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
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
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…)
you have offended all 6 of us, prepare for retribution
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.
There we are. Now all is right with the world.
What would an editor discuss be without those that support Emacs?
I noticed we even got some doom evil advocates! Lemmy truly has come off age!
(Note: as tone is hard on text: I’m genuinely pleased, and agree that the joy of Linux/Unix is it’s variety. Thank you everyone)
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?
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.
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.
Bro you forgot the ‘m’ at the end of vi
And the i, c, r, and o. In fact keep the vi.
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
in highschool my physics teacher used vim to write stuff, like most times when checking if everyone was in class he’d just open vim and type people’s name in there
Op, what do you find more offputting: emacs or neovim?
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.
Well, using vi without being forced at gunpoint.
And before you accuse me of being an Emacs fanatic - nope, they exist on the same level of masochism.
I like micro
This is the best answer
Nano is just better and I’ll happily die on this hill
We will die together brother…
NANO FOR LIFE
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
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.
It is very fast
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 *
Emacs
(ducks)
I use vi from an Emacs Shell, which was spawned from an Emacs GUI.
bro tryin’ to summon a demon… /s
Emacs is what the unified linux desktop should be
I dislike Evil, and would never recommend it to anyone looking for a modal editing solution for Emacs. I would rather break my pinky with the modifiers than use Evil.
- Evil is SLOOWWW: its startup time is 10x longer than other modal editing packages.
- It has high cost of integration with other packages; editing-related packages rarely play well with Evil unless specifically designed for it.
- We can do better than vi. Nowadays, there are some more modern alternatives to vi, like Kakoune that fix some of the fundamental problems with vi. One such problem is the fact that you cannot know what you are acting on until after the command completes: Kakoune solves this by having a unique
noun verbsyntax rather than vi’sverb nounsyntax. This means that you get constant feedback about what you’re acting on before you act on it, since objects are always highlighted.
Instead, for anyone looking for a serious and actually good modal editing, I would suggest them to try out meow. It fixes all of the problems I mentioned above, and makes more improvements to the
viexperience that I didn’t mention.
EMACS. It’s the superior text editor.
I’d say it’s a superior text editor.
link the vi command to emacs, and you’ll be able to say you use vi
you’ll be able to say you use vi
I haven’t wanted to say that in the 32 years I’ve had the choice.
oh ok then link the emacs command to vi and you’ll be able to keep saying you use emacs while using a better text editor 👍
(please dont kill me this is a joke i dont even use vi please have mercy please spare me please please please)
Emacs
It’s a sound choice. I don’t like to use it, personally, because I want to use something that uses same motions and syntax as editors on servers that I don’t own (ex. customers). And, I’m not a fan of Lisp. It’s a great and (self-)extensible text editor/lisp interpreter, though.
No
This is the way.
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
