The comments on this post went exactly like they have over the past 20 years, with one exception.
Emacs is all but forgoten.
Vim wins.
Recently, I recommended to a friend that basic vim/vi is worth learning because it’s a baseline that you can always trust will be there across different Linux systems.
They asked me what I used most on my home system, and the answer was emacs, but I was very clear that I was not recommending it. It’s a particular kind of person who finds themselves at home in emacs, and for everyone besides those people, selling them on emacs would feel like persuading them to do hard drugs.
Didn’t even macs have vi?
Basically every Unix-derived OS comes with vi. Emacs came out in 1976, macs didn’t exist until 1984.
Yes and it’s better than TextEdit that is bundled with MacOs
you have offended all 6 of us, prepare for retribution
Be real fukin careful now. You’ll tear my enacs from my cold dead hands
(But yeah, I use evil-mode. Also I edit files on remote servers with vim. I’m a traitor…)
When people are free to choose the best editor for them, we ALL win.
Unless it happens to be Ms word, in which case we all lose
I think there’s a good reason for that. If you’re not as concerned about resource consumption (Emacs used to be called “Eight Megabytes and Constantly Swapping”, back when 8MB was a lot), then there’s no reason to avoid even more complex and resource intensive IDEs. People who wanted a complex editor, but in a relatively small footprint, stuck with some variant of vi.
Thus, vi found a stable evolutionary niche. It’s a tardigrade.
We don’t want a viditor, we want an editor. Why? Because ed is the standard!
On the system I administrate,
viis symlinked toedadministrate
Mike Tyson?
Nano is just better and I’ll happily die on this hill
We will die together brother…
NANO FOR LIFE
I use nano for editing config files in the terminal. For everything else I use VSCodium. Roast me.
You already did that yourself
I use Mint, BTW.
OK, I can see the whites of your eyes.
No
Nano is easier to get into, but far more limited.
And easier to get out of…
Is it? If it wasn’t printed on the bottom, would you really be able to guess Ctrl+X, Y, Enter any easier than colon, q, Enter?
The key difference here is “it’s printed at the bottom”.
I don’t immediately need a user guide to tell me how to save and exit the program
skill issue
xoff ignored mumble mumble
It is very fast
Coding in Ansible?
You write Ansible playbooks to automate infrastructure management. But calling it a coding language might be a stretch it is just yaml
Vi hasn’t been updated since 2005. Aren’t everyone just using vim or neovim?
I use whatever the machine gives me when I type
vi, I assume it’s usually vimHuh,
vifor me has always been actual vi, not vim. Didn’t know some systems symlink vi to vim.A long time ago, someone posted advocating symlinking
vitoemacs. Evil, but entertaining.Vim is the preferred experience, so it’s for end users. Unless you have a system with no real addons and classic *nix environment, you’re almost always going to be using Vim. Alpine linux is a good example of a stripped down environment that still uses Vi.
vim has a limited “vi-mode” that it uses if you call it as vi. so it could still be vim.
Ohh that makes more sense. Yeah perhaps, although come to think of it I still need to install vim from the package manager even if vi works fresh out of the box so maybe not?
i think there’s also a
vim-minithat gets installed by default in some debian-based distros.
Not to imply that Vi is perfect, but Vi is perfect. What do you need an update for? /s
Ah, nice one! Didn’t realize it could even be done.
It isn’t as dumb as it sounds, honestly! I used to use DBeaver and it is a fantastic project, but I really wanted Vim keybinds to construct my queries as they can sometimes be quite large. There used to be a plugin that added the functionality but it stopped working on my machine. This Vim plugin is essentially a wrapper for the CLI SQL client (psql in my case), so using it actually kind of makes sense, I think.
The biggest issue I faced was exporting the results, but I just created a function in my ~/.vimrc that copies all the text of the results to a new tab and formats it however I want. CSV, HTML, JSON, XML, Markdown, whatever I need is all there and predefined. All I have to do is call
:ExportToMarkdownand off I go.
Well, “vi is love” is something I always see as “masochism is related to sex”.
How would you categorize masochism as not sex? :o
Everything is sex, except sex, which is power
- Not Oscar Wild
Oscar wild is pure sex and resting in power, so…maybe both
I know it from the Janelle monet song which apparently quotes a book from 2002 but I find it hard to believe that’s the first time the phrase was said.
Is no one gonna talk about neovim or are we all just like set the alias and forgot that we are inside neovim and not vim or vi
Op, what do you find more offputting: emacs or neovim?
Editing excel spreadsheet? VI
Excel files (.xlsx) is just an archive of some XML files and whatnot, so sure you could edit them in vim.
Though I’d rather edit them in CSV format
VI is life
If you don’t have one to begin with, sure, I guess. For everyone else, there’s Nano.
Skill issue
Vi has a shit design issue
What makes 6 so popular?
Because vii viii ix
LXIX my balls! Haha got’em.
Believe it or not, this is the second time I got to make that joke within an hour.
* laughs in Latin *
Sorry maybe I’m dumb. But does this mean VIM and Obsidian are Vi?
Vi is actually a predecessor to Vim but many people, myself included, will alias Nvim or Vim to Vi. And I’ve seen people use Vi as a catch all too.
I usually refer to im as “vi” just to
make people think I’m old school and coolsave time typing that last character.But Obsidian??
Oh yes. My “excell isn’t a database” program. Obsidian.
I want to understand this comment!
Obsidian the note taking program, I use it for storing my code, and also a KB at work. It’s made for note taking, but I use it like it’s my git, and wiki for an IT team.
Everyone at work is using Cursor these days, except for me using neovim and my emacs loving coworker. When we present during pair programming our coworkers go nuts over watching our workflows and trying to figure out if they can do similar things in Cursor lol.
What is Cursor, another AI-infested slop?
It’s a version of VSCode with deep AI integration. I’ll say, it’s pretty good from a workflow perspective. But I just use Avante to similar effect.
Neovim and emacs are both incredibly heavy. I would rather just use something like VScodium.
Nano and Vim are small and quick.
I would like you to open the same file in neovim, Emacs, and vscodium and see the ram usage.
Matter of fact I’ve done this for you (230 line json):
heavily customised emacs: 34 MB
heavily customised neovim: 32 MB Newly installed vscodium: 300 MB+both emacs and neovim have syntax highlighting, completion, mouse support, terminal support, window management, and so on
Debugger?
Yea they can attach to debuggers via dap
great
tbh they probably can, it’s just more
ctrlinvolvedI’d like to see them do visual-block/rectangle selection.
Probably!
I like micro
