I’ve never used it because I thought it would make me some lightning fast super developer. I’ve always used it because it’s simply fun. It’s makes editing into this interesting sort of game. You start out with a simple set of skills from vimtutor, and inevitably brute force your cursor around the screen for a while. Little by little your movements become more complex and efficient, and the journey to figuring that out is fun and interesting.
It makes you think about typing in a totally different way. It makes it into a some kind of interesting game where your goal is to accomplish a task in the fewest keystrokes possible. That problem solving aspect scratches an itch inside my brain that has always kept me coming back. It’s just fun, and I don’t think that gets talked about enough
I’ve been a long time vim user, and I honestly never really bought into the efficiency claims. That gets repeated over and over, but If you’re a slow typer then no editor can really make much of a difference.
Little by little your movements become more complex and efficient, and the journey to figuring that out is fun and interesting.
It’s just fun, and I don’t think that gets talked about enough
vi definitely doesn't scratch that "itch" for everyone in the same way. But for me, it's as though I found a cheat code. Getting better at vi feels like getting better at a game - only practicing this game makes you better at any number of tasks that are relevant to your daily work.
(although if you also want to get better at typing speed, there are surprisingly fun roguelikes on Steam for just this purpose)
Vi key bindings don't apply outside of vi
The shells themselves also support vi binding.
Outside of the terminal tools like Vimium add support to browsers and many other interfaces.
The added benefit I found is that Vim’s purely keyboard based design is much, much easier on the wrists. Heck, I pushed myself to learn Vim because I started to feel wrist pain due to KB and mouse switching.
specifically, the keys used by vi were there on every (terminal) keyboard.
In comparison, emacs heavily depended on modifier keys, which were pretty non-standard and if found, frequently were in different places on each keyboard.
That said, more complex editing tasks using modes/automation/etc might be more efficient with emacs.
personally, I have "thresholds". quick/dirty can be vi, more involved goes to emacs. same with scripting, quick/dirty shell script, more involved to something like python. ymmv
Macros, dude.
It's a bit annoying to become disciplined in text structure/regularity to have macros work flawlessly, but it's a bliss afterwards.
And then... recursive macros.
(I know Emacs has better macros but vim macros are way easier and fun for everyday use).
My fingers just love it. Every time I need to jump to a non-modal editor my muscle memory screams: "WTF?!"
How about Tiktok then
But I'd still rather use it than just about any other text editor, just for the simplicity of that muscle memory alone. I have way more stuff to keep in my head than I have room for and I can't afford to expend more than about 0.0001% of context on a text editor.
I can't say I agree. To me this is equivalent of saying "I have way more music in my head than I have room for and I can't afford to expend more than about 0.0001% of context on a piano". The tool you use for 8+ hours a day is extremely important and even small gains will pay dividends over the long run. The more efficiently the text editor allows you to do tasks, the more time you have to think about other tasks.
But then I discovered https://www.lazyvim.org/. Turns your copy of NeoVim into an IDE.
I still haven't edited the default config much, actually. But now I'm probably 2x to 3x as productive in vim (nvim, now) as before.
P.S. If you decide to check out the LazyVim config, I highly recommend reading https://lazyvim-ambitious-devs.phillips.codes/ all the way through. There's a lot of new keybindings to learn, but Dusty Phillips's book gives you a gentle on-ramp to learning most of them.
I wrote about how it works in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48118585 so I won't repeat that here. But if I had to pick my favorite feature from LazyVim's config... well, actually it would probably be something else, but `s` is definitely in the top three by now.
Right now I think my .vimrc is two lines. That's also sort of silly as I benefit very little from all the things Vim can do.
What really seals the AstroNVim deal for me though is the community packs. People have very thoughtfully integrated support for a huge range of nvim plugins. And it's super easy to install, and they often fit in nicely to the existing out of box experience of nvim. https://github.com/AstroNvim/astrocommunity
Once in a while I will mistakenly dump a string of keystrokes into insert mode or another application. That literal output always amazes me because the construction of those strings is so far removed from my brain's "main thread".
The inverse is if I try to write a helper function or explain to someone else how I did something they observed and I need to methodically document each action. It's like trying to describe how to walk or something.
The comments about LLM contributed code seems like a specific axe to grind that otherwise detracts from a nice history lesson.
The existence of vim classic would be hard to explain without reference to LLMs.
That advice was not entirely accurate (sometimes vi is in /usr/bin/vi, for example), and the merging of /bin with /usr/bin has made it kind of a moot point. (EDIT to add: Though the fact that busybox includes a basic vi implementation has kind of un-mooted the point, actually). But I first started learning vi because I figured I would need it professionally, and when the modal-editing workflow "clicked" for me, I figured out that I had just learned the editor I would want to stick with for years.
And although vim replaced vi and nvim replaced vim in my finger-macros, that has remained true to this day.
You don't need emacs on a server. TRAMP is built-in and can open remote files in a local instance over SSH, SMB, FTP, ADB, or docker/podman.
EDIT: Found http://www.fifi.org/doc/tramp/tramp-emacs.html which mentions that TRAMP started development in November 1998. I would have been getting that advice in late 1997 or early 1998, given when I started my Unix class at college. So the answer appears to be that the advice was actually correct at the time, but superseded sooner than I thought it was.
Seems like an interesting fact for those who don't follow the development of vim/neovim.
I am but a lowly mouse/GUI user so rarely have to dwell in a shell, but I learnt the basics of vi in my 1st year of university and never forgotten. Gotten me out of many a pickle being able to reliably edit a file quickly.
Helix mode in zed is closest to my perfect text editor right now. Does everything helix does but with alt-up/alt-down to move lines, and a few other little things like that that you'd expect a modern editor to have.
I have learned it back in Xenix heyday, and decided I was better off with Emacs.
Unfortunely not every server has Emacs pre-installed.
On my own devenv I would rather reach out to IDEs, that replicate as much as possible the Xerox PARC / Symbolics / TI experience.
When I use a different editor, there will be lots of jjkk or ,w (I nmap ,w to :w). Habits die hard.
Now I switched to neovim due to the amount of good features I like with it. I use exclusively mini.nvim modules that are awesome.
Maybe it should be included in the list. It can still be downloaded from the openwatcom project, https://openwatcom.org/ftp/manuals/1.5/vi.pdf
Use Helix now as the first one that stuck in my fingers though. before that it was always try a lil while and forget it (back to nano...).
Helix i think is like 'user friendly vi' or maybe 'no config vi'. dont need any plugins or weird stuff. everything essential works out of the box (for me)
Recently I was trying to find a good way to delete from the current position backward to another character, like dT or dF followed by the target character. The trouble was they'd leave at least one character behind, either what I jumped to or what I started on. What worked how I want, and was still easy, was just using visual mode. Where "n" was the character to jump back to, I did vFn which selected from my cursor position back to the letter n (and including that n). I could then hit d and delete all of it, no extra character left behind from either end. I remember at first I was thinking "there's gotta be a way to do this without visual mode". Best I could come up with was hitting x after dFn or whatever to get the stray character. I think using visual mode is probably fine, though. Maybe if I were doing this type of edit a lot I could bind some key sequence to do it.
Would it be accurate to say you didn't use visual mode much in vim before you moved to Helix?
Also visual mode doesn't work the same. If I want to delete up to the next word normally I do `dw`, but if I do `vwd` then I also delete the first letter of the next word. I guess in visual mode you'd have to do `vwhd` or `vawd`? Which is 4 keypresses instead of 2, which isn't great for something that I do all the time.
Why is that handy? Well, the idea is that you're probably already looking at the point on the screen you want to move the cursor to, so instead of figuring out a complex navigation, you can type a few keys: `s` plus the letters you're looking at. Then pause for a quarter-second, and type the letter that just appeared where you're looking at. The label letters will be chosen such that none of them appear after the text you typed, e.g. if the words "car", "cat", and "can" all appear in your document, then after you press `sca` the labels `r`, `t`, and `n` will never be chosen. (But the label `d` might be chosen if the word "cad", or words containing it such as "academic", never appear in the document).
It took a little getting used to, but now I've found it's quite the fastest way to issue commands. Want to delete everything from here to that closing parenthesis right there? If you're on its matching open parenthesis then `d%` is fastest, but if you're not, then `ds)` followed by split-second pause to see the label appear (in a bright contrasting color), then type the label. Quite a bit faster than `v` plus a bunch of movement, in my experience. Once you get used to it, it really speeds you up.
And when you get down to it, isn't "once you get used to it, it really speeds you up" a description of the entire vi family of editors in the first place?
The moment VSCode and Obsidian support improves, I am switching immediately.
Came in handy when I had to talk a guy through updating a Solaris config file to allow the box to boot when he only had a serial console in the early 2000s.
The most important difference is that they invert the editing model from verb-noun to noun-verb. Meaning you always see exactly what you’re going to be operating on before you do it.
The second most important difference is that they were designed from the ground up around multi-selection editing as a primitive, rather than a plugin or late addition.
That model is typically less efficient purely in terms of keystrokes, for some operations significantly so, but it’s somewhat mitigated if having the state on-screen rather than in your head means you undo less often.
I wouldn’t suggest either approach is superior. I suspect most people (“most people” in the subset of people who jibe with modal editing to begin with, anyway) will find that one just fits their brain better than the other.
Personally, even having used Vim almost daily since finding it on a Fish Disk sometime in the mid-90s, I still turned out to be in the kak/hx group. I can still use vi quite comfortably when I need to, but Helix removed a bit of friction I’d barely been aware of.
There’s a steady stream of NeoVim exiles to Helix forums, I think who mostly found its Lua-based config too complex/brittle, asking why the devs don’t add settings to make it work like Vim, include a *Vim keymap as standard, etc.
It’s kind of wild to me that people would choose their editor based on how minimalist its config/how batteries-included it is, rather than its fundamental editing paradigm.
It's worth noting that a lot of the text editing done in the vi family are just calls to ed with different ways of doing selections.
"The we family" :)
I wonder how it went for the farms that stuck to "non-tractor-generated crops" in the 1900s.
Sounds familiar.
[1]: “However, even though steam-powered tractors provided an alternative to draft animals, the size, mechanical complexity and risk of explosion rendered these tractors unusable for most farms.” https://www.volocars.com/blog/history-of-tractors-in-agricul...
Granted, it's more about chemicals than tractors, but still quite close to the spirit of the comments. Bio approach sacrifices some tech advances.
What I wish existed was a fork of Busybox Vi which fully supports UTF-8. I’ve looked at the code and it would require a considerable rewrite to make it UTF-8 compatible, so I can see why it hasn’t been done.
On graphical Vis, I liked Cream, which almost made Vim seamless.
https://cream.sourceforge.net/
Instead of GTK2/3, I prefer Athena Vim.
My primary editor for text (not code) editing and e-mail. I just wish Unicode support made it into base vi(1) on OpenBSD, but for now I can at least use it for all other purposes other than the ones in the previous sentence.
The alternative is just as steep, if not steeper.
When I don't have a GUI available, I use micro, nano, joe.
Vim on the other hand never felt like it benefited much from a GUI, or like it had a very good one available. I just use neovim in a terminal.