Why Atom Can’t Replace Vim

chromejs10 · on March 5, 2014

I appreciate the fact that this isn't some biased "vim is God" type post. It has good points too about how editors do tend to follow the Emacs style where "command x does y". To me, that works fine because most of the commands you run will turn into muscle memory and never ends up being a problem. However, there is definitely a lot of use cases with VIM's way by being able to build up commands. It definitely cuts down the learning curve. Honestly, I'm not terribly psyched about Atom. It doesn't appear to offer anything knew other than instead of being extensible through VIM script, Emacs Lisp, or Python, it's extensible via Coffeescript.

mkozlows · on March 5, 2014

In practice, a lot of vim stuff ends up being muscle memory, too -- anything you use frequently, you don't think about consciously. It's the less frequent stuff where the composability really comes into conscious play.

ackyshake · on March 7, 2014

This article does have great points. Vim commands are very short that do a whole lot more than other editors.

I don't agree with the last paragraph though, that Vim needs half a dozen plugins to get basic functionality.

I suppose, it all depends on what you would call 'basic functionality' but people install some of the most pointless plugins sometimes, like NERDTree, when there's already a built in, great file explorer called Netrw you already get with vim that you can open with :Ex or :Vex (or :Sex snigger). You already get the :find commands that's just as good as ctrlp.

Seriously, try typing :find <as><as>/<as> (substitute an * for <as>, HN doesn't seem to like two asterisks for some reason) and then any file, and it's as quick if not quicker than ctrlp.

People also install ack to grep through codebases when :grep exists and can be programmed using grepprg, an ugly, slow statusbar with 200 SLOC, that everyone seems to have problems with every other week. My statusbar is 2 lines and is just as good if I may say so myself. Using vanilla vim without plugins isn't very hard when you think about it.

In fact, the best way to learn vim is to actually try to learn vim, without any plugins. You will find that this is a great editor already with a chalk-full of features that you didn't know about. The most amazing thing is that you learn new settings or options or motions every day if you read the :help enough.