We want to feature your voice on DevDiscuss! This week's topic: Vim

The DevDiscuss Podcast begins with an interview and ends with commentary from listeners.

For your chance to appear on an episode:

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Please send in your recordings by August 19 at 5 PM PT (8 PM ET, 12 AM UTC)

This week's prompt: "What are your thoughts on Vim?"

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Don't forget to check out the Season 2 premiere, released earlier this week!

Comments

[Matthieu Cneude]

I love it so much 🥰

I understand that some people don't, though. But what I don't understand is developers criticizing Vim even if they never really tried it.

I was one of them, too. For months. I still don't understand why I was so anti-Vim.

Then I really tried to learn it.

Everything changed.

[Gracie Gregory (she/her)]

Hey @phantas0s ! Any interest in sending us a voice recording of these thoughts? We'd love to feature your actual voice on the podcast! Instructions above if this is something you'd be open to.

[Matthieu Cneude]

Hey Gracie,

Done. Expect a strong French accent 🤣🧀

[Gracie Gregory (she/her)]

Je suis sûr que je pourrai comprendre de toute façon!

[Matthieu Cneude]

Wow! Very nice French 🙂

[hedy]

story of how I fell in love with vim (and then neovim)

Back when I opened vim for the first time in my life, I was like, “cool this is classy! *type hello world* wait a minute how do you edit??”

Then search on google, skimmed the results, words that I caught “insert”, “normal”, “mode”

Then I press the insert key (which now I know is replace mode) and fiercely type stuff using *press insert*, *type character*, repeat 😂

1 minute later, “cool, let’s exit this thing.“ *search google again* “oh so you press esc and :wq, wow that’s cool, bet that’s a command or something. Vim is really different to the stuff I used before!” 🤣🤣🤣

For the next month: pouring over vim books and tutorials 😏

Fun fact: my first interaction with vim was in Windows Git Bash

[Gracie Gregory (she/her)]

Hey! Thanks for sharing your thoughts here!

Any chance you might be interested in doing a voice recording of this/a similar message so we can feature you on an upcoming episode of the podcast? Instructions above :)

[hedy]

Don’t think I’d be able to sorry! How about you reading them aloud as mentioned above?

[Gregory Witek]

I'm trying to move on from Vim at least once every couple of months - Sublime, WebStorm, VSCode - I've tried them all many times and somehow I always revert to Vim for most of my coding time.

I think the reason is that neither of the other apps offers such a seamless way to move around the whole editor with keyboard shortcuts. With Vim I can open terminal or project drawer and they're just another pane, while WebStorm has separate shortcuts to move between files and the terminal. VSCode has a shortcut to open git info, but there's no shortcut to close it, etc.

I'm still going to try other editors, because I see plenty of shortcomings in Vim and its "relatives". I wish though that editor creators explored the concept of modal editing more - all other editors are focused primarily on writing, while I spend most of the time reading, jumping between files and moving some blocks of code around

[Marcelo Andrade R.]

Same here, I think is muscle memory.

[Gautam Krishna R]

TBH i just do 🤪

sudo cp /bin/nano /bin/vim

[Galuh Utama]

Dude. Symlink it instead.

[Gautam Krishna R]

hehe that's an option 😄 but I'd like to be

[Romans Pokrovskis]

Here are my 2 cents.

We don't tell a painter which brush to use, so why should we prescribe tools for a developer?

I don't mind people using vim. But I also suffered through pair programming sessions with a person using vim extension for Visual Studio.

My suggestion is the following: If you expect someone to help you at the same machine, find a way to temporary restore defaults.
Disable vim extension, switch Dvorak layout to QWERTY and dust-off that company-issued mouse instead of forcing your partner to use your Ergonomic Trackball.

[ABHINAVA GHOSH (he/him)]

Vim is the grand-daddy of ide's.
Vim is older than many of the junior devs around.
Jokes aside . Vim is a very simple yet powerful tool, but given the modern ide's advanced functionality and their more user friendly graphical interface, there are better options available than vim.

[MDobak]

I love Vim when I have to do some simple work on remote server via SSH but I can't understand why somebody might want to use it for daily work as an IDE. I think Vim is little overhyped today.

[Nathan Kallman]

Neovim is my daily driver. Literally all of my tooling is command line based though (running specs, builds, deploys, git, etc.). So my command line is essentially my integrated dev environment.

If tooling isn't in the command line though, then I can see the value of a purposeful IDE that builds in those other tools.

[Ben Halpern]

For a long long long time the only thing I knew about vim/vi was how to get out of it when I landed there 😄

[Matthieu Cneude]

It's already more than many others :D

[Pacharapol Withayasakpunt]

Vim, and its variants (e.g. vi, nvim) are nice, well-polished and powerful.

However, it totally forgets about intuitiveness and beginners. Even a mild manual / tutorial is needed.

nano has its intuitiveness well, but never as sufficient as vim.

[Matthieu Cneude]

Try to type vimtutor in a terminal.

Other than that, Vim help is crazy good in the editor itself. Just type :help <whatever_subject, like :help motion for example. You might need some basics to use it though, I wrote an article about that if you're interested.

[Juan F Gonzalez]

Vim is the grandfather of all text editors. It's the things that most people talk about either by being full supporters or by being scared by all its complexities. But is IMO the #1 thing that would enable a great shift in productive output for devs of any kind.

It's funny, coming from me as a front-end UI dev, that I have so much appreciation for a tool that doesn't even have a graphical interface, BUT I have seen a great improvement in my "coding fu" after I started learning it.

I'm far from experienced in the skill of VIM but even at knowing the 10% of what's possible, I had some great returns on my invested time and pairing it up with VSCode shortcuts I can code at work and write articles at a similar speed of what I saw others doing before I started working as a professional developer.

That's it. Drop the mic.

[Hayden Young]

Vim was always the sort of... black horse of editors, to me. The red herring. It was the editor you look at, go... 'Uhhh, how do you even do anything in this?' and leave it be.

And that was my view on it for months and months. Then I decided to mess around with Linux more, and I fell in love with the command line. I decided to look into Vim to see how to do more than just vim file.txt, i, change some text, esc, :wq.

And I regret nothing. Over time, I've built up much knowledge on how it works, and how to practically use it, (much thanks to ThePrimeagen for that one, his videos & streams were brilliant). It's gotten to the point where I've gone from using IntelliJ IDEs & Visual Studio to basically use using vim for everything.

I've loved my experience thus far, and I expect nothing less as my knowledge continues to grow!