8 ms·

Happy Birthday Vim, The Venerable Text Editor Turns 20

241 points by pdelgallego 15y ago

nobody31 15y ago
dupe - http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2011/11/two-decades-of-productivity-vims-20th-anniversary.ars http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2011/11/two-decades-...
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
alexis-d 15y ago
I think it'll always amaze that we haven't been able to do better tools than the goold old ones (Vim, Emac & Unix tools I'm looking at you).
- ojbyrne 15y ago
  http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000017.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000017.html
  - kiba 15y ago
    Nice article, but it kinda butt against chrome, which I like to upgrade every single time it come out. (Actually, it get upgraded automatically when I tell archlinux to update against itself.)
- davidw 15y ago
  Well... vim and emacs both grow with their users, and have acquired a lot of functionality over the years.
- wazoox 15y ago
  I'm still trying to get my head around the Plan9 utilities :)
sunils34 15y ago
I honestly don't know where I would be without vim. Happy Birthday!
jamesbritt 15y ago
Larger discussion here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3187065 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3187065
artursapek 15y ago
Wow, VIM is just months older than I. Had the impression it was much younger.
statictype 15y ago
Vim has the kind of user lock-in mechanism that big corporations can only dream of: modal editing. Once you get sold on modal text editing it becomes very difficult to accept or use any other editor that doesn't do it (which is pretty much every other text editor out there). Sublime, Textmate, e - all great editors. Don't feel like using any of them after 10 years of Vim.
- m0shen 15y ago
  You can have Vi keybindings in many popular editors / IDEs. There are plugins/settings for: * Eclipse * IntelliJ * NetBeans * Komodo Edit / IDE * Visual Studio Just FYI. Your plugins, macros and settings though... it's tough to have those follow you around.
  - JoshTriplett 15y ago
    vi keybindings don't really suffice, though, even when fully implemented (which many tools don't). I don't just want basic text editing functionality, though vim does that extraordinarily well. I want substitution, compilation/quickfix mode, grep, indentation, abbreviations, file modes, highlighting, and a dozen other things that prove hard to enumerate until my fingers automatically use them and they don't work.
    - LarrySDonald 15y ago
      It's a good step forward though. For years, I was always torn about IDEs, it's very handy to be able to do so much automatically rather than having to do everything yourself. So much so that the productivity boost is near-required in a modern environment. But.. you don't get to edit in vi. For no particular reason as such, the editing scheme in the IDE is no less arbitrary. The whole kit would be nice, but hey, if it's at least modal and support the normal keyboard functions (around what you'd get if you just ssh:ed into your buddies box to help him with something and ended up editing things with vi, the local version, nothing customized) that's a lot.
- tricolon 15y ago
tokenadult 15y ago
As someone more than twice that old, I find it amusing when something twenty years old is described as "venerable." The world of computer technology has seen many fashions come and go, but some tools have been comparatively long-lasting, and have been used through several generations of the newest and greatest other technologies.
- JoshTriplett 15y ago
  So very few, though. Many standards have lasted that long (deflate compression immediately came to mind), but few specific tools have. The Linux kernel turned 20 recently. X has lasted 27 years, and remained backward-compatible (X11) for 24 years. GCC (24 years), Vim (20), and Emacs (35) have grown ever-more widely used. How many other specific tools that we use today have that kind of history?
JoshTriplett 15y ago
Despite its age, I still find myself discovering new useful functionality. Reading this article, I noticed that the screenshot had a shell running in a buffer, which vim doesn't normally do. I searched for the text in the status line, and found ConqueTerm.
toyg 15y ago
Tim O'Reilly makes a good point here: https://plus.google.com/107033731246200681024/posts/aZSZCsAcHbH https://plus.google.com/107033731246200681024/posts/aZSZCsAc... : "It isn't really Vim's 20th birthday. It's a lot closer to its 35th!" Because of course, vim is really just an extended and improved version of the venerable vi, the first screen-oriented editor for Unix. While the article starts out with a history of vi, it somehow treats it as if it were a grandparent, rather than the template for what remains. The core design of vim reflects the design insights of Bill Joy, not those of Bram Moolenaar, who refined and updated them."
- ludwigvan 15y ago
  I had almost forgotten that Bill Joy, the creator of vi is also the co-founder of Sun; and Gosling, the father of Java authored his own version of Emacs. Isn't it ironic that most people find Java, one of the major accomplishments of Sun, is almost impossible to code in vim or emacs without an IDE though?
- St-Clock 15y ago
  Well, I like this counterpoint too from the Google+ discussion: "Sedat Kapanoglu: Technical innovation process on computing is too organic to find a single originator. Everything is derived from something else and that's what computing industry owes it's amazing progress in such a short term. Unix was from Multics. C was from B which was from BCPL. , and vi was from ex. We can consider vi itself as vim for ex from that perspective. I think there are no distinct thought processes for creating and improving. All creation is improvement and all improvement is a creation. We don't need to have a moment of silence for the father on a kid's birthday. Let the kid enjoy the day."
  - chalst 15y ago
    Quite so. One quibble: ex is Bill Joy's reimplementation of ed. I think it was always intended to be part of vi.
dddddannyyyyy 15y ago
Bah.. stagnation is not worthy of being called life. I love vim because it is the best. I can't use anything else because nothing else works like it. I hate vim because it has stopped advancing. It has not had a good update for 5 years. May 7, 2006 7.0 Spell checking, code completion, tab pages (multiple viewports/window layouts), current line and column highlighting, undo branches, and more May 12, 2007 7.1 Bug fixes, new syntax and runtime files, etc. August 9, 2008 7.2 Floating point support in scripts, refactored screen drawing code, bug fixes, new syntax files, etc. August 15, 2010 7.3 Lua support, Python3 support, Blowfish encryption, persistent undo/redo We are all still waiting for various types of extensibility, even though they been in the top 5 sponsored requests for over almost 15 years. I normally wouldn't be complaining about free software, but vim is donationware.
- rbonvall 15y ago
  > I hate vim because it has stopped advancing. It has not had a good update for 5 years. Vim itself has stopped advancing, but there is an active community developing very useful and novel plugins. This has happened thanks to several plugin management systems that have arisen independently during the last couple of years.
xpaulbettsx 15y ago
If you appreciate Vim and use it every day, make a donation to http://iccf-holland.org/ http://iccf-holland.org/ - for many of us, Vim is an indispensable tool, if we all paid ICCF what we properly owe Bram for his years of Vim work, it would make a huge difference to people who really need it.
- masomenos 15y ago
  Thanks for the reminder! This is something I've had at the back of my mind for the 10+ years I've been using vim, so high time.

241 points by pdelgallego 15y ago

dupe - http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2011/11/two-decades-of-productivity-vims-20th-anniversary.ars http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2011/11/two-decades-...

deleted 15y ago
[deleted]

alexis-d 15y ago

I think it'll always amaze that we haven't been able to do better tools than the goold old ones (Vim, Emac & Unix tools I'm looking at you).

ojbyrne 15y ago
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000017.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000017.html
- kiba 15y ago
  Nice article, but it kinda butt against chrome, which I like to upgrade every single time it come out. (Actually, it get upgraded automatically when I tell archlinux to update against itself.)
davidw 15y ago
Well... vim and emacs both grow with their users, and have acquired a lot of functionality over the years.
wazoox 15y ago
I'm still trying to get my head around the Plan9 utilities :)

sunils34 15y ago

I honestly don't know where I would be without vim. Happy Birthday!

jamesbritt 15y ago

Larger discussion here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3187065 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3187065

artursapek 15y ago

Wow, VIM is just months older than I. Had the impression it was much younger.

statictype 15y ago

Vim has the kind of user lock-in mechanism that big corporations can only dream of: modal editing. Once you get sold on modal text editing it becomes very difficult to accept or use any other editor that doesn't do it (which is pretty much every other text editor out there). Sublime, Textmate, e - all great editors. Don't feel like using any of them after 10 years of Vim.

m0shen 15y ago
You can have Vi keybindings in many popular editors / IDEs. There are plugins/settings for: * Eclipse * IntelliJ * NetBeans * Komodo Edit / IDE * Visual Studio Just FYI. Your plugins, macros and settings though... it's tough to have those follow you around.
- JoshTriplett 15y ago
  vi keybindings don't really suffice, though, even when fully implemented (which many tools don't). I don't just want basic text editing functionality, though vim does that extraordinarily well. I want substitution, compilation/quickfix mode, grep, indentation, abbreviations, file modes, highlighting, and a dozen other things that prove hard to enumerate until my fingers automatically use them and they don't work.
  - LarrySDonald 15y ago
    It's a good step forward though. For years, I was always torn about IDEs, it's very handy to be able to do so much automatically rather than having to do everything yourself. So much so that the productivity boost is near-required in a modern environment. But.. you don't get to edit in vi. For no particular reason as such, the editing scheme in the IDE is no less arbitrary. The whole kit would be nice, but hey, if it's at least modal and support the normal keyboard functions (around what you'd get if you just ssh:ed into your buddies box to help him with something and ended up editing things with vi, the local version, nothing customized) that's a lot.
tricolon 15y ago

tokenadult 15y ago

As someone more than twice that old, I find it amusing when something twenty years old is described as "venerable." The world of computer technology has seen many fashions come and go, but some tools have been comparatively long-lasting, and have been used through several generations of the newest and greatest other technologies.

JoshTriplett 15y ago
So very few, though. Many standards have lasted that long (deflate compression immediately came to mind), but few specific tools have. The Linux kernel turned 20 recently. X has lasted 27 years, and remained backward-compatible (X11) for 24 years. GCC (24 years), Vim (20), and Emacs (35) have grown ever-more widely used. How many other specific tools that we use today have that kind of history?

JoshTriplett 15y ago

Despite its age, I still find myself discovering new useful functionality. Reading this article, I noticed that the screenshot had a shell running in a buffer, which vim doesn't normally do. I searched for the text in the status line, and found ConqueTerm.

toyg 15y ago

Tim O'Reilly makes a good point here: https://plus.google.com/107033731246200681024/posts/aZSZCsAcHbH https://plus.google.com/107033731246200681024/posts/aZSZCsAc... : "It isn't really Vim's 20th birthday. It's a lot closer to its 35th!" Because of course, vim is really just an extended and improved version of the venerable vi, the first screen-oriented editor for Unix. While the article starts out with a history of vi, it somehow treats it as if it were a grandparent, rather than the template for what remains. The core design of vim reflects the design insights of Bill Joy, not those of Bram Moolenaar, who refined and updated them."

ludwigvan 15y ago
I had almost forgotten that Bill Joy, the creator of vi is also the co-founder of Sun; and Gosling, the father of Java authored his own version of Emacs. Isn't it ironic that most people find Java, one of the major accomplishments of Sun, is almost impossible to code in vim or emacs without an IDE though?
St-Clock 15y ago
Well, I like this counterpoint too from the Google+ discussion: "Sedat Kapanoglu: Technical innovation process on computing is too organic to find a single originator. Everything is derived from something else and that's what computing industry owes it's amazing progress in such a short term. Unix was from Multics. C was from B which was from BCPL. , and vi was from ex. We can consider vi itself as vim for ex from that perspective. I think there are no distinct thought processes for creating and improving. All creation is improvement and all improvement is a creation. We don't need to have a moment of silence for the father on a kid's birthday. Let the kid enjoy the day."
- chalst 15y ago
  Quite so. One quibble: ex is Bill Joy's reimplementation of ed. I think it was always intended to be part of vi.

dddddannyyyyy 15y ago

Bah.. stagnation is not worthy of being called life. I love vim because it is the best. I can't use anything else because nothing else works like it. I hate vim because it has stopped advancing. It has not had a good update for 5 years. May 7, 2006 7.0 Spell checking, code completion, tab pages (multiple viewports/window layouts), current line and column highlighting, undo branches, and more May 12, 2007 7.1 Bug fixes, new syntax and runtime files, etc. August 9, 2008 7.2 Floating point support in scripts, refactored screen drawing code, bug fixes, new syntax files, etc. August 15, 2010 7.3 Lua support, Python3 support, Blowfish encryption, persistent undo/redo We are all still waiting for various types of extensibility, even though they been in the top 5 sponsored requests for over almost 15 years. I normally wouldn't be complaining about free software, but vim is donationware.

rbonvall 15y ago
> I hate vim because it has stopped advancing. It has not had a good update for 5 years. Vim itself has stopped advancing, but there is an active community developing very useful and novel plugins. This has happened thanks to several plugin management systems that have arisen independently during the last couple of years.

xpaulbettsx 15y ago

If you appreciate Vim and use it every day, make a donation to http://iccf-holland.org/ http://iccf-holland.org/ - for many of us, Vim is an indispensable tool, if we all paid ICCF what we properly owe Bram for his years of Vim work, it would make a huge difference to people who really need it.

masomenos 15y ago
Thanks for the reminder! This is something I've had at the back of my mind for the 10+ years I've been using vim, so high time.