Discussion What drew you to vim?
I've been using vim now for the same amount of time I've been using Arch Linux pretty much.
What drew me to it was after installing Arch, I started watching different Linux videos and a lot of the config files were being edited with vim. And I was watching 3 or 4 content creators and they all, for the most part, were using vim to edit those config files. One guy would switch to something different like a GUI text editor like Geany, gedit, and kate. But vim was the one they all used.
So, watching these videos and editing my config files along with them, I was pretty much using vim as well.
I've been using Doom Emacs (most of the key bindings in Doom Emacs are the same as vim key bindings) a lot lately but for quick things, especially if I'm already in a terminal, vim is what I use.
What brought you to vim and do you use other text editors as well?
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u/gumnos 14d ago
the prime driving factor initially was ubiquity. Once I learned to use vi and the breadth of its power/flexibility, speaking an editing-language nothing else really even tempted me.
I could sit down on any Unix or Unixlike, type vi and be editing with a powerful editor. There were plenty of machines where typing emacs or nano or mg or ee or joe would fail. But vi was everywhere. Except Windows. But even that was a simple & straightforward install most of the time and worlds better than futzing about with NOTEPAD.EXE.
So I'm comfortable in vi, nvi, vim, vim-tiny, nvim, vim-classic (and even ed(1)) regardless of which Unix-like I'm on.
The only other editor I occasionally use is Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio on Windows for $DAYJOB, but even then, I'm about as likely to copy/paste the query into gvim there for real editing, and then paste the modified query back into MSSMS.
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u/tblancher 14d ago
I was a forced convert to vi. I had an internship working on an HP-UX system, and the sysadmin wouldn't install emacs for me.
It took me a decade to lose the muscle memory of Ctrl+s, Ctrl+x to save and exit from vi/vim. But now I can't go back, I'm one of those "vim everywhere" types.
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u/gumnos 14d ago
I also had nudges toward
vi/ed(1)from the early days of termcap/terminfo hiccups, where the ability to use ctrl+s (XOFF) was questionable since it could end up stopping terminal output until you typed ctrl+q (XON), or arrows/6-pack keys might not work as expected. So having an$EDITORthat worked regardless of my terminal settings & (mis)configuration was quite the boon.
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u/Dependent-Constant-7 14d ago
I only need to type two characters to open it
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u/dziad_borowy 14d ago
Pro tip to save you months of typing:
alias v=“vi”/s of course :-)
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u/sapphic-chaote 14d ago
I have
nnoremap ; :andalias e=vimso that I can;e file.txtin both bash and vim2
u/Lor1an 14d ago
I do, unironically, have vim aliased to 'v' though...
Two keystrokes to open up a place to type and work out thoughts is pretty good.
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u/EgZvor keep calm and read :help 10d ago
Welp
🐱 type v v is a function with definition # Defined in ~/.config/fish/functions/v.fish @ line 1 function v --wraps=vim VIM_LIGHT=true V $argv end ~ 🐱 type V V is a function with definition # Defined in ~/.config/fish/functions/V.fish @ line 1 function V --wraps=vim # Create a local .viminfo file for per-project marks touch .viminfo # Open existing session if called without args if test (count $argv) -eq 0; and test -f Session.vim set argv $argv -S Session.vim end # Always specify a servername if not contains -- '--servername' $argv set servername (path change-extension '' (path basename (path dirname $PWD)))/(path basename $PWD) set argv $argv --servername $servername end command vim $argv endVIM_LIGHT is for skipping LSP stuff basically, I check it in the .vimrc .
--servernameis for fuzzy finding Vim windows via the window manager (I dump:h windowidfor each server name from Vim into a temp json file, I then runvim --serverlistand fuzzy choose one, read the mapping file via Python script and return chosen Vim's windowid to Xmonad, which finally focuses it).3
u/Chimchar789 14d ago
Wouldn't that be "vi" not vim?
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u/acdcfanbill 14d ago
I think that most distro's I've used in the last several years start vim when you type vi. Either by alias, symlink, or something else.
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u/vagrantchord 14d ago
I had a course at uni on Linux and servers, and the first month of the class was a crash course in vi/vim, which we were required to use for the rest of the semester. I immediately loved it, never stopped.
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u/Quartzalcoatl_Prime 14d ago
Same for the classroom for me, but it's just what I was told to use so I kept using it not knowing there were others lol
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u/Ath-ropos 14d ago
Almost 25 years ago at the uni, I had to implement networking algorithms and test them on a simulator running on a remote Linux server.
At first I edited the files in my computer and uploaded them on the server. At some point I wanted to be faster and decided to edit the files remotely on the server. The obvious choices were emacs and vim. I chose vim.
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u/bschlueter 14d ago
It’s on most Linux installations by default. This made it particularly useful when I was teaching myself Linux in the early aughts. I did give eMacs a serious try, but vim was easier to pick up.
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u/AbbreviationsNovel17 14d ago
It was the opposite for me lol. I was watching vim videos on Youtube and see they use Arch Linux. And now I'm a hardcore Arch Linux dwm vim user 😂
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u/1_21-gigawatts 14d ago
It was faster than starting Eclipse for simple Java file edits and unlike Emacs didn’t require a ton of faffing about to get it configured
Edit: as other posters have pointed out it’s also installed and available everywhere (except Windows, but Windows sucks as a development platform)
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u/luxfx 14d ago
The fact that it was already installed on every server I connected to
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u/prthorsenjr 14d ago
Actually, the three that are always installed are ed, ex, and vi. Sadly I need to install vim these days, but for some odd reason nano is there.
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u/livingpunchbag 14d ago
There was a Vim course offered by students at the first semester of the University. I didn't know Gedit and others existed, I was new to Linux.
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u/TheBlackCarlo 14d ago
It was the perfect storm:
- I was bored of having to use the mouse for text editing. I was studying a lot in libraries with a laptop and tried to be as minimal as possible. Also, a mouse was not possible a lot of the time, due to constrained shared desk space.
- I was using an OLD laptop, so the less resource usage, the better, especially when AC is not a guarantee in a library.
- I was already spending a lot of time in the terminal to do scripting and other study-related stuff.
- I wanted the same program EVERYWHERE, even on remote server, without having to install it (especially when I did not have privileges).
- I was bored by hours and hours of study and thesis writing every day, so I wanted to do something fun without wasting time. Vim looked like it.
- I looked cool? Maybe? At my current workplace, people are scared when looking at my monitors, which are basically Zellij-multiplexed terminals, so... maybe I do?
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u/Snarwin 14d ago
I wanted to learn a terminal text editor so that I could edit files from the command line without opening a separate window. I already had a leg up on learning hjkl from playing Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup, so I decided to go with Vim. Eventually, I went from using it for quick edits in the terminal to using it for everything.
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u/Late-Drink3556 14d ago
It's the only text editor guaranteed to be installed on every internal Linux VM at every company I've worked at since January of 2017.
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u/chrnz00 14d ago
i was a happy notepad++ guy but around late 2024 (just before my uni) there was a crowdstrike outage which caused bsod on windows.I installed chrome flex os for some reason and messing with it there was virtualization setting that installed debian and i found the distinctive green looking vim icon
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u/stephensmwong 14d ago
30+ years ago, when I learnt Unix, I'd ed/vi/emacs to choose. ed was too raw, emacs was too complex, vi was/is a good choice.
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u/MouseJiggler 14d ago
It's the sane default on most production systems I work with, so I just stuck with it, got used to the workflow, and then couldn't really imagine switching to something else.
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u/washtubs 14d ago
In uni I was in the process of switching to linux and desperately trying to make notepad++ work, cause that's what I was used to. Then one day a classmate was like why don't you just be a badass and switch to vim (he was a sublime text guy, he wasn't speaking from familiarity). But that was enough lmao. It helped that I had some throwaway classes. I took all my notes in those classes in vim just to learn the editor and the rest is history.
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u/DialOneFour 14d ago edited 14d ago
Learned how to use the vi(m) family after both the Dennis Ritchie and Sam's Teach Yourself books recommended it in 2004-2007ish. After doing away with dual booting and going 100% Linux, I haven't used anything else in any major capacity since I learned enough about neovim
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u/Slackwise 14d ago
It's 1999, I'm logging into a "free shell account" BSD/Unix server to edit my CGI Perl script... now I'm stuck with muscle memory I cannot escape.
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u/Ok_Outlandishness906 14d ago edited 14d ago
none. I started using vi and screen on a terminal in 1993 ..... on hpux . I wrote a lot of code with those technologies and now "vi" is home . I only use a very little subset of vim functions, for the most i use vi, regex ,macros and so on, because i have muscolar memory with them . It is not faster, it is not simpler , it is not better than vim, neovim or whatever, ok i agree, but when i open vim or any vi clone , even standard vi on aix that is till now less than 200kb, i don't waste time to learn the "vim way", i do "as i know" ... with the instruments i have ( vi + awk or sed or whatever for example with r! ) . Vi was not designed as vim, it was designed as a tool of unix, so if something is easier to do out of vi, vi let you use unix command as you prefer . it is a very different phylosophy from VIM. I know it is not better, faster and whatever, but it is 40 years i use it , and changing is too difficult now :-) . In any case my firs try is quite always a macro . Usually i like to do macro old style :
i open a new line , i wrote the macro and then i paste it because q did not exist
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u/hamer12string 14d ago
I’ll really be revealing my advanced age…
When I started my EE career in the late 80s there were only a couple of options:
As I remember it,
on Unix there was vi or emacs.
Both of them had pretty steep learning curves… I stuck with vi because I had a little experience with it from uni.
Vi led to Vim and here I am.
Being a guy of that era,
you didn’t think twice about using an editor without a mouse…
you used the mouse of course on your Mac or PC but for main frame stuff I don’t recall even thinking about it.
You kids (shakes fist at the sky!) have a zillion options now
- and I’m legitimately happy for you!
Options are always a good thing imho.
I feel like I’m ridiculously productive and mostly mouse-less with my Vim setup -
But the truth is that I made all of the adaptations (learning commands… thinking like the editor) …to get here.
If I started now, would my setup look like it does now?
I really have no idea.
I used to like to say to people that weren’t in engineering who looked over my shoulder while I sliced/diced a file like a magician… they’d ask
“Wow - what is that?”
“It’s Vim”
“Can you teach me?”
“Sure - block out a 7 year slot in your calendar and we’ll get started”
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u/Roticap 14d ago
Carpal tunnel
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u/waldeinken 12d ago
Same, I started with *nix in 99 and stuck with emacs for the first year-18mos, back when I was also still playing guitar a lot. I remember reading that rms had carpal tunnel so bad for awhile he was coding by dictation
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u/notcoder01 14d ago
Random guy on YouTube who was talking about fundamentals and became the reason why I use Linux and vim, learning assembler and a computer architecture... Now this guy is a pro-AI, a vibecoder, a web-developer and an influencer
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u/Prestigious_Boat_386 14d ago
Already installed on the compute cluster and the usb drive I use for chroot.
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u/riskeilles 14d ago
For me, it’s just the idea of my hand not needing to move away from home row and touch the mouse for coding and basically for typing any text. That alone is still fascinating to me.
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u/dziad_borowy 14d ago
Still early on the learning curve but coming from the (usually) opposite way:
- years of coding (always using regular code editors, not much in terminal, apart from occasional nano).
- I tried vim every once in a while but it seemed overwhelming and complex (still is)
- tried to improve my comfort & speed with some mechanical keyboards for a while and
- then realised that most people using them also use vim, so it must be the holy-grail-of-code setup 🙂
Long story short: started using vim (for now as plugins in my usual editors) and love it!
Don’t know why I wasn’t patient enough when I tried it before.
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u/mss-cyclist 14d ago
For me it was efficient editing without needing to reach for a mouse. Needless to say may first tiling WM was ratpoison.
Still happy with vim and without mouse
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u/mr_sudaca 14d ago
each dev had a vm to work, i used sublime text and a network drive configured with samba... that thing kept disconnecting/de-syncing every time, so i just moved to work in the vm directly... vim/tmux and that became my default config since 2014 or so...
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u/cyberia324 14d ago
My job sent me to a Unix class back in the mid 90s. That was my first exposure to unix-like operating systems. Was a DOS and Windows admin until then. I don't think they even showed us emacs or nano at that time. So basically I went with what I knew.
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u/SibLiant 14d ago
The terminal drew me in first. then realizing the ethos of vim and linux, it was a natural step on which i stumbled 2 different times before I found my vim footing. Now my neovim is so tricked it blows other IDEs out of the water in almost all aspects.
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u/Electronic_Leek9147 14d ago
During my research internship this summer, I could only use vim when connected to the super calculator. Once I learned a few keywords I just wanted to learn even more than I needed, thus making vim my main code editor now.
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u/digggggggggs 14d ago
long time vs code user but it becomes incredibly slow and AI bloat so I switched. I haven't fully committed to vim yet and I'm exploring other editors like Zed but I really want to like vim.
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u/Throwaway-48549 14d ago
Everybody said it was good and I was larping as a Linux Nerd so i installed it, honestly I still use nano for most things but I've been learning more about Vim and it seems like it could be very useful if I did a lot more software dev.
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u/quemazon 14d ago
I didn't actually get drawn to vim. It was my only option and I can't escape it. I started with vi at university using a green/amber text terminals connected to a MIPS machine. The instructor showed a few basics and I was off to programming. Graduated then I was working on SGI Irix and Sun/Solaris systems. Emacs was available but no, vi was better for me (maybe a skill issue).
Moved to Windows dev, Visual Studio was cool. I still edited with vim and used Visual Studio to debug. I would try the nice graphical text editors and IDEs. Sublime looked beautiful. Always ended up back at vim. Moved on to the macos and linux ecosystems...vim. Went to vscode with vim bindings. That one almost got me but buffers over tabs. So back to vim and now on to neovim. There is no escaping...
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u/Ok_Outlandishness906 14d ago
Same here, hpux, serial terminal with vi and screen .... i remember that i used a lot screen for copy and paste for example , more than vi, even if now i do everything inside vi and what i am not able to do with vi, i do with unix command (r!paste .. cut , awk sed )
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u/tv_st 14d ago
I was curious about the modal editing workflow. After a couple of weeks and several vim tutor, I was able to edit config files and do basic programming without too much friction. Even if modal editing is something I discovered to not like, vim remains a great tool when I ssh around machines.
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u/helduel 14d ago
I have no idea what drew me to vim. Too long ago. But I remember having to reboot my machine to get out of it.
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u/bhurt42 14d ago
Microsoft Visual C++
OK, So it's the mid 90's, and I'm a young whipper snapper just out of college in my first real job, working on lots of various systems, mostly unix. Coming out of the WordStart/TurboPascal/TurboC world, Emacs was a natural fit. Just remap what control characters do what, no biggie.
Then I had to do a big project on Win3.1/Win95. No emacs here. Microsoft Visual C/C++ or vi. It wasn't even Visual Studio yet. I gave it the old Boy Scout try, I did. After three months, I broke down and learned vi. And never looked back.
In the decades since, I've done Java development with vi. I've done lisp development with vi. You can not exit vi. I can not quit vi. We are not the same.
This was also the time I learned that IDEs give you brain damage. The product we were shipping at the time was a hardward board with associated driver and library. We shipped on every Unix known to mankind, VMS, VXWorks, etc. In every OS, the pattern was the same: #define this constant, #include that library, -l library.o. Our documentation had one sentence describing how to link in our library, and not one single customer support call.
Then we shipped a Windows driver. Same pattern- #define this, #include that, link this. By the time I left, what was one sentence on every other OS on the planet had expanded into it's own chapter. Showing, step by step, how to link a library, etc. With pictures. Because you couldn't just say "Open the file menu". You'd get innudated with tech support calls asking "what is file menu?" replicated three different times (MSVC 4.0, 5.0, and 6.0) because they changed the UI enough to confuse the poorly trained chimpanzees they called software engineers.
Maybe it was Microsoft. But I blame IDEs. And the lie that you don't need to know how things work. Things like build systems. Because you do.
You get one guess what my opinion of AI is. Now, get off my lawn.
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u/__rituraj 14d ago
i was already adept at the keybinds of gui editors.
But when I got to know there is a
Command-Motion
methodology that helps create "some sort of a language" for editing texts. I was hooked.
Then when i got to know that even the command and motion can have prefix number signiifying the count i was really sold.
Before this I only used vim when i ran git commit and it opened vim for the commit mag. But after this, I started spinning it up myself. To use it for my programming task.
I took less than a month to remove my primary GUI editor for Vim and have never looked back.
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u/Kriemhilt 14d ago
I had to learn it for work, as it was guaranteed to be installed at customer sites on Solaris & HP-UX.
Every few years I get persuaded to try and IDE which now, finally, is claimed not to suck. They all suck though. Using vim, optionally with a couple of plugins, is quicker, more consistent, and more reliable.
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u/vikingduck03 14d ago
I actually started using vim when I was still on Windows and just dabbling with Linux concepts. I noticed the existence of this strange terminal program with a blank screen and simple, but not obvious, commands. Instead of running away scared, I was curious, and then I learned how easy text editing can be.
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u/Organic-Future-2909 14d ago
i really just wanted to see what text editors existed, so i tried out most things and i ended up liking vim the most
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u/ianwilloughby 14d ago
A client said it was better than sliced bread. Prior to that I couldn’t even quit the program.
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u/italiatroller_9999 14d ago
I use Vim (specifically Neovim) for Python and some C. For website frameworks like Astro I'd prefer to use VSCodium
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u/ikerbiker 14d ago
I was not a CS major, but had some "programming" classes in mechanical engineering. Took a course on computational fluid dynamics which used OpenFOAM which introduced me to Linux via wsl. Lots of manual editing of complex config files and moving around different directories led me to an editor inside the terminal instead of having to jump to notepad/vs code/etc. it all went downhill from there
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u/noclasstomorrow 14d ago
I watched some videos from ThePrimagen writing code and thought: "that looks cool"
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u/zu2 14d ago
Emacs wouldn’t run on the PC-9801 I was using at the time.
I started with Stevie, a vi clone, and later switched to Elvis. Both supported Japanese text.
After I got a Sun workstation, I stuck with vi/vim.
I tried Emacs several times during my Unix days, but I could never get my fingers to remember all the keybindings.
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u/gbrennon 14d ago
vi motion and portability.
i used to work in a telecom company and i had to connect using ssh to server and it was awful to edit files using ed or nano then i startedto include vi and then vim in the server image
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u/MarimbaMan07 14d ago
My company won't pay for IDE licenses since AI writes all the code now. We were told to use vscode or something free if we needed to read code. I liked the idea of having my screen split between vim to read/write code and prompting our tools through the cli to generate code with AI. I haven't set up a debugger in vim, maybe I'm mistaken but the gui debugging seems easier to me so I'll still pop open vscode for that but tbh it's kinda rare
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u/kolorcuk 14d ago
That vim everywhere and i want to use and be proficient in the thing that is everywhere.
I do not want to 'edit config'... ,i still have, and getting there took me a year. First few months were good times of editing vimrc daily. Now i am on nvim astronvim with couple custom config, and it's perfect. I enjoy as much default as possible config.
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u/_VZ_ 13d ago
Maybe the most original answer: built-in help.
I started trying to use Vim because the idea of modal editor and combining commands with motions seemed appealing, but I would have almost certainly never continued with it if it were not for being able to quickly find help for anything (this was before all this information could be easily found online, the hot new search engine back then was called AltaVista and it was great, but there was just not that much to find back then...).
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u/scientificoon 13d ago
Poverty, no, really, my computer was so limited that using GUI-based tools was not an option, so I used mostly X-Server with a simple window manager, TWM, and the Lynx browser.
Eventually I moved to Enlightenment and Mozilla, but I always used the terminal for pretty much everything: LaTeX for writing (papers, white papers, pretty much any writing), and of course vi/vim for that, including coding mostly C, but also some ASM32 and Java.
In my first job, I was provided with an old desktop computer; I think it was an Intel Pentium MMX. I wrote C code for Linux, so it wasn't a problem to set up a minimal system for work with an email client and my command-line toolkit: automake, autoconf, GCC, and, of course, Vim.
After several years using very constrained computers, I moved to Apple, so now I work on a Apple sillicon M4 Max with idk 32Gb RAM; I run tons of code on it, python, C/C++, Rust, R, Go, Java; I move from LaTeX to Markdown but I still use Vim, not as my main editor but as the only one.
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u/Available-Skirt-5280 13d ago
Efficiency, pure unbridled efficiency.
In vim I can do amazing things with few keystrokes, no mouse, no wasted time. Just pure thought translated to keystroke combinations.
Edit: literally everything has `vi` on it
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u/Anonemuss666 13d ago
When I started my UNIX life, the system only had vi. Everyone said learn emacs it's great. Since I was basically thrown into a sysadmin role, I decided not every computer I logged into might have emacs, so I learned vi.
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u/__lockhart97__ 13d ago
Memory was limited on my older 2GB machine. I had painfully switch from vs code to vim, so that I could free some memory.
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u/ObligationFit400 12d ago
20 years ago , I chose vim because it was free. Later on my fingers got addicted to this.
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u/maredsous10 12d ago
Reasons why I use vim in this comment still hold.
https://www.reddit.com/r/vim/comments/17e27rg/comment/k6e7ail/
With modern computing, touch typing along with having a solid background in VIM and standard UNIX commands sets one apart.
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u/Edthal01 12d ago
I'm retired, and only started to really use Linux in the last few years. I decided to try Vim when checking out the editors incorporated in the different distributions. The only one in all of them was Vim, so I decided to check it out because it was universal across all of them. Haven't gotten very far, but I have learned enough to be able to use it in Linux, and in Termux for Android. Don't think I'll master it soon, but I'll keep at it.
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u/VoidLance 11d ago
What drew me to it was all the cool Linux programmers on YT were using it, what made me keep using it was the lack of AI integration, I use VSCode when I just want to build something fast, I use NVim when I want to learn while I build
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u/mrbellek 11d ago
My first real job required everyone to use Vim and Screen. It was a steep learning curve, but once you go vim, you never go back.
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u/Jimmy-Ballz 11d ago
First off... come on it's cool asf. I started because i like the idea of customizing something to the points it fits me and me only, but most importantly, it's annoying to use vscode and grip the mouse once every 5 seconds to do something; that's where nvim comes in clutch, it boosted my productivity so much. I'm saying something obvious and yet, this was my experience.
Using keyboard only to do everything is damn fast and feels good, it's a steep learning curve tho. But imo the best thing about this editor is that once it's configured the way you like it, it becaomes powerful for YOU.
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u/Adventurous_Voice988 11d ago
Management of 21 Moodle LMS instances that sit on 16 RHEL 8 VMs. Many of the Moodles have custom code. IT removed VS Code and Notepad++ several years ago due security concerns.
Was forced to learn and teach others that work for me. I can now comfortably switch between Vim and Neovim.
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u/Dougaak 11d ago
Mine is probably quirky if not strange: I got myself a new desk but it turned out forcing me to put my elbow on it instead of under it on the chair, so my previous full-size keyboard was too large for me to properly use the mouse, so I got a smaller keyboard, and thought: hey, why not use mouse less too, what was the thing that they always recommend when talking about no-mouse? And here I am-
Have to say that once I got into it, I’m more and more into Vim/terminal focused workflow. It’s interesting that I was probably among the early people to use VS Code when it was just young and I recommended it to others everywhere, but then when it’s literally everywhere, I ditched it and got into Vim.
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u/nate-rivers 11d ago
After about 2 years of working everything about IDEs became a hassle and i wanted a "Buy It For Life " editor
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u/ASleepingAssassin 10d ago
It feels like home. Once I got familiar with the vim keybindings, it became really hard and really slow to use a normal code editor, I saw that when I attempted to edit some code on my brother's laptop with vscode.
Although I'm not a true vimmer cause I use DOOM Emacs with evil mode.
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u/ignus1991 10d ago
I saw it, I said "this is really cool to move quickly across files", I've learned the basics and crazy stuff, now every other editor feels just inferior or incomplete
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u/ilyailinich 10d ago
Using midnight commander and nano is impossible at the same time, because writing the document in nano is ctrl+o and hiding / showing mc interface is also ctrl+o, so stuff just breaks and you have to close mc, then navigate to folder, open file, do stuff and after that get back to mc again. I got so tired of this that I just learned how to use vim, was never wrong
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u/-romainl- The Patient Vimmer 10d ago
Back in 2009, I was using Linux at home and Mac OS X at work. My workhorse editor was Textmate. I knew it like the back of my hand but it was Mac-only and Gedit, which I had been using for a while on Linux wasn't a proper alternative.
So I started looking for a cross-platform Textmate replacement. I compiled a list of candidates and spent the next 9 months trying all of them. Komodo Edit kind of worked but I didn't like it, so I eventually reached the end of the list without a clear winner. The two last ones were Emacs and Vim. The weirdos.
I dutifully tried Emacs but I hated its ergonomics, so I moved to the last of the list quickly.
I already had to use Vi(m) before but found it too weird, hence its place at the bottom of the list. So I tried it like all the others, starting with vimtutor and following up by a few chapters of the user manual and I was pretty much instantly hooked. The modes, the text objects… it all made perfect sense to me and Vim won. Right at the bell.
Actually, if Sublime Text had a Mac version at the time I would have switched in a heart beat. They eventually released one but I was already too deep in my relationship with Vim.
So yeah, those 16 years of vimming have been quite great.
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u/VenusPortait 7d ago
vim motions drew me in, personally I use neovim now and love the freedom it gives me to do anything I want to. Emacs is gay by the way, who would want to write even a single line of lisp? I would take lua any day.
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u/joekrry 14d ago
Unironically, youtubers.
I used vim before but this kid called Magicalbat was so efficient and intellectual with his development that i just had to.
It would take me double the time to output what he was and i just knew i had to level up haha.
That and the fact that i could increase my niche rating
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u/Shay-Hill 14d ago
I was using Linux in the late 90s or early 00s, back when you could buy distros at the electronics store. I was trying to get more serious about coding, and all the coders I knew used Vim or Emacs. I installed both, and Vim was less ugly.
I haven't gone anywhere near Linux since 2011 (got an office job), but Vim stuck.
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u/Choice-Level-5486 14d ago
Me obligaron en la universidad. Luego, mi primer trabajo fué en una empresa que utilizaba S.O. unix y editaba programas con vi. Lo odiaba, hasta que me dí cuenta de su poder. Me dí cuenta que estaba pensado para programadores. Luego, cambié de trabajo y ya no utilizaban vi. Lo extrañaba. Hasta que me instalé gvim para Windows y me instalé WSL con Ubuntu. He vuelto a utilizarlo y me siento cómodo
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u/Clean-Interaction802 14d ago
Hmm it was because I had serious skill issue setting up VS code, don’t get me wrong it is a good IDE but I never liked it + seeing Neovim/Vim motions by the Primegan felt cool AF
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u/Butters_565 13d ago
honestly, mostly for hjkl and not needing to use my mouse to navigate through texts all the time
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u/TheNerd30318 8d ago
im not going to lie, my brain just won't allow me to do things the easy way lol. i find an enjoyment in doing it with minimum help (within reason lol)
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u/Szethian 8d ago
It was basically vim or emacs at my first job and between those two the choice was easy. I had to be able to edit files quickly on lots of different remote hosts, some of which where overseas. Just made the most sense at the time.
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u/Legitimate-Power-738 5d ago
It actually makes sense when you get that editing does not necessarily mean having a caret you use to type.
My first real contact (outside a default vi session when I started playing with Linux and didn't know how to configure nano as default) was in programming classes where the teacher taught us what vim was. He was more on the "cmd 37337" mindset but explained the basics.
I liked the idea specially after I found I could have that navigation in eclipse with plugins and even if I still have way too much to learn, I still feel that those basic movements, macros and editions I learned ~10 years ago make sooo much sense and today I rarely choose a tool that doesn't have keybindings / plugins if I can avoid it.
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u/objective_porpoise 14d ago
When I studied CS at uni, I had 2 lecturers who were into terminal workflows and they used Vim. I just thought it looked cool so I started doing the same. After getting used to the Vim ways of doing things I could never really go back.