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This is what I was expecting. And, I think this is very much just a perception, as you say. I think it's rather unlikely that VIM and Emacs are actually the mos

This is what I was expecting. And, I think this is very much just a perception, as you say. I think it's rather unlikely that VIM and Emacs are actually the most used editors, or even among the most used. I think it's interesting that you put quotes around both words surrounding community but not around the word community itself. I think what you perceive as the ruby community is actually a very small subsection of the actual ruby community and that is only a very small subsection of the entire community of people that use plain text editors. The learning curve for VIM and Emacs is so high as to almost be prohibitive for what is probably the vast majority of users. What I've seen from only a few minutes of googling is that, in the surveys I've found (https://blog.codeanywhere.com/most-popular-ides-code-editors/ https://blog.codeanywhere.com/most-popular-ides-code-editors... & http://www.sitepoint.com/best-php-ide-2014-survey-results/ http://www.sitepoint.com/best-php-ide-2014-survey-results/, for example), VIM and Emacs are really no where near the most used editors. And I think that should probably be expected. I just think that people in this community too often think of themselves as the norm, when our very presence on a site like Hacker News places us very much outside of the norm. Outside even the norm for people in the tech community.

qznc 12y ago
It very much depends on the niche. Among C developers I would think vim does quite well. Among Java developers there is no vim usage to speak of.
- ravitation 12y ago
  This is the exactly the problem though. We aren't speaking about niches, we're speaking about all text editor users. And in that case, I think Vim and Emacs don't do nearly as well as some may think.
gexla 12y ago
> I think it's rather unlikely that VIM and Emacs are actually the most used editors, or even among the most used. Apparently there is enough demand for Vim key-bindings that it seems most text editors and IDE's have them available. > The learning curve for VIM and Emacs is so high as to almost be prohibitive for what is probably the vast majority of users. Vim is probably more widely used by developers and system admins than say... writers. If you have been able to tackle the learning curve of learning to program or learning to administer Linux then the VIM learning curve is just another day at the office.
- ravitation 12y ago
  No one is saying that Vim key-bindings aren't incredibly useful, I'm saying that there is a reason those key-bindings are in most text editors and IDE's... because people are using those editors instead of Vim. Also, most developers are not Linux administrators... It's not that learning Vim or Emacs is hard, what's hard for most users is increasing one's productivity enough to warrant learning Vim or Emacs, especially in the short term. So most developers/users don't; they use text editors that have much more in common with word processors, which many have been using their entire lives.
atmosx 12y ago
> I think it's interesting that you put quotes around both words surrounding community but not around the word community itself. I think what you perceive as the ruby community is actually a very small subsection of the actual ruby community and that is only a very small subsection of the entire community of people that use plain text editors. Your insights are spot on :-) ps. I thought being part of the 'HN community' is the norm for a but maybe it's not. I can't really tell without numbers...

qznc 12y ago

It very much depends on the niche. Among C developers I would think vim does quite well. Among Java developers there is no vim usage to speak of.

ravitation 12y ago
This is the exactly the problem though. We aren't speaking about niches, we're speaking about all text editor users. And in that case, I think Vim and Emacs don't do nearly as well as some may think.

gexla 12y ago

> I think it's rather unlikely that VIM and Emacs are actually the most used editors, or even among the most used. Apparently there is enough demand for Vim key-bindings that it seems most text editors and IDE's have them available. > The learning curve for VIM and Emacs is so high as to almost be prohibitive for what is probably the vast majority of users. Vim is probably more widely used by developers and system admins than say... writers. If you have been able to tackle the learning curve of learning to program or learning to administer Linux then the VIM learning curve is just another day at the office.

ravitation 12y ago
No one is saying that Vim key-bindings aren't incredibly useful, I'm saying that there is a reason those key-bindings are in most text editors and IDE's... because people are using those editors instead of Vim. Also, most developers are not Linux administrators... It's not that learning Vim or Emacs is hard, what's hard for most users is increasing one's productivity enough to warrant learning Vim or Emacs, especially in the short term. So most developers/users don't; they use text editors that have much more in common with word processors, which many have been using their entire lives.

atmosx 12y ago

> I think it's interesting that you put quotes around both words surrounding community but not around the word community itself. I think what you perceive as the ruby community is actually a very small subsection of the actual ruby community and that is only a very small subsection of the entire community of people that use plain text editors. Your insights are spot on :-) ps. I thought being part of the 'HN community' is the norm for a but maybe it's not. I can't really tell without numbers...