Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

A Look at Vim, a Text Editor for the Ages

posted by chromas on Wednesday August 22 2018, @09:22PM   Printer-friendly
from the :wq dept.

hubie writes:

Over at The New Stack is a brief but entertaining history of the editor vi and Vim.

"The editor was optimized so that you could edit and feel productive when it was painting slower than you could think. Now that computers are so much faster than you can think, nobody understands this anymore," Joy said. "It was a world that is now extinct. People don't know that vi was written for a world that doesn't exist anymore."

Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
A Look at Vim, a Text Editor for the Ages | Log In/Create an Account | Top | 135 comments | Search Discussion
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.

  • (Score: 4, Informative) by cosurgi on Thursday August 23 2018, @10:01AM

    by cosurgi (272) on Thursday August 23 2018, @10:01AM (#725131) Journal

    "it was painting slower than you could think"

    Just a week ago I was very frustrated because vim was painting too slow for my taste. Of course I have a pretty fast PC. And I use `xset r rate 120 140` because I don't have time to wait for slower key presses (default is 250ms, that's way too long for me). And yet, with :set nocursorline! and syntax on, the editor refresh time was slowing down to a crawl.

    And then I found :set lazyredraw command. Now vim is snappy again! It just doesn'r refresh screen on every keypress.

    --
    #
    #\ @ ? [adom.de] Colonize Mars [kozicki.pl]
    #
    Starting Score:    1  point
    Moderation   +2  
       Interesting=1, Informative=1, Total=2
    Extra 'Informative' Modifier   0  
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  
    Total Score:   4