this post was submitted on 01 Sep 2023
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My hot take: Vi, make and C would have gone the way of COBOL a long time ago if it wasn't for a lot of programmers thinking "my tools are more difficult to use, hence I'm a better programmer".
I agree with C and Make, not with vim/neovim though
I agree. You should use Neovim instead of Vi nowadays. :P
Yeah, its so much more interesting to edit code with only your keyboard. Always switching back and forth from mouse to keyboard is just too cumbersome.
Bonus points for Neovim: It made me understand my tools (LSP, linting, CLI tools, TUI etc...)
Upvoted for make and c, highly disagree on vi/vim though. It's significantly nicer not having to use a mouse for 95% of my work. Need to delete between two quotations to replace it? v, i, ", d does it. Whole line? d, d. Beginning of end of document? G or gg. There are keyboards to streamline just about any movement or operation, and none involve the mouse. I still need the mouse for clicking stuff in vs code, but that's mostly just when committing.
Side shout out to emacs, it's lost popularity over time, but it can do just about anything
For any interested Vi(m) user, one can install evil-mode to get vi keybindings in GNU Emacs.
But why?
Emacs editor commands are kind of clunky, you hold Ctrl or alt a lot and the movement commands are less intuitive and smooth than vi/vim keyboards imo. I've heard it described as: emacs has a text editor, vim is a text editor. Vim is great at editing and moving around in documents, selecting and editing text, and basically anything editor based. Emacs can do notes (org mode, linking notes, searching notes, etc), web browser, file browser, git (better git interface than vim), calendar, agenda, music playing, email... and that's all without plugins
I am triggered by that statement.
vi lives on because it's everywhere. On a remote machine and need to edit a file? vi is there.
As a person uses neovim, make and exclusively programs in C I am indeed triggered. Maybe you could argue Make and C are hard but Vi definitely is not (atleast the basics aren't).
I use the unholy IdeaVim and honestly... I love it. I won't pretend that interacting with a heavy IDE while using vim is a great idea, but it makes editing so much more comfortable.
Also while you can use something like nano for editing files in the terminal, vi(m) is much faster for more in-depth editing.
Vi, make and C are elegant beautiful tools, and the joy they will bring into your life will wait steadfast and pure in spirit until you discover it.