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Early developers were struggling. They loved the landmark text editor vi but needed something that was available on more than just Unix.
They needed something more tailored to programmers, something that supported syntax highlighting for various languages and remote editing via SSH. They needed to fine-tune their development environments with plugins to maximize their efficiency.
Dutch programmer Bram Moolenaar created his own solution and shared it for free, eventually asking only that users make a donation to a charity caring for children and families in Uganda.
...Proponents of Vim commonly point out the same features as reasons why they use the program:
- Light and portable: Commonly used as a command line interface, Vim can be launched with a terminal, run through a GUI, or used remotely through an SSH connection. Vim is widely used on Windows, Linux, and macOS.
- Highly customizable and full of plugins: As with so many other open-source platforms, users have run amok with creating custom configurations, features, and plugins. ...
- Modality and no mouse functionality: It seems frustrating, but your fingers never need to leave your keyboard. Maximize productivity and coding time by using keystrokes to switch among normal, insert, command line, and visual modes. Keys have different commands based on which mode you’re in.
- Registers: Think of these as multiple clipboards. You can store copied text and macros, which record keystrokes for playback, in different registers. Registers, which persist between uses of Vim, help you save time by executing certain text in a fraction of the time.
- Motions and text-objects: Arguably our team’s favorite facets of Vim, motions and text-objects serve as the verbs and adjectives of the Vim language, allowing you to write your code über-productively. Motions allow you to tack on an action to built-in commands, so you can, say, delete from the current cursor position until the next occurrence of a letter. Meanwhile, text-objects are used in the context of motions, allowing you to declare commands inside or around words, paragraphs, HTML tags, and even current function blocks.
This submission prepared using the Firefox vim plugin, Vimperator.
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Vim Creator Bram Moolenaar Discusses Developing the Popular Text Editor, How He Uses It
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Grelb's Reminder:
Eighty percent of all people consider themselves to be above
average drivers.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Marand on Monday December 26 2016, @01:07AM
They needed something more tailored to programmers, something that supported syntax highlighting for various languages and remote editing via SSH. They needed to fine-tune their development environments with plugins to maximize their efficiency.
Sounds like what they really needed was emacs. :) (That's right, I went there.)
Joking aside, vi users really should try visiting the dark side for a bit. We even have a mode just for you [emacswiki.org], and there's a custom, vim-user-oriented emacs release [spacemacs.org] to make getting started easier.
I still use vim some, so I appreciate the theming and syntax highlighting and other niceties it brings over plain vi, but for anything more complicated than opening a file for a quick edit I prefer to have the power of emacs. So, despite the general emacs preference, I'm a heretic that uses both situationally. :)
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 26 2016, @01:16AM
You seem to have missed the "light and portable" part. When was emacs ever light? It's a virtual OS in and of itself: it has everything an OS needs except a decent text editor.
(Score: 2, Redundant) by Snotnose on Monday December 26 2016, @01:18AM
Emacs is great, all it needs is a good text editor.
/ ducks
When the dust settled America realized it was saved by a porn star.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Monday December 26 2016, @09:01AM
Please tell me more about that ducks text editor.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by mtrycz on Monday December 26 2016, @11:42AM
If it walks like a duck and it quacks like a duck, then you can edit it.
In capitalist America, ads view YOU!
(Score: 1) by Scruffy Beard 2 on Monday December 26 2016, @02:24AM
"light and portable" is why I have been using vim more than emacs the past 10 years or so.
I prefer Emacs though.
(Score: 2) by mhajicek on Monday December 26 2016, @02:55AM
I started on Peach Text in '81 when I was six.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Marand on Monday December 26 2016, @08:26AM
Have you actually checked memory usage lately? Opening the same file, I see emacs with a fresh config using about 25mb and vim using a fresh config using about 15, and they both start instantly. The difference between the two is trivial and has been for a very long time. Even my extremely tweaked emacs config, with 35 buffers currently open, is using less than "modern" editors , and that's after intentionally increasing the allowed memory usage.
It used to be a bigger difference, but it's not 1995 any more. vim's managed to get bigger, while emacs already did most everything it needed so it's mostly remained the same. If you want "fast and light" now, and the difference between vim and emacs seriously matters to you, you'd be better served by using nano, joe, or jed, all of which use about a third of vim's memory or less.
It's a virtual OS in and of itself
Not related to your trolling, but it's basically the only remaining lisp machine in use, which is actually kind of interesting regardless of anything else.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday December 26 2016, @01:43PM
Light and portable is VIM its for everywhere other than my $HOME for less than 5 minute jobs.
An interesting way to look at it is word choice, if its all "me" and "edit" or "develop" type words then it lives under $HOME and I'm in emacs, if the word choices are all 3rd person over there where I'm "fixin" xorg.conf or something then its vi all the way.
If its in my area of control, if the edited file came to me rather than me going to the edited file, if its a job so long term its worth my time to add packages and customize .emacs.d/init.el to max out productivity, then its emacs all the way.
So logged into "someone elses" server at 2am on emergency callout to change one hostname in one file to make the damn thing work until tomorrow, then its vim all the way.
On the other hand if the code comes to me on my turf its insanely customized init.el with like 50 packages all the way. I got perspective and projectile to shard emacs into distinct projects, magit is the best git client, helm and its addons for all selections, flycheck for syntax checking, smartparens, yasnippet as my templating system. With vim, well, I'm pretty good with dd, x, i, occasionally o, and of course :n, :wq, and :q! and so forth and thats about all the features you need/use for vi. I know it can do a little more, but if I were doing a little more I'd be using emacs, so ...
Emacs is very Perl-ish in that theres always like 15 ways to do things. That makes the average fundamentalist Python-ite completely flip their lids because there should only be the one true god created way to manage whitespace or parenthesis or whatever and only an apostate ready for the purifying fires would dare risk badthink by doing anything different than the one true way. So yeah philosophically emacs is a better mind match at editing something like Perl than something like Python, although it technically works for both.
(Score: 2, Touché) by butthurt on Monday December 26 2016, @07:59PM
> When was emacs ever light?
When did computers ever have more than 8 MB of RAM?
(Score: 2) by darkfeline on Monday December 26 2016, @10:03PM
If I'm writing code, light and portable is about the last thing on my list of requirements. What I want are features that help me write code and don't get in my way (the "don't get in my way" is where most fat IDEs fail). I don't care too much if my editor needs an extra GB of RAM if it can write 40% more of my code for me (which Emacs does splendidly (not the 1 GB RAM part)).
If I'm editing config files on a remote machine (the "portable" requirement), I don't care what editor I use, because I'm restricted by what's installed on the remote machine. ed, vi, nano, vim, cat, sed, I've used them all. (Of course, there's always Emacs TRAMP mode, which lets you edit files on remote machines locally, even across multiple hops.)
Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 26 2016, @01:51AM
FSF and Stallman are toxic. You cannot participate in hacking emacs without signing away your 0th child along with all of your patents and copyrights. Fuck that noise.