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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(Score: 4, Funny) by mhajicek on Monday December 26 2016, @12:03AM
Just slap a ribbon bar on it and call it good.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 26 2016, @12:25AM
... but it also sucks ass (figuratively speaking).
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 26 2016, @01:22AM
I'd reply to you and tell you how wrong you are if only I could figure out how to exit this darned text editor.
^C - no... ^X - no... ESC - no... ESCESCESCESCESC - no... F1 - no... F2 - no... F3 - no... ...
(Score: 4, Informative) by coolgopher on Monday December 26 2016, @02:30AM
Open new terminal, then
killall -9 vim
Done!
I may have done this a time or two to weird editors that don't understand :q! or ZZ...
(Score: 3, Informative) by Techwolf on Monday December 26 2016, @06:33PM
Back when I started to play with Linux, there was this program that did a system check, one thing it did as part of this process was to dump you into this strange editor, you had to make any changes as needed. None was needed, but as the parent pointed out, I did literally tried all the above. I eventually discovered how to switch to another terminal, find the offending program and kill it. The result was a properly finished system scan.
Yes, I literally did hit the keys : and q to no avail like all the fucking docs said to do.
(Score: 2) by TheRaven on Monday December 26 2016, @11:19AM
I completely agree. The big problem with vim is that it's just about good enough. It's the LaTeX of the editor world: it mostly works and has a huge number of extensions built on top of it that are too hard to completely rewrite, which discourages anyone from creating something that's actually good. The killer feature for editors like vim and emacs is their ability to run over ssh in a tmux (or screen, if you're that way inclined) session, so you can editor remotely and not worry about network disconnections.
With YouCompleteMe, vim is a pretty reasonable code editor and lets me edit code directly on a big server. What I actually want is a nice IDE, a network filesystem that handles disconnections gracefully, a mechanism for invoking the build on the nice fast servers, and a way of tunnelling the gdbserver protocol over ssh so that the IDE can give me graphical debugging for a remote process, with minimal setup. What I actually have is ssh, tmux, vim, and lldb running on the server.
sudo mod me up
(Score: 2) by mtrycz on Monday December 26 2016, @11:38AM
Wouldn't you be using (any kind of) source/version control these days, instead of editing/recompiling on the server?
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(Score: 2) by TheRaven on Monday December 26 2016, @12:46PM
sudo mod me up
(Score: 2) by schad on Monday December 26 2016, @04:01PM
It's not completely crazy to think of git as a network filesystem with excellent disconnected-mode operation.
(Score: 2) by TheRaven on Monday December 26 2016, @08:58PM
sudo mod me up
(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday December 26 2016, @02:02PM
Lately I've been playing with a chromebook having 64 GB of memory and several TB of partially SSD database storage. Well, the chromebook is actually very weak and running VNC to a really big openstack image on a rack somewhere near the NAS racks.
Its pretty fast.
VNC means no weird font/UTF-8 problems, its exactly the way I want it no matter where I access it. Rdesktop is supposedly more secure than VNC but on an internal only LAN it doesn't matter and VNC is just so easy to set up and use whereas rdesktop server side was providing some interesting headaches.
The openstack "horizon" web interface gives you a console via VNC but I run in parallel because I need to keep horizon as an emergency backup if even ssh can't fix an image. If an image is unfixable in a couple minutes I just spin up a new one and let ansible do its thing and I'm back up in ten minutes or so anyway.
emacs on ssh can work but often is weird. My helm sessions want to go monochrome and not show my "bar" so I can't actually use helm prompts which is a little bit of a problem, I'm sure I could fix the color scheme but... I don't remember exactly how flycheck responded to text mode but I remember it wasn't good. vi is totally a text mode editor but emacs is pushing the boundary of unless you put in some work around aggravations it more or less eventually requires a graphical display.
Giving up on the whole "I can't work when the network is down" feels very freeing, like when you give up on 80 columns.
Something I like about developing and debugging on the same machine is there isn't much of a "bump" in mode switching. Some bugs simply require access to a prod system to verify and often for simpler bugs its not worth the effort to image a test system or its a production load or weird data input situation where I can't really replicate without cloning the userbase of the prod systems which isn't happening. You gotta be really careful while debugging on a prod system of course.
(Score: 2) by Nerdfest on Monday December 26 2016, @12:47AM
Sadly, I've lost my master of vi after 25 or so years stuck in Windows-land. While there, I even used microEmacs until switching to IDEs. I'm slowly regaining a bit of my former knowledge, but will never switch back for development. Not using an IDE sets the bar too high for refactoring. Maybe I should look at using vim editor controls within my IDEs ...
(Score: 2) by jasassin on Monday December 26 2016, @01:08AM
As a non programmer but someone who can write a hello world program. Can you please explain refactoring, especially how it relates to integrated development environments?
jasassin@gmail.com GPG Key ID: 0x663EB663D1E7F223
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 26 2016, @01:49AM
Re-factoring: Reshaping text in a fashion that is so regular that the process can be automated (i.e., programmed).
For instance, let's say you want to change the name of a variable; rather than manually finding every occurrence of the old variable name in order to replace it with the new variable name, you simply tell the IDE to make the change, and then the IDE does all that hard work for you.
Of course, there are many more complex examples of refactoring, but surely you can extrapolate on your own.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 26 2016, @02:35AM
Refactoring? That example seems like a simple query-replace, after doing a few (tap the spacebar) to make sure it's replacing what you want, just hit "a" for all, and the rest are done.
(Score: 2) by fnj on Monday December 26 2016, @06:10AM
Negative. An tool (such as Eclipse) that supports code refactoring knows the difference between the string "huge" used as a variable, and the exact same string appearing in a comment and used in other contexts. Global replace is a very crude approximation which screws up. Try refactoring a 100,000-line or 1-million-line code base sometime using only global replace.
(Score: 2) by Nerdfest on Monday December 26 2016, @02:42AM
Thanks. Renaming classes and functions across files, and references within configurations files, etc, is a pain to do manually as well as error prone. It needs to be done though or you end up with the typical improperly named functions and variables as their purposes changed slightly as development went on.
It drives me nuts when i see hipsters developing (Ruby usually) on their doucheBooks using Sublime.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 26 2016, @04:05AM
Just use some perl or sed script.
(Score: 4, Informative) by fnj on Monday December 26 2016, @06:12AM
While you are perfecting and debugging your script and screwing up code, you could have effortlessly refactored 100 times.
(Score: 2) by linuxrocks123 on Monday December 26 2016, @11:16AM
Personally, though, I don't see it, man. I don't spend most of my coding time renaming things. When I do need to rename something, find/replace is usually fine, and when it's not, sed -i s/Old/New/g * is usually fine. If I were working on a million line project, I guess I'd need to do sed -i s/Old/New/g `find . -name '*.[ch]*'` or something. Still no big deal.
But actually if I were working on a million line project I think I'd be careful before renaming something used across multiple files. I mean, presumably there are other people working on this code, too, and it wouldn't be very polite to go all "LET THE NAME OF MOSES BE STRICKEN FROM EVERY BOOK AND TABLET" on the codebase without discussing the matter with them first.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday December 26 2016, @01:22PM
IDEs are kind of for people who can't learn emacs extensions or shell commands.
If you do the polyglot thing and know shell, emacs, and your development language you don't need the IDE.
Also there are some languages that are very verbose, COBOL, Java, and require massive verbosity which results in repetitive and expensive refactoring vs most every other language out there is less verbose requiring less refactoring.
(Score: 2) by Nerdfest on Monday December 26 2016, @01:57PM
Emacs extensions and shell scripts don't take syntax into account. Just because something happens to be the same word doesn't mean it's exactly the same.
I'm a fan of using the right tool for the job. If I wanted to show how hardcore a developer I was, I'd use echo and sed. :)
(Score: 2) by driven on Monday December 26 2016, @05:03AM
I remember JBuilder (the Java IDE) had a cool feature where you could select a block of code and say something like "extract method/function" and it would take that code, figure out what variables were being used in that code, and create a function with the required variables passed as arguments. The code you had selected would be moved into this new function. Nice little timesaver.
I've gone the other way and switched from IDEs to Vim years ago. I do miss some of the productivity enhancements.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by TheRaven on Monday December 26 2016, @11:23AM
sudo mod me up
(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
Relationship status: Available for curbside pickup.
(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.
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(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.
(Score: 2) by opinionated_science on Monday December 26 2016, @01:46AM
Still use it. Solid over weak internet connections (especially to remote servers/supercomputers).
I can emacs, sometimes. But for short and nicely formatted , vi(m) fits the bill.
The visual stuff I rarely use, but the column stuff is useful.
(Score: 2) by wonkey_monkey on Monday December 26 2016, @02:08AM
He's history's greatest monster!
systemd is Roko's Basilisk
(Score: 0, Troll) by Ethanol-fueled on Monday December 26 2016, @03:44AM
I see gated-community retardism is not unique to the United States. Just wait until all those Ugandans start showing up on that asshole's doorstep.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Monday December 26 2016, @09:05AM
So what has he done that makes him worse than Hitler?
No, that's not a Godwin. Being worse than Hitler is logically implied by being history's greatest monster.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 3, Informative) by wonkey_monkey on Monday December 26 2016, @11:48AM
It was a joke. I thought it was pretty obviously one.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 26 2016, @02:53AM
... that now that I've gotten used to it, I keep trying to use vim-like keyboard shortcuts in other programs, such as MS-Word. VimFX for Firefox helps a lot, or Vimium in Chrome. Now I just need a similar plugin for every other piece of software that I use.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 26 2016, @04:41AM
Too bad you didn't train your fingers for Emacs commands, then you could load Vbacs into MS-Word
http://www.rath.ca/Misc/VBacs/ [www.rath.ca]
I've been using this for 10+ years (basically at the time my work forced me to start using MS-Word). Vbacs works fairly well (not perfect), learned Emacs commands while Getes was still a student.
(Score: 5, Funny) by snufu on Monday December 26 2016, @03:34AM
I'm not even a programmer, I'm just learning emacs to keep track of shopping lists. But several guys in robes with cryptic RMS lettering said I would be expelled from The Order if I didn't come to this thread and insult vim users.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Monday December 26 2016, @09:17AM
So what problem do they have with cleaning agents? [wikimedia.org] :-)
Note: The inscriptions translated to English:
Upper: "it cleans and prettifies all fine laundry!"
Lower: "cleans dirtiest hands in next to no time!"
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 26 2016, @03:40AM
Nano is better than either VI VIM or emacs in every way that matters.
(Score: 2) by mtrycz on Monday December 26 2016, @11:51AM
I once read that vim's author said himself that the editor was a giant mess. Coded without any foretought and become a formless monster.
Is there any truth to this? Or was it vi?
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(Score: 2) by bart9h on Monday December 26 2016, @12:30PM
It's true, and the reason why neovim [neovim.io] exists.
(Score: 2) by GungnirSniper on Monday December 26 2016, @04:00PM
If I can't copy/paste from a program, that's not a benefit but a huge annoyance. And that includes XTerm.
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(Score: 1) by Scruffy Beard 2 on Monday December 26 2016, @10:00PM
You are supposed to click with the left then right mouse button to select, then use the center button to paste.
Some programs such a firefox don't appear to implement this correctly though.
(Score: 2) by darkfeline on Monday December 26 2016, @10:07PM
Headline scared me for a second, I thought it was "Vim Creator Bram Moolenar Develops Disease".
Quote from an interview:
8: How can the community ensure that the Vim project succeeds for the foreseeable future?
[Bram] Keep me alive. :-)
It doesn't sound like he has a backup plan for Vim maintainership. If Bram dies, Vim dies.
Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 27 2016, @01:59PM
How is that frustrating for anyone, including people who've only used Windows GUIs? Is there some compelling itch in some people to reach over to the mouse?