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**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, it's always fun to find Vim in weird places. And the more you look, the more you will find Vim, or things that smell like it, all over the place. But why? We've talked about aspects of Vim that these four love, but I also asked them specifically why exactly they think Vim is so stinkin' popular. |
**Suz Hinton:** I think that once you start feeling the benefits of using Vim, it becomes very sticky for you. You said that you still juggle the two different code editors, right? |
**Jerod Santo:** Right. |
**Suz Hinton:** So something changed, but you're still hanging on to it, and I think that that actually says a lot. So I think it has that sticky factor once you start using it. The pessimistic take on this is that it may be a sunk cost fallacy, and you're like "Well, I've invested so much in this... I don't wanna let ... |
**Jerod Santo:** \[laughs\] That's a good take. |
**Suz Hinton:** And it's also the ubiquity, as we've talked about. That seems to be my favorite word for this particular recording. Its persistence as a tool on Unix machines to get work done... I like that it's just become traditionally part of the toolbox everywhere, but even in a modern context. So consider like you... |
So you can just get started with Vim and you're just not consuming a lot of resources on things like IoT devices, because again, it's very performant. So I think there's a lot of modern context for using Vim, which is why it's stuck around... And it's just nice to not have to use an entire VNC server and get yourself a... |
And then the last thing I will say is that you have to admit, it kind of still has that really cool Hollywood hacker movie aesthetic vibes to it, right? You feel cool when you're using it, because there are those late connotations around it, whether or not that's fair or not fair... So sometimes it just feels kind of n... |
**Gary Bernhardt:** Vim is the best text editor that anyone ever wrote, that was widely used. But I mean that in a more narrow way than it probably sounds. So every editor is gonna be good at something; there's a reason that every editor was written. Even Nano was written because it's small and easy to install, right? ... |
**Jerod Santo:** Vim has a lot going for it - ubiquity, a powerful grammar that builds on itself, it's hackable, there's a huge community around it, but it's not all rainbows and unicorns. I just had to ask these four - what frustrates them the most about Vim? What don't they like about it? Here's Drew. |
**Drew Neil:** \[31:45\] One of the things I think Vim doesn't do very well is having files that have more than one language in them; something like an HTML file with a bit of CSS and a bit of JavaScript mixed in is quite a common scenario these days. I mean, Vim does support it. You can have JavaScript syntax highligh... |
**Jerod Santo:** Right. |
**Drew Neil:** One of the things I remember from my TextMate days is that it has this idea of scopes; I think that was the terminology used, where it's very much not just looking at the current file, but looking at the cursor position within the file... And you could have some sort of a command that would run and it wo... |
**Jerod Santo:** What frustrates you, Julia? |
**Julia Evans:** The configuration. I don't understand a lot of the stuff in my vimconfig. You have nnoremap... what is it? Like, I kind of know what it means... |
**Jerod Santo:** What does it mean? |
**Julia Evans:** I know it means you're mapping a shortcut to something else... I have one that's like leader N to remove highlights if I'm searching for something and it was highlighted and now I wanna unhighlight it... But I don't know what the noremap thing is about, but I know that I see it a lot of time. |
**Jerod Santo:** I definitely have it in my vimconfig, and I definitely don't know what it does specifically... |
**Julia Evans:** That's a little frustrating. It never really feels good when you have stuff on your computer that you use all the time and you don't know what it means... |
**Jerod Santo:** Anything else that frustrates you about it? |
**Julia Evans:** I think for a long time I didn't have paste working. Vim didn't interfere with my system clipboard, and I found that frustrating... And then one day I figured out how to do it and it was life-changing; now it does, and I'm just really happy... But I'm still literally surprised every time I can do that,... |
**Jerod Santo:** It didn't work long enough that you were trained to believe it won't work, so when it does, it surprises you. |
**Julia Evans:** Yeah. I was going to say maybe one more thing that I find frustrating, actually... I think the default way Vim is set up -- whenever I use Vim on not my computer, it doesn't have my config, and there are just like some things about Vim's defaults, like it doesn't do indenting... If you're editing a fun... |
**Jerod Santo:** Gary? |
**Gary Bernhardt:** I'm pretty good at complaining, so I'll limit myself to just one thing... \[laughter\] Vimscript. To understand Vim's relationship to its scripting language, let me contrast with Emacs. Emacs is almost like an operating system that happens to ship with an editor... And long-term Emacs users will eff... |
\[36:00\] So that is the most frustrating part of Vim for me, and it's also one of the reasons that I avoid configuration when I can. I have a very sort of mostly stock Vim configuration, despite 15 years, and Vimscript is why. |
**Jerod Santo:** Suz shared two frustrations, one social and one technical. |
**Suz Hinton:** By far the most frustrating for me is, again, it's outside the editor itself, it's... the community and the culture around Vim can be very friendly. I wanna qualify that first. There's a lot of people that are really enthusiastic and happy to help you. But then there's also the dark side of the Vim comm... |
And the dogma around even just fuzzy finding search tools, the amount of people that have piled on me because I use [Ctrl+P](https://github.com/ctrlpvim/ctrlp.vim), and they think that that's too slow, and I should be using these other things... It's really frustrating. It's like any other hobby that you see people get... |
So I feel like Vim doesn't do the best job at selling itself as it is. We've talked about how it has a rep for having a steep learning curve, and this just adds extra awkwardness around the tool to people getting started with it. You almost don't wanna say "I'm starting with Vim", because you just know there's gonna be... |
When you are talking about Vim itself, when you're working with it, I still -- you know, my touch-typing is still not perfect. So sometimes I'll just accidentally hit a key I didn't mean to. And when you're typing as fast as you are, you'll just see something very dramatic happen in Vim, and you have absolutely no idea... |
But I think everyone's done that thing where you accidentally toggle Caps Lock - if you haven't remapped your Caps Lock key, which is I'm sure why a lot of people do this... You toggle Caps Lock, you hit K because you're just trying to go up a line, you're trying to move your cursor in the file line and then all of a s... |
So some of those kind of jarring moments that happen sometimes... And I think that obviously they get less and less frequent, but for me, I still sometimes frustrated myself that way. You can really do a lot of damage with the efficiency of the program, if that makes sense. |
**Jerod Santo:** For me it's always accidentally getting into macro recording mode. |
**Suz Hinton:** Yes. Hitting Q... |
**Jerod Santo:** I wanna hit Tab, and I hit Q on accident... |
**Suz Hinton:** \[laughs\] |
**Jerod Santo:** I'm tabbing, and I hit Q a couple of times, and all of a sudden I'm recording things that I don't wanna be recording, and I'm like "Aaargh! How do I stop this?!" |
**Suz Hinton:** Yeah, I've recorded things for an entire half hour sometimes... |
**Jerod Santo:** \[40:02\] \[laughs\] |
**Suz Hinton:** So you hit Q again to toggle it off, and then you kind of go into a new buffer and you hit Play to see what you were recording... Because it's quite amusing. There are definitely times in my Twitch stream where people are like "Suz, you're recording right now", because it's just like in the corner of my... |
**Jerod Santo:** Yeah. \[40:16\] |
**Suz Hinton:** But yeah, I think that Tab vs. Q thing is very common too, and it's exactly the same frustration. |
**Jerod Santo:** Totally. There you have it, a few Vim frustrations... And of course, the learning curve is a big one for many folks. The question is, should you learn Vim today? Maybe you gave it a try once and you got stuck... Should you give it another go? Gary shared some excellent reasons why that might just be th... |
**Gary Bernhardt:** I absolutely would recommend it. I also recommend people not to beat themselves up over it if they decide they don't like it. There's kind of this weird sort of "You have to use the hard thing or you're not a real programmer" or whatever. Don't worry about any of that, but give it a try. |
I can name three different reasons to do it, and I think all of them are sufficient on their own. First, RSI. It will prevent injury. It's a really important thing as a programmer if you wanna make a career out of this. The second is speed. Vim is unambiguously faster than other editors. Not even remotely controversial... |
And then the third reason is that Vim, unlike most other editors, is not gonna go away, the Vim keystrokes in particular. So many people have been so deep in their brains that 30 years from now you will absolutely be able to get an editor that has those keystrokes. I don't know whether it will be Vim, I don't know whet... |
\[42:00\] So any of those for me is sufficient, especially for the last one. If you think about the timeline - just for me, 15 years; at the beginning of that time, TextMate was just becoming popular. Then it was Sublime Text was cool. Then Atom was cool. Then VS Code was cool. A lot of people switched between two of t... |
• The history and popularity of the text editor Vim |
• The reasons why some developers choose to use Vim |
• The impact of social environment and pressure on a developer's choice of text editor |
• The ergonomic benefits of Vim, particularly in reducing the risk of RSI injury |
• The differences in input efficiency between Vim and other text editors |
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