I consider my vi/vim skills to be extremely minimalist subset, and probably horribly inefficient, since they were developed to work accross a broad range of UNIX systems (SCO, Solaris, HP-UX, OSF, AIX) and I rarely add anything to my vim configs on top of that other than syntax highlighting.
But I'd still rather use it than just about any other text editor, just for the simplicity of that muscle memory alone. I have way more stuff to keep in my head than I have room for and I can't afford to expend more than about 0.0001% of context on a text editor.
I still haven't edited the default config much, actually. But now I'm probably 2x to 3x as productive in vim (nvim, now) as before.
P.S. If you decide to check out the LazyVim config, I highly recommend reading https://lazyvim-ambitious-devs.phillips.codes/ all the way through. There's a lot of new keybindings to learn, but Dusty Phillips's book gives you a gentle on-ramp to learning most of them.
Likewise, I'm also not very demanding of my text editor. I used vi on any *nix systems and Notepad (the original one, not the new bloated monstrosity) on Windows for most of my work. Navigation, basic editing, and searching are probably all I need.
If anyone wanted to write a minimal vi-style helix clone they should call it 'ix', as it's derived from helix, gives a nod to 'vi' and a wink at the turning of vi syntax on its head, like rotating a six to make a nine. Then a descendent of 'ix' could be called 'six', and we'll have come full circle.
One thing I noticed that with Claude Code and Codex running in the terminal, I tend to use VS Code much less than before, and found myself opening files in vim more often. It just looks like, for me, the agent development brings me back to using the basic tools, like many years ago, before VS Code existed.
This is interesting to me. vim was my main editor since the start of my career and I was very fast with it, much faster than my peers with an editor. at the outset of llm’s, I ended up using a plugin that would utilize bindings to help me edit faster. with claude code, and how fast it is making changes across many files, I almost never use vim anymore, or vi, unless I need to inspect files in a container/server.
Interesting the history is varied for such a simple tool.
I am but a lowly mouse/GUI user so rarely have to dwell in a shell, but I learnt the basics of vi in my 1st year of university and never forgotten. Gotten me out of many a pickle being able to reliably edit a file quickly.
The history and endurance of vi is impressive. I never thought I would be using the same editor today that I started using in the mid 90s because it was more l33t.
The comments about LLM contributed code seems like a specific axe to grind that otherwise detracts from a nice history lesson.
I started learning vi around the same time, but in my case (since I was expecting to work on Unix systems for decades, which has proven true) it was "because it'll always be there." I.e. if you're SSHing into a server to fix a problem, it's possible that /usr/bin/emacs won't be there (perhaps the problem you're fixing is that /usr isn't mounting), but you can nearly always count on /bin/vi being available: if you can access the server at all, you will be able to access vi, so at least learn its basic keystrokes, our prof told us.
That advice was not entirely accurate (sometimes vi is in /usr/bin/vi, for example), and the merging of /bin with /usr/bin has made it kind of a moot point. (EDIT to add: Though the fact that busybox includes a basic vi implementation has kind of un-mooted the point, actually). But I first started learning vi because I figured I would need it professionally, and when the modal-editing workflow "clicked" for me, I figured out that I had just learned the editor I would want to stick with for years.
And although vim replaced vi and nvim replaced vim in my finger-macros, that has remained true to this day.
Never really learned emacs so didn't know TRAMP existed. When was it created? I was given that advice ("vi will always be available on the server") in the late 90's so I'm curious to know if TRAMP was an option my prof didn't know about (or didn't mention), or whether it was developed later and the advice was good at the time.
EDIT: Found http://www.fifi.org/doc/tramp/tramp-emacs.html which mentions that TRAMP started development in November 1998. I would have been getting that advice in late 1997 or early 1998, given when I started my Unix class at college. So the answer appears to be that the advice was actually correct at the time, but superseded sooner than I thought it was.
Yes, I can use TRAMP but as I ssh to the server anyway to run commands, I'm editing the files with vi there. Furthermore I'm sure I don't inadvertently edit the local version of the file instead of the remote one, or that I forget to kill the buffer with the remote file and edit it instead of the local one after a few days. What's on the server stays on the server.
I had a mini holiday job working for (long since gone from NZ) Philips Design and Development Laboratory in 1992. As part of that I worked on some tools for their silicon graphics workstations. I was shown vi, and how to get help and left to it. Tough learning curve! Seemed ridiculous at first, then I developed a mini set of editing skills and got used to it! Still using Vim/Nvim today.
When I was in college in 2001, I went to the library and checked out Kaare Christian's book called "The UNIX Operating System". One of the early chapters covered vi - I'd telnet into the school's Sun server with a pretty early version of vi (one-level undo) and follow the examples. Never looked back!
Long ago I wrote my own really incomplete vi subset for the C64 that I really should dust off. But there's a more polished vi clone for 6502 machines, including the C64, Apple II and Atari: https://vi65.sourceforge.net/
It’s funny how many forks aiming to keep it free from LLM-generated code. The luddites are present even in the most progressive parts of the population.
cool stuff, for a bunch i didnt realise they were really distinct versions!
Use Helix now as the first one that stuck in my fingers though. before that it was always try a lil while and forget it (back to nano...).
Helix i think is like 'user friendly vi' or maybe 'no config vi'. dont need any plugins or weird stuff. everything essential works out of the box (for me)
Had someone else parrot this line to me the other day, but I remain unconvinced. Especially when vim has visual mode, and you often can make a select before doing something to it. v$ to select from cursor to end of line, then d to cut or y to copy. Is that not the sort of thing you mean? Is visual mode in vim just underused?
Recently I was trying to find a good way to delete from the current position backward to another character, like dT or dF followed by the target character. The trouble was they'd leave at least one character behind, either what I jumped to or what I started on. What worked how I want, and was still easy, was just using visual mode. Where "n" was the character to jump back to, I did vFn which selected from my cursor position back to the letter n (and including that n). I could then hit d and delete all of it, no extra character left behind from either end. I remember at first I was thinking "there's gotta be a way to do this without visual mode". Best I could come up with was hitting x after dFn or whatever to get the stray character. I think using visual mode is probably fine, though. Maybe if I were doing this type of edit a lot I could bind some key sequence to do it.
Would it be accurate to say you didn't use visual mode much in vim before you moved to Helix?
I think you're right and visual mode is underused. It gives you the best of both worlds: "cw" meaning "change word" for when it's obvious what you're going to be selecting, and "v3wwwc" for "change 5 words" when you discover (by experimentation) that the text you wanted to change actually counted as 5 words due to punctuation, not 3 as you had first thought.
Sam isn't graphical there is sam and samterm which sends commands to sam. sam itself is an ed style line editor, where the concept of a line is replaced with a dot. vis allows multiple dots.
It's worth noting that a lot of the text editing done in the vi family are just calls to ed with different ways of doing selections.
I'm more in the vim camp, but I will say emacs has one of the best GUIs out there. Everything that works in the terminal still works (great keyboard accessibility), plus you get additional benefits, like proper window separation that isn't just a text character drawing an imaginary line (so copying lines of text with the mouse when you have a bunch of splits is easier). There's also image support, you can connect to a server with TRAMP, open up dired, and view remote images right in emacs. I always thought that was cool.
Vim on the other hand never felt like it benefited much from a GUI, or like it had a very good one available. I just use neovim in a terminal.
Being able to choose is a good thing. Use what works for you. I prefer the terminal, but not as hard core as switching to a TTY and never see a GUI again...
I consider my vi/vim skills to be extremely minimalist subset, and probably horribly inefficient, since they were developed to work accross a broad range of UNIX systems (SCO, Solaris, HP-UX, OSF, AIX) and I rarely add anything to my vim configs on top of that other than syntax highlighting.
But I'd still rather use it than just about any other text editor, just for the simplicity of that muscle memory alone. I have way more stuff to keep in my head than I have room for and I can't afford to expend more than about 0.0001% of context on a text editor.
I never edited the default config much.
But then I discovered https://www.lazyvim.org/. Turns your copy of NeoVim into an IDE.
I still haven't edited the default config much, actually. But now I'm probably 2x to 3x as productive in vim (nvim, now) as before.
P.S. If you decide to check out the LazyVim config, I highly recommend reading https://lazyvim-ambitious-devs.phillips.codes/ all the way through. There's a lot of new keybindings to learn, but Dusty Phillips's book gives you a gentle on-ramp to learning most of them.
Likewise, I'm also not very demanding of my text editor. I used vi on any *nix systems and Notepad (the original one, not the new bloated monstrosity) on Windows for most of my work. Navigation, basic editing, and searching are probably all I need.
Same. I barely edit default configs. I also mostly use emulators provided by whatever ide I use.
If anyone wanted to write a minimal vi-style helix clone they should call it 'ix', as it's derived from helix, gives a nod to 'vi' and a wink at the turning of vi syntax on its head, like rotating a six to make a nine. Then a descendent of 'ix' could be called 'six', and we'll have come full circle.
One thing I noticed that with Claude Code and Codex running in the terminal, I tend to use VS Code much less than before, and found myself opening files in vim more often. It just looks like, for me, the agent development brings me back to using the basic tools, like many years ago, before VS Code existed.
This is interesting to me. vim was my main editor since the start of my career and I was very fast with it, much faster than my peers with an editor. at the outset of llm’s, I ended up using a plugin that would utilize bindings to help me edit faster. with claude code, and how fast it is making changes across many files, I almost never use vim anymore, or vi, unless I need to inspect files in a container/server.
Yes indeed, same here!
Interesting the history is varied for such a simple tool.
I am but a lowly mouse/GUI user so rarely have to dwell in a shell, but I learnt the basics of vi in my 1st year of university and never forgotten. Gotten me out of many a pickle being able to reliably edit a file quickly.
...and presumably quit vi once you're done!
I have typed either :wq or ZZ into so many files in VS Code... :-)
The history and endurance of vi is impressive. I never thought I would be using the same editor today that I started using in the mid 90s because it was more l33t.
The comments about LLM contributed code seems like a specific axe to grind that otherwise detracts from a nice history lesson.
I started learning vi around the same time, but in my case (since I was expecting to work on Unix systems for decades, which has proven true) it was "because it'll always be there." I.e. if you're SSHing into a server to fix a problem, it's possible that /usr/bin/emacs won't be there (perhaps the problem you're fixing is that /usr isn't mounting), but you can nearly always count on /bin/vi being available: if you can access the server at all, you will be able to access vi, so at least learn its basic keystrokes, our prof told us.
That advice was not entirely accurate (sometimes vi is in /usr/bin/vi, for example), and the merging of /bin with /usr/bin has made it kind of a moot point. (EDIT to add: Though the fact that busybox includes a basic vi implementation has kind of un-mooted the point, actually). But I first started learning vi because I figured I would need it professionally, and when the modal-editing workflow "clicked" for me, I figured out that I had just learned the editor I would want to stick with for years.
And although vim replaced vi and nvim replaced vim in my finger-macros, that has remained true to this day.
> if you're SSHing into a server to fix a problem, it's possible that /usr/bin/emacs won't be there
You don't need emacs on a server. TRAMP is built-in and can open remote files in a local instance over SSH, SMB, FTP, ADB, or docker/podman.
Never really learned emacs so didn't know TRAMP existed. When was it created? I was given that advice ("vi will always be available on the server") in the late 90's so I'm curious to know if TRAMP was an option my prof didn't know about (or didn't mention), or whether it was developed later and the advice was good at the time.
EDIT: Found http://www.fifi.org/doc/tramp/tramp-emacs.html which mentions that TRAMP started development in November 1998. I would have been getting that advice in late 1997 or early 1998, given when I started my Unix class at college. So the answer appears to be that the advice was actually correct at the time, but superseded sooner than I thought it was.
Yes, I can use TRAMP but as I ssh to the server anyway to run commands, I'm editing the files with vi there. Furthermore I'm sure I don't inadvertently edit the local version of the file instead of the remote one, or that I forget to kill the buffer with the remote file and edit it instead of the local one after a few days. What's on the server stays on the server.
> The comments about LLM contributed code seems like a specific axe to grind that otherwise detracts from a nice history lesson.
The existence of vim classic would be hard to explain without reference to LLMs.
The comments about LLM contributed code seems like a specific axe to grind that otherwise detracts from a nice history lesson.
Seems like an interesting fact for those who don't follow the development of vim/neovim.
I had a mini holiday job working for (long since gone from NZ) Philips Design and Development Laboratory in 1992. As part of that I worked on some tools for their silicon graphics workstations. I was shown vi, and how to get help and left to it. Tough learning curve! Seemed ridiculous at first, then I developed a mini set of editing skills and got used to it! Still using Vim/Nvim today.
How does an article like this not mention Bill Joy??
When I was in college in 2001, I went to the library and checked out Kaare Christian's book called "The UNIX Operating System". One of the early chapters covered vi - I'd telnet into the school's Sun server with a pretty early version of vi (one-level undo) and follow the examples. Never looked back!
Long ago I wrote my own really incomplete vi subset for the C64 that I really should dust off. But there's a more polished vi clone for 6502 machines, including the C64, Apple II and Atari: https://vi65.sourceforge.net/
I'm vim poweruser since around 2009. When I use VSCodium (not that much today) I obviously use Vim emulation.
When I use a different editor, there will be lots of jjkk or ,w (I nmap ,w to :w). Habits die hard.
Now I switched to neovim due to the amount of good features I like with it. I use exclusively mini.nvim modules that are awesome.
It’s funny how many forks aiming to keep it free from LLM-generated code. The luddites are present even in the most progressive parts of the population.
vi was never progressive, it was "the Ancients knew it better, the present sucks, these kids have terrible taste, return to the one true Past"
cool stuff, for a bunch i didnt realise they were really distinct versions!
Use Helix now as the first one that stuck in my fingers though. before that it was always try a lil while and forget it (back to nano...).
Helix i think is like 'user friendly vi' or maybe 'no config vi'. dont need any plugins or weird stuff. everything essential works out of the box (for me)
Helix's selection-action feels way more natural to me than vi/vim's action-selection.
Had someone else parrot this line to me the other day, but I remain unconvinced. Especially when vim has visual mode, and you often can make a select before doing something to it. v$ to select from cursor to end of line, then d to cut or y to copy. Is that not the sort of thing you mean? Is visual mode in vim just underused?
Recently I was trying to find a good way to delete from the current position backward to another character, like dT or dF followed by the target character. The trouble was they'd leave at least one character behind, either what I jumped to or what I started on. What worked how I want, and was still easy, was just using visual mode. Where "n" was the character to jump back to, I did vFn which selected from my cursor position back to the letter n (and including that n). I could then hit d and delete all of it, no extra character left behind from either end. I remember at first I was thinking "there's gotta be a way to do this without visual mode". Best I could come up with was hitting x after dFn or whatever to get the stray character. I think using visual mode is probably fine, though. Maybe if I were doing this type of edit a lot I could bind some key sequence to do it.
Would it be accurate to say you didn't use visual mode much in vim before you moved to Helix?
I think you're right and visual mode is underused. It gives you the best of both worlds: "cw" meaning "change word" for when it's obvious what you're going to be selecting, and "v3wwwc" for "change 5 words" when you discover (by experimentation) that the text you wanted to change actually counted as 5 words due to punctuation, not 3 as you had first thought.
Sam isn't graphical there is sam and samterm which sends commands to sam. sam itself is an ed style line editor, where the concept of a line is replaced with a dot. vis allows multiple dots.
It's worth noting that a lot of the text editing done in the vi family are just calls to ed with different ways of doing selections.
I have nothing against Vi or Emacs, but since I strongly prefer GUI and mouse over terminal I use GUI editors.
When I don't have a GUI available, I use micro, nano, joe.
I'm more in the vim camp, but I will say emacs has one of the best GUIs out there. Everything that works in the terminal still works (great keyboard accessibility), plus you get additional benefits, like proper window separation that isn't just a text character drawing an imaginary line (so copying lines of text with the mouse when you have a bunch of splits is easier). There's also image support, you can connect to a server with TRAMP, open up dired, and view remote images right in emacs. I always thought that was cool.
Vim on the other hand never felt like it benefited much from a GUI, or like it had a very good one available. I just use neovim in a terminal.
Being able to choose is a good thing. Use what works for you. I prefer the terminal, but not as hard core as switching to a TTY and never see a GUI again...