Why vim

But, I have a confession. I actually use NeoVim. But why? What gives!? And to be honest at this point in time. The reason I use NeoVim is more of a long-term and principled philosophy and also long-term mindset. NeoVim is maintained by a large community of developers and because of this is very community-driven. Vim on the other hand is maintained by a small core of developers bus factor, jk. My goal is to teach you everything from scratch.

Every command will be explained fully. Every line of the init. You will know your Vim setup inside and out. You can away with to come away from this series with:. Coding tutorials and news. The developer homepage gitconnected. Sign in. On Unices I used nedit for years, which is pretty much the equivalent, but via osmosis I slowly learned vim. I find vim to be much like playing a musical instrument, you develop the chops with lots of practice, and you can always learn new techniques even after many years.

Regardless I find it more fun and enjoyable to use since it is mine. About 18 years ago as a novice programmer I became a Visual Studio addicted guy all. It was amazing for me that the burden of handling so many unnecessary feature faded away in a simple capable text editor.

Nowadays I sometimes switch to VScode for writing C programs but switch back to sublime immediately since VScode makes me sick with its messy windows and slow environment. Who has once mentioned cultural roots?

I would presume this to be equally true of climbing, which is probably even more perilous. All in all, a poor analogy, and a poor — and gratuitously rude — post.

And emacs is an IDE. VS Code has a snazzy SSH plugin that allows one to edit remote files, without installing anything on the remote. And VS Code has integrated terminal one can split into multiple panes.

Especially in cases where the editor and the language are close friends e. Just use both in the circumstances where they make you the most productive, no?

This is a profoundly clueless article. I spend virtually all my time in an IDE, and Vim is a crucial part of that. A grammatical command language, where sophisticated instructions can be composed from verbs and nouns, then qualified with counts or repeated with a single keystroke.

Because Vim is modal, these commands are plain text, human-readable and editable. Every key on the keyboard is a register, which can store sequences of these text commands, which can then be played back or even composed into more complicated actions. Vim is much deeper than that, but these factors alone makes it absurdly powerful in the hands of an expert.

My current job requires both Windows and Linux. I use Vim, everywhere, all the time. Vim is not some tool used by old dinosaurs clinging to the past. Vim and emacs are equally obtuse, but emacs is a full blown lisp machine. It will do absolutely anything you want to unreasonable levels.

People learn vim because its always there. People move to other editors because vim isnt easily extensible. But they already learned modal vim so they make the new editor like the old. Emacs is timeless. No replacement necessary. I guess it depends on how you define easily.

Having written a plugin for IntelliJ, I did not find it easily extensible at all. As a years Emacs user, I have to say I do not recognize myself in your article. I started working as a developer using eclipse and other IDEs , and felt I was spending too much time switching between my keyboard and my mouse.

This incited me to try Emacs, which is mostly but not only keyboard-driven. I discovered a fantastic piece of software, extremely extensible and carried by a community who creates excellent packages. From time to time I try newer IDEs to see if I can find something even better because yes, I realize the time I spend to fine-tune Emacs to get IDE-like features is a bit of a shame when newer editors have it out of the box. But I eventually come back to Emacs.

Org mode is so useful it became a major part of my work flow. Magit is so powerful I never get the issues my coworkers have with git.

Now, I was a bit puzzled when I was reading your article. Emacs vs vim vs modern IDE war? The Emacs — vim war is, afaik, nothing more than a joke today. Each community benefits from each other.

I would like to know what gave you the feeling there was some hostility here, maybe I missed something. With just a couple lines of elisp of vimscript you get access to LSP-powered autocompletion, formatting, refactoring and linting. A couple lines more and you get Git control as well.

And then you can take all that and just use the same editor with any number of different languages. It just take a little configuring. I…have all of that in Emacs? I write Java, for a living, and use code completion in Emacs every day. This post makes it sound like Emacs and Vim are just Notepad with funny bindings.

Some are OK, some are great. None have anything I need to be more productive. Vim and emacs are still used not because developers are too stubborn to let go, but because their editing methods are simply more efficient that using mouse for navigating and keyboard for typing. Vim is a modal editor which means you can perform any command directly with the keyboard. Also vim and emacs are simple, fast and customizable. Vim just edits files. And if you need anything extra, you install a plugin.

I wish there was a modern vim. A minimal text editor with a scripting language and good plugins. This kind of statement really annoys me. Its startup time is also good, and it can run in a pure text mode, which is handy for SSH sessions where X11 forwarding would bring a huge performance penalty. This seems like you have never actually used emacs. Add emacs is able to do everything sin can do and is free and open source. After a decade of using vim I switched to CLion and was very happy since it had vi key bindings.

Then emacs came to the rescue. Everything I could do in CLion or vim is there plus some. Nevertheless, I do use both these tools yes, both! Most Linux systems have vi, because that is built into many coreutils packages. We get that you have strong feelings, but keep your discussion civil. However, a few years ago I was with a contracting outfit doing a lot of Linux work. VIM was always there and if you could use it you could program in any Linux shop. I use Emacs to write my website, journal articles, books and manage my projects.

Are the authors being obtuse to raise controversy on purpose, or have they really never themselves used vim and emacs? I came to say the same. I have used several IDEs for several years professionally when required. Cluttered interface, occasionally useful, but never enjoyable.

I eventually found a job where I can use only vim. This is useful for a large, non-modular codebase. IDE vs vim or emacs is sort of like automatic vs manual transmission, or walking on the moving walkway at the airport vs walking off the trail through the woods, or a coloring book vs blank paper. Do you want an experience that is created and managed by a commercial IDE software company, or do you want to create your own experience? I used to use emacs, but also learned vi for ops, then switched to vim because of the smaller minimum size, faster startup, and charmingly idiosyncratic keystroke philosophy.

If vim suddenly ceased to exist, I would be happy with emacs. If both ceased to exist, I would be sad. There are many programmers who are extremely specialized web development factory robots, while knowing very little outside of their specialization. Using IDEs tends to increase this specialization. On most measures, expert Vim users performed even worse than novice Emacs users.

Vim users, however, more often report enjoying using their respective software. So it was vi or nothing. So i learned vi. This is why vim is a text editor, and ides like Atom or VSCode are not.

Vim focuses on keymaps, both built-in and user-defined to quickly and without a mouse, jump around, change and manipulate text and code, in a smart way.

The other thing is that vim is just fast. I spent a couple years in VSCode and everything about it felt slow and not well thought out. The git integration is not helpful and the opposite of intuitive, as such it would be better off left out entirely.

Simply put, vim requires retraining to really understand, but it is better for people who care about rsi, people who care about speed and efficiency, and people who simply want a consistent environment across multiple machines.

Even though Python is much easier for a beginner to grasp environment-wise, a good IDE like PyCharm still offers code completion, integrated debugging, PEP-8 hints, smart refactoring not just rudimentary find-and-replace , regex testing, and a host of other helpful gadgets.

Aye, these are very good points. At that stage, the important thing was learning how to write a program. Mucking about with environment settings, makefiles, of task runners distracts from that, and can be learned soon after.

A great example would be the Arduino IDE. The whole compile-and-deploy thing is done with one button. Those of us who are willing to learn to use flexible, useful tools will continue to be far more productive than those that resign to be unable to do anything not given to them by their IDE. There was never a war between Vim and Emacs. Emacs is a single mode editor like every other and requires use of chords, chords and more chords.

Vim is a dual mode editor and that feature alone unleashes a storm of fast efficient functionality that can be used from second to second as you type.

This effectiveness has never been bettered in any editor since, although it has been emulated many times. Stubborn and irrational resistance to change? The question I ask is why are so many coders, people that I would expect to be able to tolerate high information loads and deep complexity, why are so many coders resistant to learning the few basic Vim commands that would set them free to greater efficiency and power, not only in a windowed environment, but also when managing headless servers and working remotely?

I am a 24 year old developer. I use vim, any IDE is incomplete to me without either vim emulation or an nvim connection. Modern IDES have the main advantage of being mostly ready to go out of the box whereas vim requires a mountain of config to reach a similar level of functionality. However the main advantage of vim is the speedup in thought-to-code translation time.

With marcos, registers, and the modal nature of vim you can format, modify, create code significantly faster than if constrained by mouse movements and precise clicks. Once you get used to vim, not using vim feels lackluster and slow. I encourage all young developers to give vim a shot! Learning the many keystrokes of vi and emacs takes time and practice, but the end result is a developer that can edit code much faster than a developer using the competitively narrow range of key shortcuts a modern IDE provides see: efficiency competitions such as vim golf.

The limit is in the skies, but when you put tmux terminal multiplexer and fzf command-line fuzzy finder , the limit is beyond the skies. Emacs is arguably one of the most powerful things ever developed, and I can make it do anything I want by writing Lisp. And the Emacs community in general is ridiculously intelligent. There is a disconnect between the knowledge of old Unix wizards and what the newcomers to Tech perceive as valuable.

A lot has changed in years, but a massive amount of fundamentals are unchanged. Yes, I was always frustrated by notepad and edlin!! I feel no temptation to use vim, but I am much happier using bash now than Windows explorer. If I were to choose my editor, it would be one compatible with Brief — I have never seen anything better for quickly getting 2,3,4…N separate panes on the same file.

The only thing that is currently brief compatible is very expensive. Oh, please. I wish that electronic medical record systems had a vim mode. I tried to get access to the data elements used by Epic and was repeatedly told that was off limits. We have to be button clickers.

The frustration especially when overlaid on sleep deprivation drives me bonkers. OK Boomer! Seems a bit absurd to me. I rarely use it any more, though. Vscode is my text editor, my debugger, my file explorer, my terminal emulator, my ssh client, my build system and error parser, my embedded executable uploader, etc…. It certainly takes time to get these things configured, but not as much as it did ten years ago; with the introduction of package managers, installing ALE and LanguageClient has become a piece of cake.

You just have to know that these things exist in Vim, and ignore the many who have a very limited view of what it can do. Do yourself, and your employers a favour, and always make time to modernise….

Beginners, teenagers learning to code tend to use IDEs. I use an IDE. So what? Well, maybe there is a reason for this. World class programmers also use IDEs, and novices also use vim. It really just a matter of building the toolchain you feel most productive in. I use both every day, personally. The second point about vim vs. I full time Emacs user but I like vim. Vimium is how I survive a web browser. For me Emacs is the application platform, unified environment: each key press is a programmable customizable command.

Naturally, there are lots of programming modes. Moving to Vim for me was a choice, and I feel way more productive for doing so. The article really reads to me as derogatory to those who choose anything but VS Code and the kin. Totally agree. And then there is performance. This also completely ignores that modern vim and neovim, as well as emacs can have many IDE-like features by installing a few plugins. Was this article intended to be written from an objective perspective? Just use whatever works for you.

The article is just entirely spouting off their ignorance of Vim and Emacs. Genuine question! As stated below, I have recently gone the other way. I know there is something about raw text editors — like driving a manual car with the top down on a country road — but what was it in particular that turned you away from VS Code in the end? Suppose you are asked to do a simple calculation. Would you refuse to work until you got Excel installed in your machine? Of course not — you could use the calculator that comes with your OS.

Vim has its own language, with verbs, modifiers and nouns and that simple concept translates into incredibly complex actions with very few keystrokes. The only issue is the learning curve. I have yet to find any other IDE capable of the power of vim. But the concepts at the core of vim are powerful and I wish modern IDE followed suite. Unfortunately, I think it suffers from being written as an Electron app in the performance department for some things, and I do end up preferring VIM over VS Code as well.

However, with PyCharm or Visual Studio the full Windows app for me it was a whole different ball game. Transitioned from BBEdit to vim a couple years ago.

Living in the terminal is an upgrade in itself, especially with tmux in the mix. A company, in the end, is always self-serving. Git control? Have you heard of Org mode? Have you read the calc manual? I think this is a bit harsh on vim. Still, through extensions, vim offers autocomplete, code actions, refactoring, syntax highlighting, linting and the like.

There are people that think Atom, Pycharm or VScode are better than vim or emacs. They either work in management or are tech journalists.

Things that only programmers need to do like changing the first character of each line in a section of code, or repeating the last thing you did multiple times, or using regular expressions in search and replace.

An IDE is an integrated development environment. This contains lots of tools a programmer needs such as a text editor, a compiler, a run environment, probably a visual GUI editor, some sort of source code control.

You can use it in any IDE. I never leave comments on things like this, but this blog post seems heavy on opinion and light on empirical evidence. You already have to learn your tool and plugins no matter what environment you use. Hate using an editor that requires a mouse.

Slows down my input, thinking etc but then I discovered vi in and used it every day since. I even set visual studio up to use it despite the limitations it then has.. I tried to use pycharm, php storm, vscode, but all of them seems too heavy to me, with vim my feeling is that the editor is really light.

This is a stupid post and reeks of ignorance. Vim can do anything any modern IDE can do if you want it to but.. The operating system is the ide.

Vim is the editor. Vim can do code completion, colored highlighting, auto-indent, inline doc, jump-to, search and replace, run a terminal, execute terminal commands and insert results into file, multiple buffers, multiple panels with resizing and rearranging.

All your IDE features were in vim first. Atom is essentially a vim-inspired editor written in JavaScript with emacs style keybindings. How many times do you lift your hand from the keyboard and reach for the mouse in a coding session? And a big advantage of vim debugging using e. VeBugger, is that the exact same keybindings will work with different debuggers.

That means transitioning to a new language does not mean a muscle-memory overhaul. The same goes for autocompletion, finding references etc. Now, I use vim for both of these languages and the transition is seamless. Vim is more than an editor, vim is a language and a tool to translate intent into code. I can 2p to paste something twice, or 12yy to copy 12 lines. I can edit multiple lines at once, and substitute text using advanced regular expressions.

All without any plugins. I can move freely through the document without my wrist leaving the home row of the keyboard. Putting it short, learning vim gave me a super power being able to control the computer in the speed of thought. If you want me to switch to your editor, and tempt me with a vim mode, then you need to give me something in return.

All the plugins I have fancied in VSCode or Atom has equivalents in vim either by plugins or just being native. And the only thing can see being awesome in VSCode over both Atom and vim is the git integration. But again just using the git cli gives me more features, and allows me to simply type in what I want into my shell, and it will be done. VSCode and Atom are not like the new Playstation, where I need to purchase the new system to be allowed access to buy the new games.

VSCode and Atom are trying to take the fundamental graphical editor, designed for the computer illiterate person who does not want to learn how to command the computer, and tacking on programming helping features.

This is great, I would have loved to have VSCode when I was in elementary school writing my first programs in notepad. So why change from a program designed to efficiently translate intent into code. To a methodology of writing where its simply designed to allow a computer illiterate being able to enter text into their computer?

Why change from vim to VSCode with the vim mode plugin, when it will use two magnitudes more memory, be slower, and require me to move the mouse around for the menu items?

You need to give me something more than the new editor looking fancy, and telling me that my editor is out of date for me to want to switch. It should be noted that most people who ended up using with vim have used IDEs before but finally moving to vim. I have personally used many IDEs in the past, and also liked them, no question. I nevertheless switched to Vim bindings at some point because that was faster for certain things.

I even have my zsh configured to use vim bindings. You might say I have vim in the terminal stages pun intended. Which can all be done in Emacs. Arguably Emacs has the best git interface of any program magit. Did you know SO runs in Windows? I mean do you expect to learn how to be a power programmer from Windows people? I hate Google for suggesting this garbage article. All hail magit — it is truly a thing of beauty. These authors obviously have no idea what Emacs and even modern Vim are like to use.

Agreed Atila. I think the big difference between most IDEs on the one hand, and vim and emacs on the other, is that IDEs typically target only one or two programming languages. That forces developers to learn how to configure and use multiple IDEs in order to be efficient. I agree about Magit; in Vim there is a port called vimagit, which is also top-notch. Visual Studio and various other IDEs are doing half-assed attempts to match this. It is disappointing to see that Visual Studio thinks that svn names map to git actions, making their version very confusing to use.

Wow, what an acerbic gauntlet thrown to the users of Vim and Emacs — shots fired. I do wonder: are the authors sad that the Vim-vs-Emacs wars are cooling down, and want to stir up a new war? I started programming no more than 5 years ago. I started to use VSCode and whatever that looks pretty. I was hearing a lot about Vim but never tried it until I did. It was an eye-opener to the speed I could reach while editing code.

Its such a huge inconvenience to go back and forth from the mouse. Vim allowed me to shred my code while keeping my fingers at the home row. Sorry vim is not arrow keys but hjkl for single character movement. If hjkl are arrow on your keyboard thank vim. I wish there was a 5-minute edit window here for when I post while half-asleep. Not really. How many people expected to learn something then realized 5min was wasted from their lives reading this?

An similar article could make the exact same kinds of arguments, and be just as woefully misguided:. Why are so many IT professionals using Ubuntu and Fedora? Why do F1 racecar drivers use custom racecars carefully optimized to their driving habits?

Why do more advanced users invest time and energy to become more efficient than most people? But for those of us who want and need to be more precise than our mouse can be on screen, vim and emacs are the most widely available options. Honestly, the people I see using IDEs are mostly working on legacy systems, and people using vim or other text editors are working on vanguard technologies. To a large extent, IDEs are training wheels.

They lessen the cognitive load, facilitate adoption of unfamiliar technologies. But, like training wheels, they also limit you. I find some of the history behind the Emacs vs Vim debate rather interesting, but I was not even born in the 80s. I found vi on my own during high school, I graduated in , and after climbing the rather steep learning curve, I now use it for almost everything. Most of the so-called modern tools do a lot for their users. And in my experience, I have seen many programmers that do not understand what their editor is actually doing.

A good example would be managing git repositories. Vim and Emacs both are extremely customizable, and any feature that one desires can most likely be found in a plugin. Also, the latest release of Vim is only from last year. Rather, I think the big divide is more of a philosophical approach; do you want it to do everything for you? Or do you want something that stays out of your way unless you tell it otherwise. I think the worst IDEs are the domain-specific ones because then you end up with like six different IDEs because they are very opinionated on what languages or tools they work with, specifically all the terrible embedded ones like uVision from Keil.

Also no mention of ultra edit. That was my go-to for a while in the early 90s on windows systems. Notepad is trash. For one thing, vim is always there well vi is , but emacs very rarely is. Vim is usable by anyone familiar with the key bindings whereas emacs without your personal customizations can be a nightmare.

For another thing, vim vs emacs is a meme that does not really reflect reality. One of the most popular plugins for emacs is evil-mode which brings in the vim key bindings. I came to both after being an avid visual studio, crimson, jedit, sublime text which I lectured on , intellij, and atom user. In fact most people I know making the switch are young developers. So why did I move to emacs over the darling of the hour vscode?

Ever notice how vscode has no golden ratio mode? No ability to position the terminal the same way as other windows?

To split and rotate windows at will? I use it because for the most part, it makes me far more effective than the alternatives. There is much to be annoyed with in emacs and vim, but the newer IDEs need to mine then a heck of a lot more for ideas before I jump so again. I can easily switch to Kanji or ancient greek and create Anki cards to help me with both.

I can extend the editor and the UI, override anything to create a domain-specific editor for stuff no one is ever going to produce a commercial product to support. Emacs is the Unix Philosophy taken to the ultimate extreme — it does one thing and does it well. Did I miss something? That is what Vim gave me, a way of thinking. Honestly what I want is the Vim-way of editing mixed with the modern way of organizing my editor.

For now Visual Studio Code with vim mode is a quite pleasurable experience in my opinion. I have a unique take as someone that is just starting out in their coding journey.

I dont really care what others find easier. Its what I find easier and more comfortable. Not sure criticizing people for wanting to stick with whats fastest and easiest for them to use makes any sense. The article is low key trying to start something, but people getting angry over it clearly enjoy a fight, too. Although this steep curve is exaggerated in the online world and the quitting vim joke is getting very old It's:q btw. Press i to go to insert mode. Type some gibberish.

Press :wq to save and quit. First of all, don't get disheartened when you see VIM for the first time, it's known to make a horrible first impression. We'll learn to customize it later in the blog. To get started, get your hands dirty on vimtutor. It's a minute vim tutorial which teaches you all the basics.

Just type vimtutor in your terminal in a machine where you have vim installed to open it. Try Vim Adventures. An interactive game that teaches you vim skills in a step by step manner and lets you unlock new abilities after you've proved your worth with the previous ones.

Just get started with it. Learn as you go. You can always refer to the Vim CheatSheet to get better. Practice makes a man perfect. Watch screencasts if that's helpful was helpful to me. The best way to configure your Vim is through. Cool huh? Using vim to configure vim.. Here you can define your keybindings, set themes, install plugins etc.

The easiest way to download and manage plugins for vim is by using a plugin manager. There are quite a few vim-pathogen , Vundle. Vim-plug being my favourite. Installations and usage for each plugin manager can be found in their respective repositories. I personally like to call all my plugins in a separate file and link that file to my vimrc. The first and last lines are for vim-plug to know what plugins are to be installed.

The lines beginning with Plug is to install that particular plugin. Now just reload. Glad you asked because Vim is no fun without plugins made by the awesome open source community. Here are some good plugins you should definitely install. Just search these on GitHub in case you wanna know more about them or their usage. So you see there's a plugin for anything and everything. These plugins are more than enough to make vim a full-blown IDE.