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I wonder how long vim and emacs can stay vibrant. I've used emacs in the last 20 years, so I stick with it, but new generations who are trained on vscode and su

• mmooss 2y ago
  Emacs and Vim have remained popular through several generations. What do developer surveys say? Vim was near the top a few years ago, iirc.
  • eviks 2y ago
    https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2024/technology#1-other-tools https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2024/technology#1-other-tool... emacs is 4% vs VSCode 73%, so it's not popular, though vim still is
    • mmooss 2y ago
      Thanks. In more detail: Visual Studio Code 73.6% Visual Studio 29.3% IntelliJ IDEA 26.8% Notepad++ 23.9% Vim 21.6% Android Studio 16.1% PyCharm 15.1% Jupyter Notebook/JupyterLab 12.8% Neovim 12.5% ... Emacs 4.2% ... Spacemacs 0.4% So Vim + Neovim = 34.1%, essentially second to Visual Studio, the overwhelming leader.
      • imp0cat 2y ago
        I wonder why is Spacemacs listed as a separate entry?
      • Dalewyn 2y ago
        I'm pleasantly surprised Notepad++ is so high up.
      • viraptor 2y ago
        What this doesn't show is people using vscode/vs with neovim driver or vim key bindings. The vim "backend" percentage is going to be significant.
      • The_Colonel 2y ago
        StackOverflow isn't representative. It was always skewed towards .NET world (and thus VS). I assume this is the case because the founders were prominent .NET personalities.
        • fomine3 2y ago
          There's no representative community though
      • oneeyedpigeon 2y ago
        This feels like it's skewed by the question: "Which development environments did you use". I know that vim is an IDE, but I still think of it as a text editor. I would probably answer "Zed" to that question (not even on the list!) and "vim" to a "Which text editor" question, although I use a third, graphical editor (CotEditor) for a lot of stuff too. I never use a full-blown 'ide' like visual studio.
      • dalai 2y ago
        I don't think you can add them, respondents could select multiple editors. I am guessing 34% is the upper limit if no Neovim users use Vim and vice versa, which is hard to believe.
      • the__alchemist 2y ago
        You could probably lump PyCharm and IntelliJ together; different language modes of effectively the same editor.
    • bandrami 2y ago
      Isn't stackoverflow's most-accessed question to date "how do I exit vim?"
      • eviks 2y ago
        More like top-200+ by views, though even the wouldn’t contradict much else
  • krykp 2y ago
    With nvim, there has been quite the resurgence of Vim. Good software tends to be resilient. I believe both emacs and vim will see many, many more years.
    • openrisk 2y ago
      Neovim feels indeed the proper future-proof evolution of a standard. Its still a bit cumbersome to setup (fonts, lots of plugins to configure, opinionated and overly decorated UI etc.). The acid test of maturity is the dry functionality you get out of the box in a fresh linux. It should be "just right", introducing the new thinking and functionality of neovim without getting in the way.
      • aktau 2y ago
        I actually like `nvim --clean`, which is just the basics. Early on in the Neovim project, a lot of heirloom defaults were changed to be more modern, resulting in a better (IMHO) out-of-the-box experience. I use `nvim --clean` as my man-page viewer: MANPAGER=nvim --clean -c "colo sorbet" +Man! Startup speed is blistering. My current config is pretty stable, and not that large. But if it were causing issues, I'd seriously consider only doing LSP setup, which is not that onerous with the latest APIs (it was already fairly easy with `vim.lsp.start`, but `vim.lsp.config` and `vim.lsp.enable` make it easier still: https://neovim.io/doc/user/lsp.html https://neovim.io/doc/user/lsp.html).
    • volemo 2y ago
      I wonder, will there be something to emacs, as nvim is to vim?
      • bananapub 2y ago
        sacrificing all existing elisp code makes a new editor worthless, maintaining compatibility makes it extraordinarily hard to get anywhere.
      • kdtsh 2y ago
        There’s (arguably) an argument to be made that Emacs configuration distributions fit that niche - Doom Emacs, Spacemacs, and Prelude provide varying flavours for different kinds of Emacs users. Apart from that, I don’t really know what an application would be to Emacs as nvim is to Vim. It’s more like nvim is to Vim what Emacs is to nano, except Emacs came first.
• atorodius 2y ago
  I use VIM bindings in VS Code. Always assumed many do but might be wrong
  • xarope 2y ago
    Ditto. I went from vim to neovim, but the LSPs for python/go(lang) for large files (not that large, maybe 10k loc) seem to really bog it down (back then, no idea if it's better now), whereas with VS Code it was still performant enough. So I ended up using VS Code with Vim bindings. And yes, with ad hoc work, I still end up using system vim when just doing simple edits (e.g. adding a line to README.md or somesuch)
    • matwood 2y ago
      Similar. I use IntelliJ, Neovim, and some Zed all with vim keybindings. Modal editing just fits my mind. As an aside it’s also one of the reasons I dislike Notion. I feel like I’m always inadvertently changing the content.
    • dailykoder 2y ago
      At work I often switched to VSCode because I couldn't get pyright to work with our django project. The errors everywhere were just annoying to look at. So I looked around and found "ruff" and "jedi_language_server". This combination seems to do the trick. I don't have to configure anything. I source my venv and it "just works". I assume our python codebase is something around the 10k LOC, too. I am not mainly responsible for the python part, so I don't spent excessive amount of time in there, but for the time I do, it works nicely - https://github.com/pappasam/jedi-language-server https://github.com/pappasam/jedi-language-server - https://github.com/astral-sh/ruff https://github.com/astral-sh/ruff
  • flohofwoe 2y ago
    Me too (there doesn't seem to be plugin that's completely free of issues unfortunately). Vi/Vim is basically the universal text input model which allows me to transcend text editors and platforms. Also I quite often find myself starting a vim instance inside the VSCode terminal for quick text edits.
• runevault 2y ago
  I think Neovim helps with this, though last time I was using it (via... bootstrap? One of the prebuilt addon packs) at some point a Mason update broke my LSPs for multiple languages and i went back to VS Code on my Linux laptop because I didn't want to fight with it.
  • mobilemidget 2y ago
    I ran screaming from VS when I noticed how much resources it used and what software it copies on remote servers in case you want to work remote. Did this improve at all in the last year+?
• Ferret7446 2y ago
  You can't really compare vim and emacs beyond a superficial level. Emacs is fundamentally an interactive shell, like Bash. It has a text editor, also like Bash. It is of course generally more powerful and featureful than Bash. Hence, people sometimes live in Emacs, because it's a shell like Bash or Gnome or KDE. I use Emacs and VSCode. VSCode for some code repos, and Emacs for general computer usage. Meanwhile, Vim is a text editor. It is neither a shell nor an IDE, although it can be adapted somewhat into an IDE. I also use vi (alongside Emacs and VSCode). vi is for editing some text if I am not in Emacs for some reason or if I temporarily borked my Emacs config. (I also use ed, for when I'm in a dumb terminal or I don't want to lose screen context.) Vim or Emacs "dying" is not really an issue, although Vim or Emacs losing enough mindshare to keep them up to date as competitive IDE options, maybe that might happen.
  • qazxcvbnm 2y ago
    Just for the other side of the picture, I live in vim and use it as my terminal multiplexer. Vim’s my shell. I have thousands of buffers in vim and practically never leave it. I’ve used terminal multiplexers for years before I switched to vim in that capacity and never looked back. The integration it’s allowed between all my buffers and commands and shells is difficult to match in my opinion.
    • exogenousdata 2y ago
      As a 3rd anecdote, I used vim for 10 years as my primary editor and “shell”. Then 10 years ago I learned tmux and fell in love with its window multiplexing. Now I use vim strictly as an editor/splitter. But I use tmux to split my code from my repl window. And maintain multiple windows where I’m working on different projects.
    • rand0m4r 2y ago
      I'm going to try this. I use tmux but the idea of being able to use vim for everything seems nice. If you have tips/suggestions, I'm interested.
      • 2y ago
• abraxas 2y ago
  Lots of editors and IDEs came and went while Emacs/Vim persisted. Through my three decade career I recall the ascents and downfalls of tools like BRIEF, CodeWright, NEdit, JEdit, TextPad, Notepad++, Visual Studio, JBuilder, Eclipse, Sublime and a few others so the cemetary (or hospice in some of those cases) is large.
  • the__alchemist 2y ago
    Sublime, nor Visual Studio are in the cemetery.
    • abraxas 2y ago
      Visual Studio is very much dying. Visual Studio Code is its successor that's very much alive. Those are two different products
• rob74 2y ago
  To put it into perspective: vi was already 15 years old when Bram decided to write vim for the Amiga, which had a GUI - so vim already looked out of place on the Amiga too! - but it was still successful, of course (I think) mostly because of being ported to Linux pretty much at the same time as Linux got started.
  • anthk 2y ago
    Amiga by default had an Emacs clone on every install.
    • mmooss 2y ago
      That's incredible. Why? And why a clone? ???
      • Narishma 2y ago
        Probably because GNU Emacs was too bloated for the Amiga's 512KB of RAM (or whatever amount the original model had).
        • mmooss 2y ago
          They also might have been conserving storage space. Though Emacs did run on other contemporary systems.
• makeitshine 2y ago
  Vim may die, but vim-mode will definitely be around.
• joelthelion 2y ago
  To me, vscode is unbearably slow. I think that alone is enough to keep vim alive. Also, I don't really miss anything from more advanced ides when in vim. There are great packages for almost anything.
• ookdatnog 2y ago
  I'm sticking with emacs for now because it is the only editor I have encountered that actually works well in conjunction with a tiling window manager; by which I mean: it works well as a single process accessed through multiple windows (here I mean "windows" as in OS windows -- internally Emacs calls this "frames") although it has features for managing panes internally, it doesn't insist that you use them and each windows is very lightweight (no thick sidebars, embedded terminal, etc that are hard or impossible to remove). Vim offers the second feature but not the first (each window is a separate process), most other editors I've encountered do not offer the second feature.
  • sevensor 2y ago
    Kakoune does this too, and it’s amazing with a tiling window manager. On a big monitor, I can get 4-5 terminal emulators across, and in any of them, at any time, I can attach a kakoune client, copy and paste between buffers in different windows, edit the same file in two places at the same time, close all the clients and reattach later, and so on. Emacs is the only other editor that does this, as far as I know.
    • ookdatnog 2y ago
      Thanks, I might give that a try :)
• Cthulhu_ 2y ago
  I've never been able to use vim productively, at best I use it to write commits, do interactive rebases and some remote server configuration (cheap VPS for a website); I never really "grew up" with it and stuck with Notepad++ and Eclipse when I started out in software development nearly 20 years ago. I will concede that VS Code is the default for many, but I just can't get productive in it anymore. I mainly use intellij, which has its own issues. But I can't say I've ever mastered any editor, the closest was sublime text, and that mastery mainly came from being able to use cmd+p and global search effectively.
  • skydhash 2y ago
    You probably have a good reason for not doing it, but mastering your editor is a great power up. Especially when the task can be ruled based and repetitive. Like a loop of find-select-transform action.
• PreHistoricPunk 2y ago
  Speaking for myself, I only used Neovim because of its modularity and the keybindings. Imho, everyone should give the basic Vim keybindings a chance at least once and see if they like it. At this point, however, I do not really use Neovim anymore. I switched to Zed, the Vim emulation is pretty good and customizable and most functionality I want is already there along with incoming support for Jupyter Notebooks. VSCode also has these features. It is fun to use Vim/Neovim but unless I need to use it, I doubt I will return to it.
• hnfong 2y ago
  This google trends graph is very illustrative: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=emacs,vim&hl=en https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=emacs,vi... emacs is surely on a decline, but it’s not obvious that Vim is on the same trend. This matches “theory” and anecdotal evidence: the people who chose emacs probably didn’t like modal editing, and when “better” IDEs came along they just switched. But there’s nothing like Vim (except editors specifically inspired by Vim), and those haven’t gotten any traction if only because every one of us Vim users have hjkl muscle memory burned into our brains.
  • jiscariot 2y ago
    Google translate says vim = 'I came' in portuguese, so I guess that explains Brazil.
    • arccy 2y ago
      google trends can disambiguate the context https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=%2Fm%2F01yp0m,%2Fm%2F07zh7&hl=en https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=%2Fm%2F0... both decline, but emacs is steeper
• mordae 2y ago
  One of the kids in my computer club found himself to be an avid Helix user. I guess once the dust settles around nvim's approach to LSP and stuff, give or take 5 years, it will build itself quite a following, including young people. I think the hackability is attractive.
• arp242 2y ago
  Some time in the 80s (or maybe even 90s?) Bill Joy said he just uses ed, even though he's the original author of vi. That worked for him. I believe Linus still uses that 1980s Emacs-y clone that he kind of maintains for himself. jwz uses some flavour of Lucid Emacs/XEmacs from who-knows-when instead of "standard" GNU Emacs. In the end, it doesn't really matter what other people are using. If Vim (or Emacs) works for you, then you can basically keep using it until the end of time since code are just text files, and these things don't really change all that much (outside of encodings, which is the biggest problem with older editors – but I don't see UTF-8 replaced any time soon, if ever). I don't really know what the kids these days are up to, but I don't think it really matters. I guess there's still few Bill Joys around using ed, but the existence of vi, Vim, VSCode, or anything else doesn't really take away anything for them.