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> My vim config is 600 lines. I have fixes for small annoyances. I have a bookmarking system set up in 45 lines. I have extra syntax highlighting for code snipp

> My vim config is 600 lines. I have fixes for small annoyances. I have a bookmarking system set up in 45 lines. I have extra syntax highlighting for code snippets that are important to me because I’m doing things the original syntax maintainers never even considered. I create impromptu keyboard mappings and abbreviations and autocommands as needed for given tasks. I can move around in the design space at will. I use VIM on and off, but I wanted to post the above because I think it exemplifies who might like using VIM. VIM is ideal for people who find it worthwhile to spend the time building their configuration out. VIM is the productivity tool that gets better as you put the time and effort into building it out. If you aren't the kind of person who wants to put that time and effort in, it is still decent as a basic editor, but it doesn't really shine.

tombert 6y ago
I don't disagree with your thesis, but I should point out that I have been using Vim almost exclusively for almost six years now (well, NeoVim for 4 of those years), and my config is only about 40 lines, and most of it is just installing plugins for whatever languages I'm using. Despite me not hacking it like crazy, I still think it really shines as an editor; Vim macros were sort of life-changing to me once they clicked for me. I also just think that modal editing is superior once you get past the initial learning curve.
- hwayne 6y ago
  There are many ways to use vim and they're all valid! People who love barebones vim are cool. People who love configuring vim are cool. People who love embedding vim in larger programs are cool. We have way more in common than vim squabblers pretend!
  - Scarbutt 6y ago
    Are evil users cool too? BTW, your main point about using vim is emacs greatest strength.
    - hwayne 6y ago
      You wound me greatly, but yes, evil users are cool too. I mean, I first learned vim keybindings from Kile. (People keep telling me I'd love emacs, and I have nothing against it, I just happened to learn vim first.)
      - hsitz 6y ago
        Along with Evil, Emacs org-mode is the thing that eventually lures a number of people like you over from Vim. Evil makes editing in Emacs close enough (very close) to editing in Vim. Org-mode gives useful functionality that you can't get in Vim.
        mijoharas 6y ago
        So, I am now a longtime emacs (and evil, love vim-ey things) user, and I've dipped my toes in the org-mode water a few times, but it's never quite stuck. Have you got any suggestions? The number of people that recommend it makes me sure that there's value to be had there, but it's never really become a habit for me.
        Scarbutt 6y ago
        The important part is to find a method and then leverage orgmode for it. With out some system is hard to make it stick.
- ogre_codes 6y ago
  Let me back up a step here. I use VIM for almost all basic editing. Its muscle memory. But for code editing, I generally end up on VSCode because it seems to have better language support. I've spent a fair amount of time with configuring VIM trying to get where I feel it needs to be. But whenever I shift to a new stack, it always seems to take an investment of time and effort to get VIM set where it's better than VSCode.
  - GrantZvolsky 6y ago
    I share your experience, but it should only be a matter of time until the vim LSP clients[1] mature. One notable exception is Go with its [vim-go](https://github.com/fatih/vim-go https://github.com/fatih/vim-go) plugin, which feels very mature to me as someone new to the language. [1]: https://langserver.org/ https://langserver.org/
    - deadbunny 6y ago
      CoC is already there: https://github.com/neoclide/coc.nvim https://github.com/neoclide/coc.nvim
      - blandflakes 6y ago
        Having to install node.js for a language server client is sort of a downer. For this reason I've been eagerly awaiting the built-in client in neovim, though it's definitely less polished and feature-complete than CoC today.
        deadbunny 6y ago
        Isn't the "built in" neovim language server lua? I personally can't see much difference between having to install nodejs runtime Vs the lua runtime.
        igneo676 6y ago
        The difference is that the lua runtime is embedded (and wicked fast) into Neovim vs nodejs that has to go over the remote plugin interface
- tzs 6y ago
  About 40 lines sounds reasonable to me. I've been using vim and before that other vi clones or actual vi as one of my main editors for 40 years, and my .vimrc is 60 lines. 20 of those are to automatically decrypt on read and encrypt on write .gpg or .asc files, which I copied from somewhere 20-25 years ago and haven't actually used in 15+ years, leaving only 40 lines I actually care about.
  - alwillis 6y ago
    Just as an FYI, Vim has built-in support for encryption: https://vim.fandom.com/wiki/Encryption https://vim.fandom.com/wiki/Encryption
threatofrain 6y ago
My problem is that some of that building should've been sensible defaults, and the community tends to outsource those responsibilities to extensions. Which means your Vim experience now has some risk of rot. Once and awhile my configurations/extensions rot and I have to go and update myself as to what happened in the ecosystem, or what is interacting with what. One day I decided I'm too tired and switched to VSC. Also the author failed to talk about the #1 killer feature of VSC, the reason for its meteoric rise in popularity — intellisense.
- pkage 6y ago
  Thankfully, you can get LSP-powered completion with coc.nvim, just like in VSC. It's miles better than YouCompleteMe, plus it's much easier to install—you can just use vim-plug or similar to install it. LSP is truly one of those "rising tide lifting all boats" projects. [0] https://github.com/neoclide/coc.nvim https://github.com/neoclide/coc.nvim
  - daotoad 6y ago
    I was using YCM and ALE to handle completion, but having switched to COC I won't look back. It's just a much better experience.
    - scruple 6y ago
      FWIW, neovim's built-in LSP (nvim-lspconfig -- written in Lua, currently in beta) is _outstanding_ and I have already replaced coc.nvim with it in my neovim set up. Set up is super simple, there are 2 extensions to install. Configuration is simple, I think I needed maybe 8 lines added to my `init.vim`. With that I get completion and in-line diagnostics and it's very, very fast, at least with solargraph, clangd, and tsserver.
- ogre_codes 6y ago
  > My problem is that some of that building should've been sensible defaults Vim suffers a bit from the design equivalent of tech debt. Much of the defaults and common behaviors were created based on the limits of software/ hardware 30+ years ago. Those limits still affect current design. > Also the author failed to talk about the #1 killer feature of VSC, the reason for its meteoric rise in popularity — intellisense. Given a fairly small amount of configuration, you can get autocomplete which is nearly as good as Intellisense in VSCode. For Typescript anyhow, the autocompletion comes from the same source background process.
raverbashing 6y ago
Agreed (though I use nvim now and thoroughly recommend it) Vimscript is weird. Sometimes the answer to "how to do this" comes in the form of "just install this package manager...". Stop. No. Sure, I'm ok with adding a couple of lines to vimrc, copying some files, but don't push it. I get much more out of the box from Vscode, PyCharm, etc. Why can't it be the same with vim?
- daotoad 6y ago
  This is one of the motivating forces behind nvim. While nvim supports vim script, it provides Lua as its preferred language for extension. In addition, the internal APIs are documented and are intended to be accessible from any language via RPC. https://neovim.io/doc/user/api.html https://neovim.io/doc/user/api.html
- bhaak 6y ago
  Simple. Vim is not an IDE. If you take a step back and look at software development as a whole then IDEs like VSCode and PyCharm take the top down approach. Whereas Vim is one of the solutions which do it bottom up. With both approaches you can theoretically arrive at the same functionality but in reality, there will always be something missing. Some people prefer the bottom up approach as that gives them the illusion of knowing their tool completely whereas people with the top down preference think everything is curated for them. Over time, both kinds of people notice this isn't quite true.
- jeromescuggs 6y ago
  drawing from my own experience, i once found myself trying to work on a client website. thanks to a series of events i was using termux from a cellphone. i grabbed my vimrc from my dotfiles git repo and that was that. took all of 30 seconds to turn someone's cellphone into an interface identical to the one i use everywhere else
Osiris 6y ago
My vim config is empty. I use it periodically and know the basics. I prefer it over nano and pico by a mile. 600 lines seems pretty long to me. I don't even know what I would put in a .vimrc file. Obviously I don't use it enough to even have annoyances. The nice thing about have no config is that I can hop into vim on any computer or server anywhere and be able to use the editor. I don't have to worry about having muscle memory of using keybindings/aliases that don't exist.
- enriquto 6y ago
  > My vim config is empty. That's the way to go. Unfortunately, most humans are fallible and I had to add a single line: inoremap <tab> <esc>
- ogre_codes 6y ago
  VIM is fantastic for editing files on servers for this reason.
- nurettin 6y ago
  Mine is 3 lines. Background dark, shift width and tab spaces. Been like that for around 18 years.
  - Osiris 6y ago
    I should probably add that. I know I have had it at some point on a different computer.
- sumtechguy 6y ago
  mine is empty because i jump between so many different machines and my config is not there. so i have to remember them.
- iso947 6y ago
  Mine was empty until the defaults changed in vim 8 and broke a lot of sensible behaviour.
- ybbond 6y ago
masa331 6y ago
My .vimrc is around 80 lines including 15 plugins. It's mostly like that for last 8 years. And i don't have any problem using using unmodified vi/vim on servers, which is a big plus. So no, vim shines and it's pretty bright
barumi 6y ago
> VIM is ideal for people who find it worthwhile to spend the time building their configuration out. I've been using VIM for over a decade and currently my customized config consists of a half a dozen tweaks, such as YAML-specific settings stashed in ./.vim/after.
heelix 6y ago
If you can post it on a public repo, I'd love to see it. (same goes for the many others who use VIM as a daily driver)

tombert 6y ago

I don't disagree with your thesis, but I should point out that I have been using Vim almost exclusively for almost six years now (well, NeoVim for 4 of those years), and my config is only about 40 lines, and most of it is just installing plugins for whatever languages I'm using. Despite me not hacking it like crazy, I still think it really shines as an editor; Vim macros were sort of life-changing to me once they clicked for me. I also just think that modal editing is superior once you get past the initial learning curve.

hwayne 6y ago
There are many ways to use vim and they're all valid! People who love barebones vim are cool. People who love configuring vim are cool. People who love embedding vim in larger programs are cool. We have way more in common than vim squabblers pretend!
- Scarbutt 6y ago
  Are evil users cool too? BTW, your main point about using vim is emacs greatest strength.
  - hwayne 6y ago
    You wound me greatly, but yes, evil users are cool too. I mean, I first learned vim keybindings from Kile. (People keep telling me I'd love emacs, and I have nothing against it, I just happened to learn vim first.)
    - hsitz 6y ago
      Along with Evil, Emacs org-mode is the thing that eventually lures a number of people like you over from Vim. Evil makes editing in Emacs close enough (very close) to editing in Vim. Org-mode gives useful functionality that you can't get in Vim.
      - mijoharas 6y ago
        So, I am now a longtime emacs (and evil, love vim-ey things) user, and I've dipped my toes in the org-mode water a few times, but it's never quite stuck. Have you got any suggestions? The number of people that recommend it makes me sure that there's value to be had there, but it's never really become a habit for me.
        Scarbutt 6y ago
        The important part is to find a method and then leverage orgmode for it. With out some system is hard to make it stick.
ogre_codes 6y ago
Let me back up a step here. I use VIM for almost all basic editing. Its muscle memory. But for code editing, I generally end up on VSCode because it seems to have better language support. I've spent a fair amount of time with configuring VIM trying to get where I feel it needs to be. But whenever I shift to a new stack, it always seems to take an investment of time and effort to get VIM set where it's better than VSCode.
- GrantZvolsky 6y ago
  I share your experience, but it should only be a matter of time until the vim LSP clients[1] mature. One notable exception is Go with its [vim-go](https://github.com/fatih/vim-go https://github.com/fatih/vim-go) plugin, which feels very mature to me as someone new to the language. [1]: https://langserver.org/ https://langserver.org/
  - deadbunny 6y ago
    CoC is already there: https://github.com/neoclide/coc.nvim https://github.com/neoclide/coc.nvim
    - blandflakes 6y ago
      Having to install node.js for a language server client is sort of a downer. For this reason I've been eagerly awaiting the built-in client in neovim, though it's definitely less polished and feature-complete than CoC today.
      - deadbunny 6y ago
        Isn't the "built in" neovim language server lua? I personally can't see much difference between having to install nodejs runtime Vs the lua runtime.
        igneo676 6y ago
        The difference is that the lua runtime is embedded (and wicked fast) into Neovim vs nodejs that has to go over the remote plugin interface
tzs 6y ago
About 40 lines sounds reasonable to me. I've been using vim and before that other vi clones or actual vi as one of my main editors for 40 years, and my .vimrc is 60 lines. 20 of those are to automatically decrypt on read and encrypt on write .gpg or .asc files, which I copied from somewhere 20-25 years ago and haven't actually used in 15+ years, leaving only 40 lines I actually care about.
- alwillis 6y ago
  Just as an FYI, Vim has built-in support for encryption: https://vim.fandom.com/wiki/Encryption https://vim.fandom.com/wiki/Encryption

threatofrain 6y ago

My problem is that some of that building should've been sensible defaults, and the community tends to outsource those responsibilities to extensions. Which means your Vim experience now has some risk of rot. Once and awhile my configurations/extensions rot and I have to go and update myself as to what happened in the ecosystem, or what is interacting with what. One day I decided I'm too tired and switched to VSC. Also the author failed to talk about the #1 killer feature of VSC, the reason for its meteoric rise in popularity — intellisense.

pkage 6y ago
Thankfully, you can get LSP-powered completion with coc.nvim, just like in VSC. It's miles better than YouCompleteMe, plus it's much easier to install—you can just use vim-plug or similar to install it. LSP is truly one of those "rising tide lifting all boats" projects. [0] https://github.com/neoclide/coc.nvim https://github.com/neoclide/coc.nvim
- daotoad 6y ago
  I was using YCM and ALE to handle completion, but having switched to COC I won't look back. It's just a much better experience.
  - scruple 6y ago
    FWIW, neovim's built-in LSP (nvim-lspconfig -- written in Lua, currently in beta) is _outstanding_ and I have already replaced coc.nvim with it in my neovim set up. Set up is super simple, there are 2 extensions to install. Configuration is simple, I think I needed maybe 8 lines added to my `init.vim`. With that I get completion and in-line diagnostics and it's very, very fast, at least with solargraph, clangd, and tsserver.
ogre_codes 6y ago
> My problem is that some of that building should've been sensible defaults Vim suffers a bit from the design equivalent of tech debt. Much of the defaults and common behaviors were created based on the limits of software/ hardware 30+ years ago. Those limits still affect current design. > Also the author failed to talk about the #1 killer feature of VSC, the reason for its meteoric rise in popularity — intellisense. Given a fairly small amount of configuration, you can get autocomplete which is nearly as good as Intellisense in VSCode. For Typescript anyhow, the autocompletion comes from the same source background process.

raverbashing 6y ago

Agreed (though I use nvim now and thoroughly recommend it) Vimscript is weird. Sometimes the answer to "how to do this" comes in the form of "just install this package manager...". Stop. No. Sure, I'm ok with adding a couple of lines to vimrc, copying some files, but don't push it. I get much more out of the box from Vscode, PyCharm, etc. Why can't it be the same with vim?

daotoad 6y ago
This is one of the motivating forces behind nvim. While nvim supports vim script, it provides Lua as its preferred language for extension. In addition, the internal APIs are documented and are intended to be accessible from any language via RPC. https://neovim.io/doc/user/api.html https://neovim.io/doc/user/api.html
bhaak 6y ago
Simple. Vim is not an IDE. If you take a step back and look at software development as a whole then IDEs like VSCode and PyCharm take the top down approach. Whereas Vim is one of the solutions which do it bottom up. With both approaches you can theoretically arrive at the same functionality but in reality, there will always be something missing. Some people prefer the bottom up approach as that gives them the illusion of knowing their tool completely whereas people with the top down preference think everything is curated for them. Over time, both kinds of people notice this isn't quite true.
jeromescuggs 6y ago
drawing from my own experience, i once found myself trying to work on a client website. thanks to a series of events i was using termux from a cellphone. i grabbed my vimrc from my dotfiles git repo and that was that. took all of 30 seconds to turn someone's cellphone into an interface identical to the one i use everywhere else

Osiris 6y ago

My vim config is empty. I use it periodically and know the basics. I prefer it over nano and pico by a mile. 600 lines seems pretty long to me. I don't even know what I would put in a .vimrc file. Obviously I don't use it enough to even have annoyances. The nice thing about have no config is that I can hop into vim on any computer or server anywhere and be able to use the editor. I don't have to worry about having muscle memory of using keybindings/aliases that don't exist.

enriquto 6y ago
> My vim config is empty. That's the way to go. Unfortunately, most humans are fallible and I had to add a single line: inoremap <tab> <esc>
ogre_codes 6y ago
VIM is fantastic for editing files on servers for this reason.
nurettin 6y ago
Mine is 3 lines. Background dark, shift width and tab spaces. Been like that for around 18 years.
- Osiris 6y ago
  I should probably add that. I know I have had it at some point on a different computer.
sumtechguy 6y ago
mine is empty because i jump between so many different machines and my config is not there. so i have to remember them.
iso947 6y ago
Mine was empty until the defaults changed in vim 8 and broke a lot of sensible behaviour.
ybbond 6y ago

masa331 6y ago

My .vimrc is around 80 lines including 15 plugins. It's mostly like that for last 8 years. And i don't have any problem using using unmodified vi/vim on servers, which is a big plus. So no, vim shines and it's pretty bright

barumi 6y ago

> VIM is ideal for people who find it worthwhile to spend the time building their configuration out. I've been using VIM for over a decade and currently my customized config consists of a half a dozen tweaks, such as YAML-specific settings stashed in ./.vim/after.

heelix 6y ago

If you can post it on a public repo, I'd love to see it. (same goes for the many others who use VIM as a daily driver)