Especially not if you are a learning programmer. You will , however benefit from a good IDE, but you should also be able to do real work just given a plain, simple editor. Note however it might be original vi , not vim. You're not guaranteed to have any other editor installed. Are you a fast touch typist? Do you often wish for more keyboard shortcuts to make edits? Does the time you spend editing interrupt your train of thought? Do you find little things about your editor that you wish you could customize to work just the way you like it?
Do you not mind spending potentially a lot of effort up front if it means it will save you more time and effort in the long run? Are you unbothered by people considering you anachronistic? If so, then vim may be a good fit for you. Do you prefer to be able to figure out your editor without reading the manual, even if that means fewer features?
Are you more comfortable using what everyone else in the office is using? Do you use the mouse for everything? If so, then vim may not be a good fit for you. I think that learning Emacs and probably Vim as well is very useful. Simple: I can use the same exceptionally capable editor for more or less everything I do. This is great because I am a student, constantly learning how to use shiny new things. This year, I played around with Haskell, did a ton of JavaScript, used Scheme, wrote some Java, screwed around with Perl, worked on a web site Emacs was great for all of this.
In the past, I had some problems with different languages: I would pick up Perl or Python, but could not find a good editor for either. Now, I know I can always use Emacs.
Of course, sometimes Emacs does not have all the features I want, but it always has enough features off the bat to use for quick projects. For longer projects, it may need some customization, but the time taken to do that is probably equal to getting and learning a new IDE. In short: Emacs is great because it supports so many different languages, and is powerful enough even without support for a specific language to make life much better.
There are at least three reasons why a newly minted programmer might choose to spend some time learning emacs and vi:. In fact, God himself may have invented either vi or emacs, and the devil the other, but you'll get different answers as to who invented which depending on who you ask.
You've heard that it's a religious argument, right? At any rate, these two editors have enabled quite a bit of history, and stories and jokes involving them abound.
You may feel unable to understand your roots without some knowledge of both. For example:. MacOS X is perhaps the best example of this: you can use a surprising number of common emacs commands in any Cocoa-based application unless you're one of those people and install a vi-based input manager.
So, just as you've learned to type on a QWERTY keyboard, you'll probably also pick up some commands derived from an ancient text editor whether you know it or not.
Don't like the way something works? You can change it. Don't feel like dropping out of your editor to use the command line? No problem -- you can do everything you need right inside emacs.
You'll need to spend a lot of time studying in the swamps of Dagobah to learn to tap into all that power, but some people may find that worthwhile, perhaps even just for its own sake. I'd say that it's useful to know something about both of them, especially so that you know at least a bit if you ever find yourself needing to use them you might.
But not knowing them won't necessarily hold you back. It's much more important to know how to wield the tools that you use daily as effectively as possible. If you want to learn how to use them, don't do it in a production environment. Do it on your downtime or time set aside specifically to get used to writing code on them. When you get more experience, introduce it to your environment but keep the program you are used to near by. I kept frontpage near by when I decided to transfer to a pure text editor, until I was confident enough that I no longer needed it.
If I need to make an rpm and I open emacs, and tell it to find a file which happens to end with the extension. A skeleton file appears with all the tags and macros already filled in with text color-coded. And if I want to submit to my favorite version control, esc-x load-library mercurial or git or svn puts emacs in the mood to drop down the right commands from its version control menu or to recognize the commands like ctrl-x v v to check in or out code from a repository, and to do everything one can do with a repository.
Optic fatigue occurs when one stares at the same colors for too long. I use konsole for terminal windows and change the colors frequently. With emacs not in a terminal window, I have more than 50 color themes to choose from, some of them comfortably low contrast, like Alice Blue, and some eye-stabbing like euphoria for when I need to stay awake.
I code a lot of python. When I need to test some coding for syntax, I don't leave emacs. I start the Python interpreter, and the screen splits, then I save my python file and import it to the interpreter to check syntax--an error will be readily apparent, and I can fix it immediatelty. When I am done, I can switch to an unsplit window and continue work. Some folk say use vi, and I do use it on some older SUN systems I have a regular rhythm--hit i and insert a char then hit escape and hit i again and type the next char Usually my first install on any new system is zile.
GNU zile is emacs without all the window dressing like browsing and email and irc and colors, just a C-coded binary that works in about k and uses emacs keycodes. For some tasks, they will undoubtedly be more efficient or easier. For others, they will make your life more difficult. If they interest you, sure give them a shot. Veen on June 11, prev next [—]. I think Vim is worth learning. I don't use it for day-to-day writing and coding, but there are occasions when I need to reorganize text or data and Vim macros make short work of what would otherwise take a lot of futzing around with Awk and the like.
Plus, it's handy when you're SSH'd into a Linux server, although there are alternatives unless you're in a very stripped down server environment. Do you ever have to SSH into a server? Then learn some vim or if you are like me and it is usually a conf file then nano will do just fine. Do you want an editor that is big on being customization and automation a programmable text editor? Then try using emacs. Loads of stuff you can change and automate. You can even use it as a simple web browser.
If the above don't interest you then VSCode is probably more than adequate for your needs. For vscode, who knows what the next most popular editor will be in years? But then again, these editors are easy to pick up. All of us have used IDEs and rejected them. Vim offers power, speed, and fine grained control. It can be customized and extended to anything modern IDEs do faster with lower resource usage. Not as clumsy or arbitrary as an IDE, it is an elegant tool for a more civilized developer.
Vim is a safe haven for every developer who has ever finished typing a line of text and stared despondently at the screen while the IDE struggled to display it a bloody character at a time. Vim is a swiss-army-knife that is not miserable to use over SSH. Vim and emacs are tools for developers who would prefer a more efficient tool that requires effort to learn how to use over a less efficient tool with a lower skill threshold. My development environment is the terminal emulator.
It already has the maximum degree of git integration possible. It can literally do anything git can do, and if you know how to use it effectively, it can do so faster than the IDE. Try buiding a phone app with vim. With vim I can have a consistent editing environment between all of those, including my own computer. However, to just say that vim, emacs, nano, etc are outdated points to a somewhat narrow perspective on the issue. For new programmers, vim and the like can certainly be a bit awkward to start with when compared to Atom and other IDEs.
The authors are talking about emacs and vim like they stopped being developed in the 70s. I have yet to not find support for a language or an environment while working with vim. Emacs is the epitome of customizable. Not to mention the sheer amount of hotkeys, macros, and extensions that you accrue over time using a single editor.
We get it… you like shiny things, just keep using it. Visual Studio streamlines just about every aspect of developing useful software, and vim streamlines every facet of actually inputting and editing text. I want vim to help me navigate text and type, which it helps me do really, really well. Who cares? You like VI, use VI. You like Emacs, use Emacs. Pick your poison.
I find a multi-pane terminal configuration with Vim the most powerful development environment for my current needs. I occasionally fire up VS Code to work on Jupyter notebooks. Trying to open a data file of a few tens of megabytes on these modern magic editors, you will find that the program will just freeze.
I also once tried Atom, which was unbearably slow to just start up. This is really weird. Have you tried Emacs lately? I has support for LSP, code completion, git, multiple-cursors, project management, linting, real-time LaTeX preview, etc. You can edit it as regular text, search in it, etc. When you save it, your edits are propagated to the underlying files.
I did a grep for the name of the function, placed one cursor on each line of the result, used a keybinding to flip the arguments on each line, saved, and I was done. The only difference with Atom or VSCode is that the whole IDE is built around text, which means that you can interact with all of it with normal text commands. Vim is great. Everyone wants great editors and everyone wants a thriving editor scene. Making it even better, if you want to do something programmatic with that web browsing, feed reading, email, whatever it is: typically having it implemented in Emacs makes it possible to further script as needed.
To get extensions in most other editors requires either building a plugin or calling out to an external process. For instance, if for some reason you wanted to write a server for testing your web code in real time, you would write it in some other language like Node and then have your typical IDE call Node… but in Emacs you can literally just pull down the web server package and spin up your server in the editor.
Though you just about could. Simplest possible example, think adding tags to your headings and being able to search by tags.
Small feature, more handy than it sounds. You can actually add arbitrary programmatically accessible data, and timestamps support various scheduling tools. Some people learn Emacs just for Org Mode, and while I will say it took me a while to learn it, I can also say I recommend as strongly as possible giving it a try.
Back in the day I was writing code for mainframes, workstations, PCs, and even the odd embedded microprocessor system. Uhm, screen latency? Even Vim users break out an IDE from time to time.
But all the featuritis does indeed come with an usability price. Not everyone can put up with it all day long, whether they realize it or not.
I have used simple editors like geany, gedit even notepad sometimes. I have used heavyweight IDEs like eclipse, netbeans, visual studio, aptana studio, intellij etc. The i found visual studio code, and i thought, wow, its great, i have finally found something simple but feature rich or at least has the features i need. I have used vscode for nearly 2 years. I loved it. Then came in Microsoft, started to mess around things. In a simple one python script editing session, i found my computer hanging over and over again.
After investigating, i found the reason was the ms python language server was taking nearly 6GB of ram. It was just little script, a Qt application. Very tiny script to be honest. But the ms language server was eating up every bit of ram it found.
May be it was some bug may be something else was wrong with it. I was getting frustrated about it. It wasnt just the ram, vsocde and its extensions were killing my processor too.
So i started looking for something else. I know about vim and emacs from way back, but never used them in anything other than command line editing. I started learning emacs, from tutorial to intro to elisp. Soon i realized, emacs is not an editor! Its a freaking editor framework! So i stayed with default emacs and built up from that. Now i am using a lot of packages, customized to meet my needs.
I could even use different language server for different buffer even for the same language. I had to use eglot for a python script as lsp was too slow or incomplete with any supported server for that script. It was a simple gtk app. Anyway, the daemon mode is too cool. And the org mode! Damn, its just awesome. I am still discovering stuffs about emacs, and the more i am learning the more i am impressed by the extensibility of it.
I have uninstalled vscode, wont touch it again. The idea of telemetry within an editor and its extensions, bothers me. I have used vim, its awesome too.
But i think i am gonna be stuck with emacs and i will keep loving it. First a few points about your article itself. Also a few points you conveniently, or because for lack of knowledge? And spent as much time in it as in an IDE? Man is it fast. For everything else? For goods sake be glad that there is choice.
Vim invented properly composable commands that are only now starting to get properly appreciated. Muscle memory works both for you and against you — some people have no idea how irritating it is when programs like Gimp will not open a file when you press ALT F O but fail to take your finger off the ALT key before pressing the O.
I agree. The new generation of programmers really need to pull up their socks and actually learn Emacs or Vim. I use vim a lot, after you get over the steep almost vertical! But the reason I learned vi was because I had to.
Stuck in a cold data centre with a sev 1 at 2 a. You could be pretty sure that everything but vi was stripped from the production servers and worse ksh was in vi mode.
Once you know how to cook, use your favorite knives, but stop spitting on the other ones. Waste of time. You forgot one thing — each developer has different needs. Many IDEs, like Visual Studio or the ones from Borland or Jetbrains, tried to be an all-in-one development environment, not only an editor.
For a beginner, the ability to discover and use all that, in an intuitive way, was the main advantage. What a ridiculous article. Thanks to its communities both vim and emacs are easily as powerful as modern IDEs plus having the potential benefit of being heavily customizable. I tried a bunch of IDEs at different companies already but there is always something that I find inefficient or even annoying about them which makes me come back to vim.
But why? The other IDEs are all the same and are not better at all. There is a reason vim is still here and every other old editor is gone yeah emacs has not a lot of users left.
This article does not explain at all why vim is still around. It does argument for a statement it denies itself. This is highly subjective and unscientific. VIm is still a thing because it is another better approach to text editing. No new IDE has it. Even the ones with vim keybindings only emulate the approach and will never be as good and mighty in it. The mistake you do is seeing a text editor in vim.
It of course is a text editor, but it should not be seen as one. It should be seen as a text editing language. You just tell vim what you want to do with the text: c hange w ord, d elete w ord, y ank p aragraph.
And so on. It is easier to remember and easier to think of. It does not break your flow of thoughts. Plugins do work the same.
I use IDE and vim. The Jetbrains products PyCharm, et. I use vim in a terminal for quick and dirty edits, or working through an ssh session. I use PyCharm for more complex tasks or debugging. I still use Emacs for some things and vim for others. Glad I know them. I usually use Visual Studio Code for PowerShell development and Visual Studio for C for various reasons including supporting existing code bases that were developed with those tools.
There are advantages and disadvantages to everything and there are no exceptions. If you love Lisp as a friend of mine does, you may absolutely love Emacs, for instance. Also in my development group, most programmers are barely proficient to start. It helps us generate more uniform coding. He is Emacs Window Manager. The power is unlimited, trust me.
Which one is still useful? The reason experts continue using the tools they trained on is because they are experts. And, so, she goes back to the violin. Text editing is insanely efficient in vim once you have the right plugins in place. For git integration, vim-fugitive is excellent so much so that when I do have to use IDEs I still switch to vim for staging hunks of code and resolving merge conflicts.
By doing so, instead of dropping my pinky to the CTRL key constantly not a comfortable key to hit , I can stay in the home row all day without tiring myself out. Food for thought…. I use Vim for the last 5 years, with some plugins, and I love Vim. I have linters, git integration, colors preview in CSS. I have experience with IntelliJ products, Atom, VSCode, but I love that Vim is easy on system resources also saves the battery , can be found everywhere, effective. And Vim is free, open source.
I usually see a demo with some feature that looks like the killer one that will make this IDE my new favorite too. I have always come back to vim for several reasons and I would imagine, emacs users will say the same.
It may work a bit different but in the end gets the same result. Anyone that has been developing software for more than a few years most likely has several languages under their belt. Even those with a good plugin architecture often work very different with each language. And adding each plugin usually adds a lot of overhead. To master one tool instead of spending massive amounts of time always searching for the perfect IDE. And use that extra time to read articles on software development, design patterns, algorithms etc.
Of course, IDEs have some support for keyboard shortcuts, but its as good as mouse support in Emacs. Its terrible. Its impossible to not use mouse in IDE and its impossible to not use keyboard shortcuts in emacs. Second major Emacs advantage is its unparalleled extensibility and explorability.
All emacsers use heavily customized Emacs to their needs because the price to do so is small. Both do the same thing, but latter a lot more effective. All of the GUI features are just noise and inefficiency from my perspective. Most, if not all, of the revered features and plugins and features in VS Code and the like can be accomplished as competently, and probably more efficiently, with a little bit of Vim customisation.
Admittedly, the initial learning curve presents some challenges until you can fly, but once you get over that hump you really can fly. And for me, the grammar of Vim continually provides inspiration. I think it has the best UI of any application I have ever used — seriously.
I find it interesting how SpaceVim has made this attempt to get the best of both worlds. I only wish I could integrate that one idea from SpaceVim without also taking in all the rest of their config.
This might be forgivable if it stopped there, but to go further and say:. You seem to have missed the part where Emacs can be integrated with absolutely anything.
This quote is self-incriminating in a sense as it reveals the attitude that code is nothing but keystrokes, sold by the pound-per-minute and that refactoring is some indulgent sin.
Not just a clutch of text files that are fulfilling their purpose out of sheer coincidence, forever accruing complexity as changes are incrementally piled on in haste.
I think of it as a risk to business continuity for the vast majority of companies out there. All to compensate for the absence of editor code awareness which — to me — is a metaphor for analysis and reflection. Inevitably, there are communication pains and gnawing deficiencies in onboarding that are either never organically encountered lucky!
I make use of Visual Studio Code as a notepad replacement or for small projects where the deliverable is more declarative than procedural terraform, docker compose. As noble as they are, text editor puritans are immediately at a disadvantage, even in the simplest of codebases.
Use what you want in the end and show me that it can work in the merge reviews. More importantly though, we might even benefit from having to hear less about vim…. This resonates with me, although it comes from the other side. It is a shame when, in one way or another, the project structure is affected by the personal choices of development tools. Developer should choose whatever tool they want, and configure the tool to do the job, rather than configure the job to suit the tool.
Not only do I use vim, but I use pretty plain vim. Which kind of proves my point. Again, proving my point. But my experience is that people waste too much time on them.
You and your friends have never tried Docker? To grasp the nature of that you need to read between lines in the mind of their creators, Dennis Ritchie, Brian Kernigan, and others.
The traditional tools available there editors included are fast, lean, stable, and have decades of work done to refine and perfect them, and they can easily be composed together to do anything you would want out of an IDE and more.
Learning new tools take time. Well, why not just an IDE then? By starting with Vim and adding plugins as I go along, I can try out alternatives and make my own choice. The result feels more like home, and reflects my manner of thinking.
From time to time I change plugins, or throw some away. My OS already has a terminal, file manager, and search tool; yet the IDE crams in their own versions of these. The terminal, filesystem tree, and console are all cramped. When I use a separate applications the OS is aware of them, so I can manage them using my window manager, task manager, and fuzzy-finder thing. Of all my reasons for avoiding an IDE, this is the most important one.
I use many of the keyboard shortcuts from bare Vim, and have a few leader-key mappings for some commands I use a lot. A I used to fire up NetBeans just for step debugging. Nowadays I use the Vim VDebug plugin. B Project-aware code navigation, and auto-suggestion. Nothing in the article backs this statement. Personally, I think vim keyboard bindings are great. Interesting article. I come from an Emacs background but have recently switched to VS Code. I love Emacs and have done for two decades — the key bindings and customisability has meant I invested deeply in it.
I will continue to use Emacs for text files. My blade Swiss Army Knife is in my toolbox — somewhere. I committed myself to mastering Vim during lockdown. Can anyone master Vim fully? Refactoring in vanilla Vim is way harder, if you gotta get plugins for all the languages of choice, then better go for a full featured IDE. That being said, I think knowing how to use Vim at a basic level is an essential skill, due to this omnipresence of the editor in Unix systems.
Being able to code comfortable for a few minutes with Vim lets me do some quick hacks in servers without having to scp the content… develop in my full IDE and upload back. Vim is very powerful indeed. And I highly appreciate its features when I require them. I have always been shocked at how little people who edit code for a living know about their editor — regardless which editor they choose. I doubt that this changes much with an IDE. I think the difference is if a team is required to use an IDE then someone else has made this all work for them and only through the IDE can they get necessary resources.
That said, I put quite a bit of effort into getting Eclipse working at a company, and since I could not make it mandatory, no one started to use it. Including me. It was too much trouble to keep it working just for myself, so I stuck with emacs.
Do IDEs really make most coders more productive? I am not so sure. Good point! On Unix, I like Geany. I agree with the sentiment of your post…learning this stuff from scratch all at once would be enough to put me off! I understand what you are trying to say, but what if you were working with something setup like the.
NET platform where you almost certainly will end up using something gargantuan like Visual Studio? The learning curve is steep, but once you get them to overcome the learning curve things will be better. I think the earlier you begin the better. What about ErgoEmacs? Everything but pleaaasee not Gedit. Once you start using Vim you will never come back to the light side of the force, Vim is extremely adictive.
I really try to use Sublime Text 2 but I always get back to Vim. Newbie programmers have to learn paths of Vim. Because one day these will become descendants of honored ancient tradition of blazing fast, pure console, context-aware text editing. The spice must flow. Vim is really awesome for those occasions when you want to edit stuff on a remote machine over SSH. Many things are faster to do in Vim if you have the experience and typing skills. Once you understand that initial implementation costs are nothing compared to long-term maintenance costs, you will understand that your choice of development tool is insignificant.
People should focus their learning towards planning, not implementing. It would be agood choice to start? I use sublime text. For all else nano. While I can sympathize with what the OP is saying, you can configure both Emacs and Vim to work relatively sanely for a new user. That was the only way for me to effectively learn Vim.
I always had stuff that I needed to edit. What I ended up doing was finding an example. You can make vim behave more consistently with lesser editors with some configuration options which will be enough to get work done without taking the editor completely away from you. Otherwise, you can go ahead and use it like a stupid Notepad editor: arrow keys, backspace, delete, etc.
If users are at least using Vim or Emacs then there will be opportunities for them to learn new tricks to save them time, while otherwise just fumbling around like a Notepad user would. The first step is getting them to use it. When I decided I was going to learn Vim I started by forcing myself to edit everything with Vim, combined with a newbie-friendly.
Sure, I was clumsy at first, but eventually that became comfortable to me, and I began Googling for tutorials on how to do things better. Just as with everything else, it does require you to take the time to do it. Too much at once will certainly overwhelm a beginner, but learning to use an editor well is just as important, if not more so, than learning a programming language.
Learning to write good programs takes years anyway. There is no shortcut. Learning to use a powerful editor is just one of many required skills. VIM comes from a line of editors that were originally developed for environments that had no monitor but a printer output only. Does anyone still prefer punch cards?? The problem comes from social pressure and the feeling of inadequacy that can come from not knowing how to use these editors which can cause real tangible harm to people.
When you spend a ton of time coding, one of the things you realize quickly is how beneficial it is to keep your hands on the main part of the keyboard. Every time I have to life my hand up to grab my mouse or move to the arrow keys I find myself slowing down. People like you seem to believe that because vi came from an era of older systems that the precepts it uses modal editing—not always in insert mode, etc have anything to do with being on a terminal. Emacs allows non-modal editing, and is a tower of features, but the over-reliance on CTRL is bothersome to me.
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