom keybindings. And because of that Evil mode has the same limitation, beside its insistence to prefer using builtin Emacs functionality over emulating Vim behaviour correctly. And the other thing that I could never get used to is that Emacs' terminals can't handle ncurses applications. I usually like to run Vim in a terminal multiplexer and combine it with various terminal utilities when needed, and Emacs doesn't support that - unless you run it in a terminal, but then Evil mode stops working properly... I'm fine with Vim, but I'm glad I tried Emacs for a while because it does have some nice ideas.
  - dima55 6y ago
    M-x ansi-term
  - hellofunk 6y ago
    I have to agree. Emacs w/ Evil is a nice solution and gets almost there, but there are enough edge cases that interfere with the elegance of pure Vim. Everytime you install a new emacs plugin, you have to consider that it will use Emacs keybindings, not Vim, and you jump through hoops to remedy that, or, more often, you find yourself having to mix the emacs ways and the Vim way, which I personally found annoying after awhile. Emacs is awesome and more powerful overall, but actually using Vim is easier -- from setting up keybindings, configuring your vimrc file, it's all quite simple compared to what you can do, and often do, in setting up Emacs. But to be honest they are much closer to each other than either is to a more conventional/modern IDE. They are spiritual siblings for sure.
b5n 6y ago
Probably in the minority - I have an extensive custom .emacs.d, but I've kept most of the default emacs bindings. Not only do I find them ergonomic (use the side of your palm for ctrl!), they're also the same bindings you'll find in most terminals. Additionally, emacs does so much more than editing, and having consistent bindings across tasks is really convenient (I'm super lazy :).
- fivre 6y ago
  just ``` set -o vi ``` problem solved! no more emacs pollution!

robohoe 6y ago

I was in the same boat. First real gig out of college (well besides the stints during college) and I saw how fast my boss flew on his keyboard while editing files in vi/vim. Here I was painfully editing config files in nano while he was flying by with vim. I took the time to learn it and have been using it since. I now try to pass the torch by showing folks on my team the neat things vi/vim can do. People are amazed how much you can do it with just few short keystrokes.

blinding-streak 6y ago

Hated Vi at first. Absolutely loathed it. I was all about emacs. But I gave vi another shot, and I'm so glad I did. The learning curve can be steep, and it's really unintuitive at first (or it was for me). But once it clicks a little bit, and you settle in.. Wow. I felt way more productive using it than any other editor.

dannycastonguay 6y ago
(Helpful tip) map caps lock to escape: https://vim.fandom.com/wiki/Avoid_the_escape_key https://vim.fandom.com/wiki/Avoid_the_escape_key
- the_jeremy 6y ago
  Or if you're on a locked-down computer because your office hates people, ctrl+[ works as well (and is portable to other people's computers)
  - jrockway 6y ago
    You can also do the remapping in hardware. Programmable keyboards are quite popular these days (I built one out of a $3 stm32f103), and they don't rely on the OS to help you do what you want to do. (This is a blessing and a curse. You never have to worry about OS-level hacks to make caps lock a control key, but on the other hand, there is no way in the USB HID protocol to say "send an !". Rather, the keyboard has to synthesize a shift + 1. And what character that actually maps to depends on your OS, because of course it does.)
- mahmoudhossam 6y ago
  I went one step further and swapped escape and caps lock keys on all my machines and haven't regretted it so far.
  - ncmncm 6y ago
    I cannot remember the last time I wanted to use CapsLock--more than 30 years ago, anyway. By far the most irritating thing about others' keyboards is they have not disabled it yet. Second most is that Ctrl isn't there instead.

licebmi__at__ 6y ago

Definitely, even now as I use emacs, I'm a 100% evil. It's just so natural (once you get it), that I don't know how other bindings (like ctrl-[whatever]) are prevalent in most other software, it's not like they are more memorable or intuitive. Fun story: I was into Free/Libre software as a teen, when I learnt how to move around in vi(m) and in my first tech gig (as a sysadmin), I was interviewed by some greybeard who wanted me to do some maintenance and configuration tasks. I knew the basics of command line environments, but I had never setup LDAP, mail or DNS. So anyway he asked me to setup some repository on yum, and well, at least I knew how to do that. When he saw me using vi commands to quickly edit the file, he stopped the interview, arguing that anybody who was fluent on vi, was obviously a seasoned admin and I got the postion. I never had the guts to tell him otherwise.

busterarm 6y ago
It's proof enough that you'll figure it out. Years of interviewing people for my own teams has shown me that understanding your tools (especially to the point of being opinionated about them) is probably the #1 indicator of success.
- chadcmulligan 6y ago
  What a great test, and it makes sense - a craftsman cares very much about their tools, an average tech will use the first thing that they're taught.
  - busterarm 6y ago
    It's also what's so hard about hiring junior candidates and why so many companies shy away from it. Truly junior hires don't really know the tools yet. You can't really afford to wait for the rare junior who does, so unfortunately it's not as useful a test in that situation. That's why I think OP's "seasoned sysadmin" line is perfectly valid. The junior that knows their tools has already cleared the hardest hurdle for most companies. Everything else is trainable through mentorship, but tools usage requires experience.

forgotmypw17 6y ago

If you like vimium, you may also like qutebrowser. It's built with keyboard bindings from the ground up, and is keyboard-first. I can browse most sites without taking my hands off the home row.

ausjke 6y ago
never heard about qutebrowser and it can even play netflix, impressive, it's a little memory hungry though, with just netflix running I saw memory is used almost 1GB, while 30 chrome tabs use 4.5GB
RMPR 6y ago
I use both QuteBrowser and Firefox with Vim Vixen, one of the thing that make me reluctant to switch completely are mostly addons, Multi-Container, cookies auto delete, ublock origin, Privacy Badger, ... I can't browse the Internet without those, and the built-in adblocker of QB is unfortunately not that performant. Also, you can't use the keyboard everywhere (thanks to the modern web) Random example off the top of my head: https://questions.wizardzines.com/event-loops.html https://questions.wizardzines.com/event-loops.html
- The-Compiler 6y ago
  > and the built-in adblocker of QB is unfortunately not that performant With "performant", I assume you mean "how well it works", not "how fast it works"? FWIW a better adblocker is in progress: https://github.com/qutebrowser/qutebrowser/pull/5317 https://github.com/qutebrowser/qutebrowser/pull/5317 > Also, you can't use the keyboard everywhere (thanks to the modern web) Random example off the top of my head: https://questions.wizardzines.com/event-loops.html https://questions.wizardzines.com/event-loops.html Yay... You can always customize the hints.selectors setting to add selectors for those (for websites you use a lot). There are also some thoughts on how to add hints to all elements with a JS click handler, but I haven't had a chance to take a closer look yet: https://github.com/qutebrowser/qutebrowser/pull/4817 https://github.com/qutebrowser/qutebrowser/pull/4817
  - 6y ago

airstrike 6y ago

I dream of the day when Excel will have a vim mode... My life will finally be complete.

devnonymous 6y ago
Perhaps you should give sc-im a go. It's no excel but a good enough spreadsheet with vim like keybindings. https://github.com/andmarti1424/sc-im https://github.com/andmarti1424/sc-im
- airstrike 6y ago
  Thank you!

reactchain 6y ago

100% concur with this. I learnt Vim many years ago and I genuinely don't know what I'd do without it. It's always just there when I ssh into a new server. And the JetBrains suite has an awesome vim mode meaning I can use most (but not all) vim shortcuts with an actual IDE. I don't think vim itself works well as an IDE substitute, and wouldn't use it for hardcore web dev for example - but for quickly editing random files there's nothing that comes close.

kamaal 6y ago
>>I don't think vim itself works well as an IDE substitute, and wouldn't use it for hardcore web dev for example - but for quickly editing random files there's nothing that comes close. Exactly my thoughts, you need vim and emacs these days if you want to munge through large amounts of text. The thing is in these days of Kibana and Elastic search. You don't do much of this kind of work anymore. Code is text. But it's not that kind of text where you need your fingers and macros to do much work. Your tool needs to be at least to some extent aware and intelligent of code you are working with, or you end up doing too much work for nothing. If your language doesn't have this kind of tooling and you wish to maintain your application for long, you need to use a better commonly used language. Much of the vim macro work I could put to use is done by black these days. If you are writing too much repeated code, you need to learn to write reusable code. Navigation is one more of those things which could improve if you use intellisense. Bulk of modern day dev work requires working with 2 - 3 tech stacks. The use case for vim, which is writing few key stroke in one attempt to transmit them over super slow internet connections, doesn't exist anymore.
- RMPR 6y ago
  I'll argue that the IDE is Unix, not vim, I recently started and endeavour to vanilla Vim and I was baffled by what is possible even without plugins, granted I mostly work with C and a bit of Python, but one thing to consider is that most people using Vim come from an IDE background, so horse for course I guess. https://sanctum.geek.nz/arabesque/series/unix-as-ide/ https://sanctum.geek.nz/arabesque/series/unix-as-ide/ Edit: Link

samvher 6y ago

Same experience here. Before learning vim I never expected its interface to make such a difference (it seemed daunting and unergonomic). I think the only other software that has made me feel that way is i3.

m0zg 6y ago

> And since, almost nothing else (save for maybe git) beat learning vim from a return on investment perspective Same here. Love high ROI tools where the rug doesn't get pulled from underneath me ever year or two. Linux console tools, bash, vim, etc. My vim config dates back 20+ years, with only small modifications. I can log in into just about any *nix machine made in the last 30 years and be able to edit text at least somewhat comfortably. It takes me 30 seconds to set up a fresh Linux machine to my liking: clone a repo and run a script to symlink things to the right places in home dir. Done. I can also comfortably work from anywhere in the world over a crappy SSH connection. C++ is the same. Glacial pace of change, skills from 20 years ago are still good with minimal modifications. 20 years from now it'll still be in use and it'll still be about the same. Which is exactly how I like it. Another good thing about these gnarly old tools is that they weed out the dumb and impatient. I strongly suspect Rust is the same way - the learning curve and feature set look formidable. Lesser engineers are unlikely to ever learn it to the extent required to enjoy working in it. There's value in that, so I might learn it as well once they stop screwing with the core libs. I have work to do, I have no patience for such things.

hellofunk 6y ago
> C++ is the same. Glacial pace of change, skills from 20 years ago are still good with minimal modifications. 20 years from now it'll still be in use and it'll still be about the same. Which is exactly how I like it. This gave me a bit of a chuckle since any modern serious C++ work is really a different language since 2011. Most of the C++ prior to that are considered anti-patterns now. It's hard moving at a glacial pace; the language gets major evolutions every 3 years.

wirrbel 6y ago

I was interested in programming, don't really know why but the thought fascinated me to be able to instruct a computer to do things you want it to do. So I had tinkered with QBasic and Pascal. A friend of mine went the C/C++ route which lead to us arguing like cat-and-dog (surely out of boredom) about the various benefits. Then we mutually tried out linux and editors. He picked Emacs, so I went with vim. Haven't regretted it ever since.

dastx 6y ago

This is really interesting. I'm quite the opposite. I keep trying to make vim my main devtool but I just can't stay away from a fully fledged ide. At the same time, having heard from literally everyone that once you do get used to it, vim is way faster to do everything in. What advice do you have for someone like me to proper get used it once and for all? Are there any good resources you used to learn all the vim shortcuts?

beojan 6y ago
There are a number of vim plugins (like YouCompleteMe [https://ycm-core.github.io/YouCompleteMe/] https://ycm-core.github.io/YouCompleteMe/]) that can turn Vim into an IDE. If that isn't enough, you could try Emacs (yes, I know) with an evil-mode based distribution like DOOM Emacs [https://github.com/hlissner/doom-emacs https://github.com/hlissner/doom-emacs].
williamdclt 6y ago
Same as you. I've ended up accepting that whatever the features or the plugins, the UX constraints in terminal editors (1-character unit of space, colors, graphical plugins...) will always be a huge limitation. That's reason enough to convince me to use VSCode or Webstorm with a vim plugin
- alwillis 6y ago
  MacVim uses the Mac’s graphical goodness to make a pretty slick interface for Vim.
alwillis 6y ago
You don’t learn Vim that way. Once you get the Vim grammar, you just flow. Verb-adverb-noun. This helped me back in the day: http://yannesposito.com/Scratch/en/blog/Learn-Vim-Progressively/ http://yannesposito.com/Scratch/en/blog/Learn-Vim-Progressiv...
majewsky 6y ago
My advice would be to start with the bare minimum: Using [i] to enter insert mode, [ESC] to get back to command mode, arrow keys to move around in either mode. With this you can use vim like Notepad. Then observe yourself doing stuff and whenever you think "there must be a better way to do X", find out and learn how to do just that. (You would ideally have a cheatsheet on your desk for quick reference. If it's not on there, search the internet.) At this point, it also helps to know about the basic grammar of normal-mode commands: motions as subjects, commands as verbs. Full sentences are either only-motion, command-motion, count-command-motion or command-count-motion. So if you have already learned that "dw" deletes a word, you immediately know that "d2w" or "2dw" deletes two words. There's not much more to it. Just do your actual text editing and if you ever find yourself thinking "there must be a better way to do this", that's another learning opportunity. It's a lot like language learning, really. You can plow through 10,000 vocabulary words in your SRS if you want, but nothing beats actually using the language.

collyw 6y ago

> And since, almost nothing else (save for maybe git) beat learning vim from a return on investment perspective. Interesting. I generally use IDEs Pycharm or Eclipse, or VSCode depending on the language. Do you think I would gain a lot from learning VIM?

auggierose 6y ago
No. It's like when somebody wants to learn how to fly, people tell them first to learn how to run really fast.
- alboy 6y ago
  Nowadays Vim isn't just Vim the text editor but rather a specification for text manipulation. All of the popular IDEs have Vim plugins and the benefits of learning both are perfectly additive.
  - umanwizard 6y ago
    I think your timeline is inverted. vi-style text manipulation has been a thing long before Vim.
    - alboy 6y ago
      I don't think I've claimed otherwise? Still, in my timeline those plugins aren't called IdeaEd or VsEm.

kstenerud 6y ago

I've used vi for 25 years now, starting on a m68k based BSD machine. It's an adequate editor, handy in remote shell sessions and good to know how to use, but I'd MUCH rather use an IDE or a windowed editor with menus and mouse and hotkeys like Sublime. I mean real hotkeys, not emacs. At the end of the day, it takes a certain kind of mind to like vi, and if you're not of that mind, you probably never will be.

psnosignaluk 6y ago
I think it depends heavily on what you're doing. My world is full of YAML/HCL/cnf files, and if I'm writing code, Go, where code is for software that runs from the command line, a daemon, or a no frills API/web service. Atom/VSCode and other IDE's were wasted on me, so I found myself gravitating back to Vim for its ease of use for those use cases. That said, vim-bootstrap did save me effort of getting a pretty solid editor out of Vim without having to think too hard about it.
- heavenlyblue 6y ago
  Of course IDEs are wasted on Go - there’s literally not a single IDE in the world that can find all implementations of an interface in Go.
necrotic_comp 6y ago
My argument isn't that vi/vim/neovim are not superior editors but the editing grammar is a superior way of thinking about text. This grammar can be reasonably replicated in any environment, and confusing the grammar for the editor is what makes people make such claims. This is coming from someone who lives in vim for his daily work, likes it, but always finds annoying sharp edges that are hard to reason about and script away.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]

mimimi31 6y ago

What has always kept me from learning Vim is my non-English keyboard layout. Many of the default key combinations are impossible or require some serious finger acrobatics. Sure, I could try figuring out a new set of easily reachable and non-conflicting keybindings for my own machines, but much of my motivation for learning it in the first place was being able to work on remote machines more comfortably.

jgwil2 6y ago
Interesting point, and a good reminder of how anglocentric the computing world is in some ways. Do localized IDEs typically take this into consideration?
insertnickname 6y ago
Try out a US* QWERTY keyboard for a few months. I grew up with non-English keyboards, but then some years ago I got stuck with a US keyboard for half a year, and after that I didn't want to go back. I can easily type the few non-English characters I need with the X.org compose key, so I can easily write in my native language. I assume it would work equally well for any language using a Latin-script alphabet. *) US, not UK. UK QWERTY is trash.

thedracle 6y ago

I think this is the truth for me. I have learned hundreds of tools and IDEs over the years, and nearly every one is defunct and not used any more. Every minute I've invested in learning vim has remained relevant and useful.

agumonkey 6y ago

I like vim, it's efficient. This comes from an emacser. Emacs who shares this trait a bit (albeit rarely installed by default) .. when sublime text was all the rage I saw how emacs had 50% of it builtin and the rest was absorbed in a few monthes. I felt emacs would never fade at that point.