4 ms·

Lots of people work with Vim and Emacs day to day, what makes them "long gone" in your opinion?

snozolli 2y ago
Not GP, but I've always found it weird how many people are obsessed with vi/vim and/or Emacs. I get some of the extensibility appeal of Emacs if you're a Lisp fan, but fundamentally I don't understand the appeal of "programming your brain" just to edit code. 90% of my code editing time is spent reading and thinking, not writing or modifying. Memorizing and minimizing (e.g. VimGolf) editor syntax seems like a massive waste of time and cognitive function to me. Modern IDEs have you up and running instantly, and their refactoring tools are really amazing. I feel like there's been a boom in "editor hipsterism" in the last 10 - 15 years, while everyone has forgotten the variety of novel editors that were made in the 80s and 90s (I've forgotten them, too, I just remember seeing ads and reviews in magazines as a young programmer). For context, I do have a basic understanding of vim because I run it on servers, but my knowledge doesn't go far beyond search and replace.
- bcrosby95 2y ago
  I like vim because the keybindings are familiar everywhere. For small server stuff I use vim, for most coding I use Doom Emacs (vim keybindings), and for Java I use Intellij with vim keybindings. I mostly use Emacs because of org mode. It's way better than anything else trying to fill this hole. Otherwise I'd probably just use VSCode. But I don't want to add yet another editor to my regular use.
- Dansvidania 2y ago
  i prefer to use the mouse as little as possible, i feel more productive when I can stay on the home-row of the keyboard, that is primarily it for me. This is because hotkeys are more direct, exact and easier to memorize than mouse motions it helps that vim bindings are adopted in many places so learning and using them ports well to browsing and even managing windows (vimium and aerospace respectively) secondarily, while i don't think using the terminal is generally better than GUI I tend to work in the terminal anyway, so keeping text editing there makes sense.
  - Shorel 2y ago
    > This is because hotkeys are more direct, exact and easier to memorize than mouse motions Did you ever try Opera 5.12 mouse gestures? That was a feature that completely contradicted your statement. The gestures were direct, unambiguous, and easier to memorize than any set of Ctrl+key shortcuts. Sadly, that feature has never been fully replicated. The closest I found is Vivaldi, which I am using now, but it is not exactly the same.
    - Dansvidania 2y ago
      I never tried. I will take a look.
- anthk 2y ago
  With vim you run factoring tools as an external tools. Massive wasting of time? with vim you can do something in seconds that with an IDE you would last minutes if not ours. Check out: - entr to run commands on modifying files/directories - plain Makefiles to run your code: git://bitreich.org/english_knight - LSP and alike tools for your language
  - snozolli 2y ago
    Massive wasting of time? I feel like you only read half of that sentence. entr to run commands on modifying files/directories Alt-Tab to the command console that I always have running. plain Makefiles to run your code I have no idea what the advantage is here. F5 to run my code, including scripted deployment. LSP and alike tools for your language I don't know what this means.
- f1shy 2y ago
  Emacs provides far more than just editing. Helps a lot with reading and VC (magit). Just magit would IMHO justify Emacs.
- nanolith 2y ago
  To each their own. With Vim, Unix is my IDE. I don't know about the recent interest in these editors that you mention. I've been using vi/Vim for the past 30 years. I take it to every project and job. My fingers already know what to do. I've watched colleagues who I started working with 20 years ago as they've retooled on the latest hotness every 4-5 years. Visual Studio, Netbeans, Eclipse, Jetbrains, VS Code, etc. It doesn't take long to learn to use a new IDE, but they are definitely shorter term investments. I can do more or less the same thing most folks can with an IDE; I just use external tools. I wouldn't claim that Vim is somehow superior. It's just what I use. Every now and then, I noodle a bit on a personal editor that is to ed what Vim is to vi. At some point, I'll migrate to it. I think there is a bit of a different philosophy that the editor folks have. I can't speak for them, but I can speak for me. I like to feel closer to the code base. I like to have more of it in my head. The best analogy I've found is that using an editor like Vim or Emacs is closer to driving with a manual transmission and with tight steering controls, compared to driving with an automatic transmission with partial self-driving features found in modern cars. There is definitely something to be said about things like adaptive cruise control, lane keeping assist, GPS navigation, etc. But, if you talk to a manual transmission enthusiast, there is a thrill of feeling closer to the road and being more engaged. Both folks arrive at the destination in the same amount of time. But, if you ask each about their experience, they will have much different views of the drive organized in their head.
  - snozolli 2y ago
    To each their own. And yet I get down-voted for expressing a well-reasoned opinion against vim and Emacs. I've been using vi/Vim for the past 30 years. I take it to every project and job. I've rarely used an IDE that didn't allow custom key bindings, often with the ability to select a set from a drop-down list to match other IDEs. I've been using mostly the same keyboard shortcuts across IDEs for over 20 years. if you talk to a manual transmission enthusiast, there is a thrill of feeling closer to the road and being more engaged Funny you should say that, because I regularly enrage these types by pointing out that if they can't stay engaged as a driver with an automatic transmission, then the problem is with them, not the car. This is a quasi-religious ritual with these people, and a very low-effort way to get a sense of superiority over others (i.e. every driver on the road before ~1970 had experience with a manual transmission and literally anyone can learn in a few hours. It's not a skill to be proud of).
- iLemming 2y ago
  > I've always found it weird how many people are obsessed with vi/vim and/or Emacs. Because you've never truly done it. Like someone who has seen all three sides, I can tell you this: I have never, even once, even for a second, ever regretted my time invested in learning Vim and Emacs. Vim is hands-down the best mental model for navigating through text - I use it everywhere - in my editor, in my terminal, in my browser; heck, I use it system-wide - in my window manager. It's immensely empowering - being able to control things without losing context - your fingertips are in control of everything, you don't even need to shift your hand to touch the mouse or arrow keys. It also liberates you from learning myriad key combinations for every single app, it gives you freedom from having to learn, remember and having to perform weird dactylar dance, where sometimes you can't even reach the exact keys without looking down at your keyboard, not to mention the ergonomics. And then Emacs. OMG, Emacs is so amazing, you just have no idea. The things you can do in Emacs are hard to describe in words - you just need to see it. > 90% of my code editing time is spent reading and thinking, not writing or modifying I spent most of my time taking notes. Emacs is the best tool for that. Matter of fact, I find Emacs is the best tool for any kind of text manipulation. I don't even type anything longer than three words in any app anymore. I'm typing this exact comment in Emacs right now. Why wouldn't I? I have all the tools I need at my disposal - spellchecking, dictionaries, translation, etymology and definition lookup, access to various LLMs - chatgpt, claude, ollama, perplexity, and others, search engines - here's a real, practical example: I would type a search query once and it sends requests to Google, Wikipedia, GitHub, YouTube, etc. I then can pick up the YouTube url, open the video and control its playback while typing - I can pause, mute, resume, speed up the video. All that with the emphasis of the main task at hand - taking notes. Done without leaving the window where the notes are being typed, without having to switch your focus - your mind remains "in the zone". I'm telling you - that's some blackmagic fuckery for staying productive and happy. It's enormously fun when you have complete control over the things happening on your screen. > I've always found it weird There's nothing truly "weird" about it. If you are a computer programmer, you do want to be in control of the computing happening on your computer. It's rather weird when there's the opposite - when computer programmers become merely "users", when they are told that "you're holding it wrong" and "users don't know what they want". I for one do exactly what I want - I want the shit on my computer to work and work on my terms, not anyone else's.
bigstrat2003 2y ago
I haven't used emacs so I won't speak to that. But a GUI editor (be it Sublime, Notepad++, VSCode, JetBrains, whatever) does everything vim does and is far easier and more pleasant to use. I think that using vim instead of a GUI editor is kind of like using a hand saw instead of power tools - you can do it, but you're willingly giving up a better option for a worse one. Vim made sense in a day when computers were based around text terminals, but we don't live in that day any more and it doesn't make sense to use tools that are limited by that paradigm any more. For serious work, a GUI editor (Sublime is my choice) beats the pants off vim. The only situation I use a terminal editor is when I'm editing config files on servers, and vim sucks at that too - nano is far superior for quick and dirty edits to files. I simply do not think there's a use case where vim makes sense any more.
- iLemming 2y ago
  Both Vim and Emacs have GUIs. Emacs can even render your PDFs and webpages, you can have svg icons displayed while browsing directories.
- lenkite 2y ago
  Neovim beats the pants off Sublime any day. Vim modal editing is the definition of power tools - you have it exactly backward. But like any powerful tool, it needs training.
  - Shorel 2y ago
    That's not true. Anything modal editing can do, I can do with Sublime Text, and some things I can do, for example having thousands of cursors simultaneously adding code, can't be done in Vim. If you know how to use your tools, they are power tools. You will say... oh but my fingers are in the home row! It doesn't matter. I can use the cursor keys just as fast and without having to look at the keyboard, their spatial positions are burned into my brain. And I don't need to change modes to use them! Your way is not superior to my way. However, the point of all this discussion is that Lisp doesn't provide good enough language servers for modern editors, so Vim and Emacs integration is much better. And that's an orthogonal issue to the fact that some editors allow you to do things one way or another.

Not GP, but I've always found it weird how many people are obsessed with vi/vim and/or Emacs. I get some of the extensibility appeal of Emacs if you're a Lisp fan, but fundamentally I don't understand the appeal of "programming your brain" just to edit code. 90% of my code editing time is spent reading and thinking, not writing or modifying. Memorizing and minimizing (e.g. VimGolf) editor syntax seems like a massive waste of time and cognitive function to me. Modern IDEs have you up and running instantly, and their refactoring tools are really amazing. I feel like there's been a boom in "editor hipsterism" in the last 10 - 15 years, while everyone has forgotten the variety of novel editors that were made in the 80s and 90s (I've forgotten them, too, I just remember seeing ads and reviews in magazines as a young programmer). For context, I do have a basic understanding of vim because I run it on servers, but my knowledge doesn't go far beyond search and replace.

bcrosby95 2y ago
I like vim because the keybindings are familiar everywhere. For small server stuff I use vim, for most coding I use Doom Emacs (vim keybindings), and for Java I use Intellij with vim keybindings. I mostly use Emacs because of org mode. It's way better than anything else trying to fill this hole. Otherwise I'd probably just use VSCode. But I don't want to add yet another editor to my regular use.
Dansvidania 2y ago
i prefer to use the mouse as little as possible, i feel more productive when I can stay on the home-row of the keyboard, that is primarily it for me. This is because hotkeys are more direct, exact and easier to memorize than mouse motions it helps that vim bindings are adopted in many places so learning and using them ports well to browsing and even managing windows (vimium and aerospace respectively) secondarily, while i don't think using the terminal is generally better than GUI I tend to work in the terminal anyway, so keeping text editing there makes sense.
- Shorel 2y ago
  > This is because hotkeys are more direct, exact and easier to memorize than mouse motions Did you ever try Opera 5.12 mouse gestures? That was a feature that completely contradicted your statement. The gestures were direct, unambiguous, and easier to memorize than any set of Ctrl+key shortcuts. Sadly, that feature has never been fully replicated. The closest I found is Vivaldi, which I am using now, but it is not exactly the same.
  - Dansvidania 2y ago
    I never tried. I will take a look.
anthk 2y ago
With vim you run factoring tools as an external tools. Massive wasting of time? with vim you can do something in seconds that with an IDE you would last minutes if not ours. Check out: - entr to run commands on modifying files/directories - plain Makefiles to run your code: git://bitreich.org/english_knight - LSP and alike tools for your language
- snozolli 2y ago
  Massive wasting of time? I feel like you only read half of that sentence. entr to run commands on modifying files/directories Alt-Tab to the command console that I always have running. plain Makefiles to run your code I have no idea what the advantage is here. F5 to run my code, including scripted deployment. LSP and alike tools for your language I don't know what this means.
f1shy 2y ago
Emacs provides far more than just editing. Helps a lot with reading and VC (magit). Just magit would IMHO justify Emacs.
nanolith 2y ago
To each their own. With Vim, Unix is my IDE. I don't know about the recent interest in these editors that you mention. I've been using vi/Vim for the past 30 years. I take it to every project and job. My fingers already know what to do. I've watched colleagues who I started working with 20 years ago as they've retooled on the latest hotness every 4-5 years. Visual Studio, Netbeans, Eclipse, Jetbrains, VS Code, etc. It doesn't take long to learn to use a new IDE, but they are definitely shorter term investments. I can do more or less the same thing most folks can with an IDE; I just use external tools. I wouldn't claim that Vim is somehow superior. It's just what I use. Every now and then, I noodle a bit on a personal editor that is to ed what Vim is to vi. At some point, I'll migrate to it. I think there is a bit of a different philosophy that the editor folks have. I can't speak for them, but I can speak for me. I like to feel closer to the code base. I like to have more of it in my head. The best analogy I've found is that using an editor like Vim or Emacs is closer to driving with a manual transmission and with tight steering controls, compared to driving with an automatic transmission with partial self-driving features found in modern cars. There is definitely something to be said about things like adaptive cruise control, lane keeping assist, GPS navigation, etc. But, if you talk to a manual transmission enthusiast, there is a thrill of feeling closer to the road and being more engaged. Both folks arrive at the destination in the same amount of time. But, if you ask each about their experience, they will have much different views of the drive organized in their head.
- snozolli 2y ago
  To each their own. And yet I get down-voted for expressing a well-reasoned opinion against vim and Emacs. I've been using vi/Vim for the past 30 years. I take it to every project and job. I've rarely used an IDE that didn't allow custom key bindings, often with the ability to select a set from a drop-down list to match other IDEs. I've been using mostly the same keyboard shortcuts across IDEs for over 20 years. if you talk to a manual transmission enthusiast, there is a thrill of feeling closer to the road and being more engaged Funny you should say that, because I regularly enrage these types by pointing out that if they can't stay engaged as a driver with an automatic transmission, then the problem is with them, not the car. This is a quasi-religious ritual with these people, and a very low-effort way to get a sense of superiority over others (i.e. every driver on the road before ~1970 had experience with a manual transmission and literally anyone can learn in a few hours. It's not a skill to be proud of).
iLemming 2y ago
> I've always found it weird how many people are obsessed with vi/vim and/or Emacs. Because you've never truly done it. Like someone who has seen all three sides, I can tell you this: I have never, even once, even for a second, ever regretted my time invested in learning Vim and Emacs. Vim is hands-down the best mental model for navigating through text - I use it everywhere - in my editor, in my terminal, in my browser; heck, I use it system-wide - in my window manager. It's immensely empowering - being able to control things without losing context - your fingertips are in control of everything, you don't even need to shift your hand to touch the mouse or arrow keys. It also liberates you from learning myriad key combinations for every single app, it gives you freedom from having to learn, remember and having to perform weird dactylar dance, where sometimes you can't even reach the exact keys without looking down at your keyboard, not to mention the ergonomics. And then Emacs. OMG, Emacs is so amazing, you just have no idea. The things you can do in Emacs are hard to describe in words - you just need to see it. > 90% of my code editing time is spent reading and thinking, not writing or modifying I spent most of my time taking notes. Emacs is the best tool for that. Matter of fact, I find Emacs is the best tool for any kind of text manipulation. I don't even type anything longer than three words in any app anymore. I'm typing this exact comment in Emacs right now. Why wouldn't I? I have all the tools I need at my disposal - spellchecking, dictionaries, translation, etymology and definition lookup, access to various LLMs - chatgpt, claude, ollama, perplexity, and others, search engines - here's a real, practical example: I would type a search query once and it sends requests to Google, Wikipedia, GitHub, YouTube, etc. I then can pick up the YouTube url, open the video and control its playback while typing - I can pause, mute, resume, speed up the video. All that with the emphasis of the main task at hand - taking notes. Done without leaving the window where the notes are being typed, without having to switch your focus - your mind remains "in the zone". I'm telling you - that's some blackmagic fuckery for staying productive and happy. It's enormously fun when you have complete control over the things happening on your screen. > I've always found it weird There's nothing truly "weird" about it. If you are a computer programmer, you do want to be in control of the computing happening on your computer. It's rather weird when there's the opposite - when computer programmers become merely "users", when they are told that "you're holding it wrong" and "users don't know what they want". I for one do exactly what I want - I want the shit on my computer to work and work on my terms, not anyone else's.

bigstrat2003 2y ago

I haven't used emacs so I won't speak to that. But a GUI editor (be it Sublime, Notepad++, VSCode, JetBrains, whatever) does everything vim does and is far easier and more pleasant to use. I think that using vim instead of a GUI editor is kind of like using a hand saw instead of power tools - you can do it, but you're willingly giving up a better option for a worse one. Vim made sense in a day when computers were based around text terminals, but we don't live in that day any more and it doesn't make sense to use tools that are limited by that paradigm any more. For serious work, a GUI editor (Sublime is my choice) beats the pants off vim. The only situation I use a terminal editor is when I'm editing config files on servers, and vim sucks at that too - nano is far superior for quick and dirty edits to files. I simply do not think there's a use case where vim makes sense any more.

iLemming 2y ago
Both Vim and Emacs have GUIs. Emacs can even render your PDFs and webpages, you can have svg icons displayed while browsing directories.
lenkite 2y ago
Neovim beats the pants off Sublime any day. Vim modal editing is the definition of power tools - you have it exactly backward. But like any powerful tool, it needs training.
- Shorel 2y ago
  That's not true. Anything modal editing can do, I can do with Sublime Text, and some things I can do, for example having thousands of cursors simultaneously adding code, can't be done in Vim. If you know how to use your tools, they are power tools. You will say... oh but my fingers are in the home row! It doesn't matter. I can use the cursor keys just as fast and without having to look at the keyboard, their spatial positions are burned into my brain. And I don't need to change modes to use them! Your way is not superior to my way. However, the point of all this discussion is that Lisp doesn't provide good enough language servers for modern editors, so Vim and Emacs integration is much better. And that's an orthogonal issue to the fact that some editors allow you to do things one way or another.