The State of Vim

mitch-crn

I started with vi, a long time ago. I do not remember when I switched, but it was most likely when I start using Linux. I will stay with it until I die at this point. http://crn.hopto.org/unix/#vim

jgb1984

As a long time (20+ years) vim user the passing of Bram came as a shock. But it has become clear to me that the project is in safe hands, and I've seen slow but steady progress, continuing the tradition of stability that Bram always safeguarded for 3 decades.

I do try out neovim from time to time, but I don't care for Lua (vimscript is easier to read and less verbose for .vimrc), I don't need an LSP and I found treesitter often buggy and slow.

So I'm sticking with vim, here's to another few decades more, thank you to all maintainers!

JetSetIlly

I'm happy with this "maintenance mode" tag. Personally speaking, so long as it continues to get security fixes and the build system is kept working, I'm a happy user.

amelius

Big fan of Vim. One thing I wish they fixed is the UX around opening a file twice.

ctenb

Vim in maintainance mode makes a lot of sense to me. For larger features and refactors it makes more sense to turn to neovim, which has already undergone a lot of modernization work, at times breaking with old vim.

blame-troi

Bram's passing and the split into basically two code bases (Vim, Neovim) and three customization languages pushed me over to Emacs. I switched back and forth for years, as many others do, but I didn't want to deal with having to use one or the other depending on scripting language.

[edit: grammar]

deskr

Ah, someone has arrived with matches and kindling for the classic Emacs/Vi flame war.

But I'm pouring water on it right away. I'm glad you found peace with Emacs.

emptysongglass

Yes to all perusers about to make some holy war comment or crack a long-dead joke about editors, please don't. Most of us out there are happy you've found peace or joy with your editor of choice.

Keep the holy war dead and let people decide for themselves what their editor should be. I use Emacs but I have many colleagues who use Neovim and we all are very supportive of each other.

whiplash451

Curious to know whether you considered Visual Studio?

I used vim happily for 15 years. When deciding to move on to something else, VSCode won over emacs.

devjab

I'm not the person you asked but I chose Emacs over VSC because it's just a better fit for a lot of things for me. I do think the telemetry Microsoft harvests through VSC is an issue to consider. While it is "just" metadata and no file content, they're getting your entire project structure down to file extensions. I don't see why I would want Microsoft to know what I'm working on. Anyway, the key point for me was ORG mode and that plugins for Go and C++ suck(ed?) in VSC. There are other things, the intellisense is slow, the vim plugin is terrible, the constant Microsoft product pushes are annoying, there is no Magit and so on.

I think it's important to say that I don't dislike VSC as such at this point. Because I probably made it sound like I think it's terrible. I don't I think it's ok. I didn't mind using it for Typescript as an example. Over all I think it's average at best. I get why people use it, it's easy to setup. It's easy to share configurations and so on. I probably would have gone from vim to neovim if it wasn't for doom emacs though.

I think the major advantage both emacs and vim have though is that they're always good. A lot of VSC users are now switching to Zed and that hamsterwheel will go on and on. With vim or emacs you'll never really have to change anything.

pletnes

Vim (used to be?) insanely much faster on large files, it’s already installed everywhere, it has built-in highlights for all languages under the sun, configuration is easier to sync around (in my opinion).

That said, I use both, and jetbrains.

vkazanov

Why did it have to win?

Emacs is fundamentally different, vscode is only convenient if there is no intention to change things.

beretguy

Can’t run vscode in that black box thingy.

genieyclo

omg, I’ve used vim everyday for more than 15 years and did not know Bram died. RIP

dredmorbius

Discussed at the time on HN, August 2023:

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37011324>

And yeah, that one hit really hard.

null

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