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A Look at Vim, a Text Editor for the Ages

posted by chromas on Wednesday August 22 2018, @09:22PM   
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."

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Original Submission

• Re:vim a text editor for the aged? Re:vim a text editor for the aged? (Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Thursday August 23 2018, @06:12PM (2 children)

  by tangomargarine (667) on Thursday August 23 2018, @06:12PM (#725319)

  You don't have to memorize a ton of multi-key commands in vi; you have to memorize a bunch of single-key commands. With emacs, it has a help mode where if you can't remember what you want, you either C-h k for "what does this key chord do?", C-h f "does this function do what I think it does?", or M-x enter-the-full-name-of-the-command-with-autocomplete.

  Is vi self-documenting?

  --
  "Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"

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• Re:vim a text editor for the aged? Re:vim a text editor for the aged? (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 23 2018, @07:50PM (1 child)

  by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 23 2018, @07:50PM (#725375)

  Escape Meta Alt Ctrl Shift! See, it's so easy! (I think Stallman has six fingers on each hand to come up with stuff like that).

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  • Re:vim a text editor for the aged? (Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Thursday August 23 2018, @08:43PM

    by tangomargarine (667) on Thursday August 23 2018, @08:43PM (#725396)

    It's an old joke, but Meta = Alt and I don't think emacs uses Esc for anything more than an alias to some other key. If your emacs gets jammed up you're supposed to be able to exit it via Esc Esc Esc I think? So Meta Ctrl Shift only.

    The emacs doc claims [gnu.org] that it doesn't care about case in keychords, but from experience I'm not sure I believe them. If we buy that we're down to just Ctrl and Meta.

    A lot of key chords actually involve only one modifier key, releasing everything, and typing some other character, rather than holding 2 or 3 modifiers at once. C-x [blah] for a lot of stuff, and C-[blah] directly for editing basics.

    --
    "Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"

    Parent