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The word "still" turns a honest question into a loaded, ugly question. There's thousands of people who are starting to use vim today. You can ask, why do they

The word "still" turns a honest question into a loaded, ugly question. There's thousands of people who are starting to use vim today. You can ask, why do they? That is a relevant question. The question of why old users of these editors keep using them is mostly uninteresting.

antipaul 6y ago
Not to mention the condescension in calling them, right off the bat, “a grumbling shuffle of ingrained habit and stubborn resistance to change”. Habit and sticking with something that works are, like, good things most of the time!
tedmiston 6y ago
This presumption really bothered me too. The tone of the authors is very anti-vim without ever stopping to mention that vim can be dressed up with plugins, command line tools, unix philosophy, etc. It appears that neither of the authors are developers... the quality of the article would have been a lot better if they hadn't stereotyped vim users so much / admitted there are legitimate reasons to prefer a text-based interface over a GUI for en editor in 2020. I'm surprised that a company like Stack Overflow would publish such a narrow-minded article on their company blog... surely they have developers internally using vim they could have talked to...
0xdeadb00f 6y ago
I skimmed through the article and there's quite a bit more of this: > This has led users to literally turn Atom into Vim, unable to let go of the past, unwilling to fully embrace the future of code editing. > unable to let go of the past, unwilling to fully embrace the future of code editing. W-what?
- tolbish 6y ago
  Outrage sells.
jnxx 6y ago
As the parent says, this sounds like a loaded question. In fact, it sounds just like som marketing departmetn which wants to promote some IDE is trying to gather reasons and possibly features which need to be added to some "competitor" IDE, in order to gather more market share. I write that because to me, the interest to actual answer to the question - why people use these open-source editores - seems somewhat thin. But, as somebody who uses Emacs, why not use the attention for some Emacs marketing. Before going on, I use Emacs mostly since about 22 years. I am also occasionally using vi (mostly for system administration) or mg (which is a very light-weight editor with basic emacs keybindings). I've also used a host of other tools, for example in some work environments there was really no other alternative than to use Visual Studio, or Eclipse, and in some the most practical thing to use was notepad++. So, why Emacs? At first, and something that might be interesting to beginners, basic editing in Emacs, such as to produce similar results to using notepad++, is actually quick to learn. It has a nice on-line tutorial and very good interactive documentation. The fundamental philosophy it has is that basic text editing is modeless, that is, one uses a (possibly large) number of key combinations to modify text, and the basic combinations are universal. And this is already the main difference to vi/vim, where the meaning of basic key commands always depends on the mode. Emacs does have modes, however, for advanced commands which modify different /kinds/ of text. Emacs supports a large number of programming languages out-of-the-box, which includes anything you need to write for documentation. This saves a lot of time when setting up projects. It is also very quick to set up additional packages and modes. Emacs and vi/vim both are based on the notion that code is text: They are optimized for text editing, and in my experience this is absolutely the right thing to do. I had the dubious pleasure to use several systems which use code as kind of point of entry to some kind of database or graphical system or whatever, and these are, universally, just a pain in the ass. Compared to IDEs, Emacs loads and starts very, very fast. In cases where one want it even faster and don't need that many features, one can use emacsclient, or the mg editor, or, of course, vi. It is also possible to use Emacs in a text terminal, which is invaluable for remote work on servers or embedded systems, and it also has good support for the shell's job control: Running in terminal mode (starting with the "-nw" option), Ctrl-Z will bring you to the shell, and "fg" will bring you back to your Emacs session.
chansiky 6y ago
Agreed, the word "still" and quite frankly the rest of the article shows the author hasn't taken the effort to understand why someone likes something they don't like themselves. This could have been an article written by a windows10 user who asks the question "why are so many people "still" using linux?". New people start to use linux today and quite frankly there's a lot of good reasons to use it over the newest windows. Obviously same can be said about vim.

antipaul 6y ago

Not to mention the condescension in calling them, right off the bat, “a grumbling shuffle of ingrained habit and stubborn resistance to change”. Habit and sticking with something that works are, like, good things most of the time!

tedmiston 6y ago

This presumption really bothered me too. The tone of the authors is very anti-vim without ever stopping to mention that vim can be dressed up with plugins, command line tools, unix philosophy, etc. It appears that neither of the authors are developers... the quality of the article would have been a lot better if they hadn't stereotyped vim users so much / admitted there are legitimate reasons to prefer a text-based interface over a GUI for en editor in 2020. I'm surprised that a company like Stack Overflow would publish such a narrow-minded article on their company blog... surely they have developers internally using vim they could have talked to...

0xdeadb00f 6y ago

I skimmed through the article and there's quite a bit more of this: > This has led users to literally turn Atom into Vim, unable to let go of the past, unwilling to fully embrace the future of code editing. > unable to let go of the past, unwilling to fully embrace the future of code editing. W-what?

tolbish 6y ago
Outrage sells.

jnxx 6y ago

As the parent says, this sounds like a loaded question. In fact, it sounds just like som marketing departmetn which wants to promote some IDE is trying to gather reasons and possibly features which need to be added to some "competitor" IDE, in order to gather more market share. I write that because to me, the interest to actual answer to the question - why people use these open-source editores - seems somewhat thin. But, as somebody who uses Emacs, why not use the attention for some Emacs marketing. Before going on, I use Emacs mostly since about 22 years. I am also occasionally using vi (mostly for system administration) or mg (which is a very light-weight editor with basic emacs keybindings). I've also used a host of other tools, for example in some work environments there was really no other alternative than to use Visual Studio, or Eclipse, and in some the most practical thing to use was notepad++. So, why Emacs? At first, and something that might be interesting to beginners, basic editing in Emacs, such as to produce similar results to using notepad++, is actually quick to learn. It has a nice on-line tutorial and very good interactive documentation. The fundamental philosophy it has is that basic text editing is modeless, that is, one uses a (possibly large) number of key combinations to modify text, and the basic combinations are universal. And this is already the main difference to vi/vim, where the meaning of basic key commands always depends on the mode. Emacs does have modes, however, for advanced commands which modify different /kinds/ of text. Emacs supports a large number of programming languages out-of-the-box, which includes anything you need to write for documentation. This saves a lot of time when setting up projects. It is also very quick to set up additional packages and modes. Emacs and vi/vim both are based on the notion that code is text: They are optimized for text editing, and in my experience this is absolutely the right thing to do. I had the dubious pleasure to use several systems which use code as kind of point of entry to some kind of database or graphical system or whatever, and these are, universally, just a pain in the ass. Compared to IDEs, Emacs loads and starts very, very fast. In cases where one want it even faster and don't need that many features, one can use emacsclient, or the mg editor, or, of course, vi. It is also possible to use Emacs in a text terminal, which is invaluable for remote work on servers or embedded systems, and it also has good support for the shell's job control: Running in terminal mode (starting with the "-nw" option), Ctrl-Z will bring you to the shell, and "fg" will bring you back to your Emacs session.

chansiky 6y ago

Agreed, the word "still" and quite frankly the rest of the article shows the author hasn't taken the effort to understand why someone likes something they don't like themselves. This could have been an article written by a windows10 user who asks the question "why are so many people "still" using linux?". New people start to use linux today and quite frankly there's a lot of good reasons to use it over the newest windows. Obviously same can be said about vim.