[HN Gopher] The Future of the Vim Project
___________________________________________________________________
The Future of the Vim Project
Author : mrzool
Score : 613 points
Date : 2023-08-10 10:57 UTC (12 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (groups.google.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (groups.google.com)
| ducktective wrote:
| Didn't Bram himself say anything on this matter? (I know of that
| one single quote "keep me alive").
|
| RIP Bram, I learned a lot from you.
| toastal wrote:
| This would have been the perfect time to pivot away from Google
| Groups & Microsoft GitHub
| jitl wrote:
| Shaking up the community right now would probably make efforts
| to continue Vim's development more challenging, and make it
| more likely remaining contributors switch over to Neovim.
| marcthe12 wrote:
| Google groups I can't comment but Github is a relative new
| thing. They were also still accepting patches on the mailing
| list(I believe the github pull request were mirrored to the ml
| or something like that). Bram was often replying to issues and
| pull request via email so github adoption doesn't seem to what
| Bram wanted. So no migration away from github.
| vxNsr wrote:
| Everyone puts off estate planning in general for obvious reasons
| (most people don't want to think about their own mortality) all
| the more so, most don't give a thought to digital estate
| planning, it's especially hard because there are very few
| resources to do it and most apps/websites don't have that
| workflow planned out (Afaik, really only Facebook does anything
| for this).
|
| My wife and I share a password manager account so theoretically
| she should have access to every site I use, but will she know
| where to go? Will she have any clue how to maintain our local
| self hosted services? Let alone the hardware?
|
| I've walked her through restarting the esxi server and ssh'ing
| into the main docker server to restart it, but I haven't
| documented any of this anywhere for her...
| em-bee wrote:
| as long as she has the passwords she can ask others for help.
| if you have kids, maybe they can learn how to run your things.
| RobertSponge wrote:
| I scrapped my self built server that runs snowflake TrueNAS
| with zfs doodads and replaced it with simple synology. It has
| mostly default settings with no encryption.
|
| My wife has no idea about tech and I want it to be easy for her
| to access our digitised family media and documents, once I no
| longer around. Any tech literate people/shop can figure out how
| to pull data out of synology.
| oblio wrote:
| I hope both Vim and Neovim extend olive branches (and Git
| branches where it makes sense! :-D ).
|
| Even if the fork doesn't heal, if they could align the code bases
| to bring them closer, both sides win.
| goku12 wrote:
| Neovim team has always been positive towards Vim. This post
| doesn't paint the Vim team as being hostile either. However, I
| really wonder how practical a merge is, considering that neovim
| isn't a fork or Vim, rather an implementation from scratch.
|
| Edit: Looks like I'm wrong about neovim not being a fork of
| vim.
| biorach wrote:
| No, Neovim is a fork
|
| > Neovim is a refactor, and sometimes redactor, in the
| tradition of Vim (which itself derives from Stevie). It is
| not a rewrite but a continuation and extension of Vim.
|
| https://neovim.io/charter/
| oblio wrote:
| It's not an implementation from scratch, do you know the
| history of the projects?
|
| Neovim started out as a large clean up and refactor of Vim
| code, plus the addition of async code.
|
| That's a huge amount of work, partially re-implemented by Vim
| (Bram implemented his own version of async).
|
| Actually, after the Neovim launch a lot of the Vim features
| were just Bram chasing after Neovim features. Vim9script,
| :term, etc.
|
| I think there was bad blood there with Bram, I'm not sure how
| deep the emotional rift was between the 2 groups. From the
| outside a lot of it looked like stubbornness on the Vim side,
| at least 60% of the time..
| fatbird wrote:
| I don't think there was bad blood with Bram. Rather, vim
| was always Bram's baby, even with contributions from the
| community, and he was very opinionated about how things
| should be implemented. IIRC, he found the new features of
| neovim interesting enough to want to implement them his own
| way, and a couple times commented that he thought that
| neovim's approach to certain features was "wrong," to his
| way of thinking.
|
| His choices were always a bit idiosyncratic, but the
| success of vim justified them, so it was never a problem...
| until he died, and now there are two projects, one of which
| is very modern, both in terms of the codebase and how the
| project is managed, and the other is likely to become
| something of a legacy project unless someone as dedicated
| as Bram is found to take over.
| nzach wrote:
| >Neovim started out as a large clean up and refactor of Vim
| code, plus the addition of async code.
|
| I don't think that is actually true.
|
| As far as I remember Justin and Thiago (I think) wanted to
| implement the ':term' into vim and Bram just shut them off
| because he didn't wanted to lead Vim into the road that
| Emacs went.
|
| And this was what prompted the Neovim fork. And they took
| the oportunity to also make a big refactor in the codebase.
| fatbird wrote:
| It was async that Justin and Thiago tried to add to vim,
| and spent several months wrestling with Bram to get their
| patch included. At the end, they concluded that they
| weren't going to get it in and that a fork was necessary.
| Including the terminal followed quickly after neovim was
| set up and organized.
| kzrdude wrote:
| Bram evidently had his own way, since he didn't let anyone
| else make commits to the project. That's fair, and in that
| situation forks are expected.
| rmwaite wrote:
| I've seen some reports that he did allow commits but he
| would "re"-commit them as part of his workflow. I'm not
| sure about the reasoning there.
| bombcar wrote:
| These types of mergers have occurred in the past and it
| usually is the dominant project adopting the use and feel of
| the features the other has different. Shells acting
| differently depending on how you call them, for example.
| 0cf8612b2e1e wrote:
| I am not sure how you reconcile some of the philosophical
| differences between the projects. One of the first
| objectives of NeoVIM was to dump code for obsolete
| computing platforms. A ton of legacy code was deliberately
| removed so as to streamline the project.
|
| If I recall correctly, one of the reasons the original
| async patch was ostensibly rejected was because it would
| rely on a C89(?) compiler. That was considered too
| disruptive a change that would make Vim accessible on fewer
| platforms.
| rolisz wrote:
| I think very, very, very few people still care about the
| C89 compiler.
|
| A bigger blocker to a merge/collaboration would be the
| move to use Lua in neovim
| bombcar wrote:
| It's brutal to say it, but often you handle it by some of
| the people involved passing away.
|
| Even if neovim basically takes over the older vim code
| wouldn't disappear, so it would continue to exist for
| older platforms. People still keep certain versions of
| GCC around for similar reasons.
|
| Or you abuse the preprocessor and automake.
| oblio wrote:
| Science advances...
| Aissen wrote:
| async is water under the bridge since Vim 8, both Neovim
| and Vim have async apis. I foresee native LSP and
| everything-lua to be a bigger schism between Neovim and
| Vim.
| halostatue wrote:
| Also the deliberate lack of GUI for neovim. The currently
| extant neovim GUI shells are all universally broken, and
| some of them crash more than they run. I have yet to find
| one that is remotely as good as MacVim on macOS. I
| suspect that most of them are merely tolerable on Linux
| and some might be barely acceptable on Windows.
| imbnwa wrote:
| With their recent release a few days ago, Neovide has
| become my daily driver for Neovim on my personal cpu. It
| were definitely rough edges a few versions ago, but I'm
| rather pleased where they are now.
|
| I find a lot of Rust GUI projects are slow-going but this
| has had a good pace
| halostatue wrote:
| I'll try it again in a few months, because it was
| completely unusable on macOS last time I tried it in
| March. At the moment, I have no time for something that
| may not work when MacVim works pretty much perfectly for
| me.
| sundarurfriend wrote:
| I've generally had more success with Goneovim than with
| Neovide, give that a try if you haven't yet.
| halostatue wrote:
| I've tried so many different nvim GUIs, but when I last
| tried them (March or so), _none_ of them behaved
| correctly on macOS, most of them had atrocious font
| rendering, didn 't like part of the configuration that I
| had set up (neovide in particular had a deep
| incompatibility with one of the alert replacement
| plugins), crashed regularly, or had things _enabled by
| default_ which aren 't reachable with vim scripting.
|
| I've gone all in and have converted my vim config to Lua
| and all...and I have decided that don't like Lua for
| configuration (there's a _massive_ impedance mismatch
| between neovim and Lua; you always feel like you 're
| working with a foreign interface).
|
| Goneovim was slightly more stable, but IIRC, the font
| rendering and macOS integration were awful enough that I
| uninstalled it shortly after launching it. Neovide lasted
| slightly longer (so that I could see that plugin
| incompatibility). VimR tried, but it isn't MacVim.
|
| And that's the problem: they aren't MacVim, providing a
| native macOS experience on top of a native vim GUI,
| because the neovim leadership cabal, in their infinite
| wisdom, decided that a first-party GUI is "useless".
| AlecSchueler wrote:
| Are you sure it's not a fork? From their project wiki:
|
| > Neovim is a project that seeks to aggressively refactor Vim
| source code
|
| > It is important to emphasize that this is not a project to
| rewrite Vim from scratch
| [deleted]
| OskarS wrote:
| My brother passed away very suddenly a few years ago, and I was
| put in charge of wrapping up and archiving his "digital" life. We
| were very lucky that we had access to a recovery email for his
| main gmail account (as well as a couple of passwords that his
| partner knew) and was able to access and archive virtually all
| data we could think of (services like Google Takeout were
| invaluable). I realized that if this had happened to me, it would
| have been virtually impossible to do, as all my passwords and
| credentials are in my password manager, and the password to that
| was only in my head.
|
| It's a good thing to plan for this eventuality, to make it easy
| for your family and friends to wind up your "digital life" after
| you've passed. 1Password has a very good solution for this, with
| a "recovery document" you can print out and write down your
| password on, which contains instructions anyone else would need
| to access your 1Password account. I gave a copy of this document
| printed out to a small number of people I trust implicitly.
|
| You never know when something sudden can happen to you. For the
| sake of those you leave behind, it's a nice gift to plan for this
| eventuality, even if it seems far off at the moment.
| pmckenna wrote:
| Weirdly this is something I've been thinking about a lot
| recently. I had no idea 1Password provided a recovery kit until
| you mentioned it. Just had a look and looks good.
|
| I'll definitely go through the steps, but I'm wondering what
| the best way to store it is. Feels weird keeping a document
| lying around giving access to all your passwords, bank cards,
| finances etc.
|
| I'll have a think about storage.
| mathgorges wrote:
| Banks' safe deposit boxes are a good choice if there are any
| near you, though they're often expensive.
|
| If you have a lawyer/attorney that you trust they're often in
| the habit of securely storing physical documents, but again,
| expensive.
|
| Personally, I (a cheap-ass) keep a copy in a wooden box
| buried underground in a secure location along with a few
| other things.
|
| However, the security of physical things remains a difficult
| problem that is most easily solved with money!
| lm28469 wrote:
| > I had no idea 1Password provided a recovery kit until you
| mentioned it.
|
| There are people out there with 1password and no recovery kit
| ? Some people like to live dangerously
| ubermonkey wrote:
| Let me add one other bit.
|
| I had a similar experience about 18 months ago when my friend
| A. suddenly died. He was fit and healthy, but for some reason
| had a seizure on a bike ride, crashed, and that was the end of
| his story.
|
| Unfortunately for his widow, she and he were not on a family
| account with Apple, and so it took a LOT of rigmarole to even
| access, say, the photos on his phone.
|
| Apple now has a "Legacy Contact" feature you can enable; this
| is a VERY VERY GOOD IDEA FOR MOST PEOPLE. I assume Google has
| something similar if you're on Android.
|
| The tl;dr is really "you just gotta have a plan." When you go,
| next week or decades from now, it'll be hard for those you
| leave behind. Do whatever you can to make it easier for them.
| josephd79 wrote:
| Now that I think about it, I should probably do the same. I use
| Bitwarden and they allow you to add an 'emergency contact' that
| is granted access after X amount of days.
| itsthecourier wrote:
| LastPass let you put two emails as your family members and you
| setup a 30 day limit to show you are alive. If your loved ones
| require access to your passwords and you are not there for 30
| days, Lastpass release your passwords to them
| woleium wrote:
| But we don't use LastPass after they have demonstrated over
| and over that they are not to be trusted with our secrets,
| right?
| tome wrote:
| And it means they must be keeping the recovery passwords in
| plaintext, so it just gets worse...
| 0cf8612b2e1e wrote:
| The email does not have to be the password. Something
| like, "password is taped to the back of my diploma"
| digging wrote:
| not necessarily, it may send them an email inviting them
| to create an account with control of your account.
| danielnoiz wrote:
| I've had this[0] bookmarked for a while. A good list of things
| to keep note of somewhere safe. Probably the old "3-2-1" backup
| method at minimum.
|
| [0] https://www.bogleheads.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=119346
| phpisthebest wrote:
| I keep a hard card in my safe next to my property titles, and
| other important paper work that has my bitwarden master
| password on it. From there who ever processes my estate should
| have no problems accessing everything
| kqr wrote:
| I'm lucky enough to never have been put in this situation, so
| please excuse my ignorance: why does someone need to be able to
| sign in to my accounts when I'm no longer?
| maxfurman wrote:
| Anything with recurring billing needs to be cancelled, for a
| start.
| praseodym wrote:
| Call the deceased person's bank to cancel all credit cards
| in their name and that's taken care of.
| evanriley wrote:
| Doesn't work for all services. Some services will, if
| unable to charge the card,send whatever amount to
| collections, and now they have to deal with that.
| bee_rider wrote:
| Debt collectors are persistent, but hey at least if they
| follow me to Hell maybe they can take a tour, check out
| apartments for their stay.
| devnullbrain wrote:
| Or pester your widow(er)
| humanistbot wrote:
| Your reply shows that you've never had to do this
| yourself. It's a lot more complicated than that.
| zo1 wrote:
| You'd think it's that easy. Some places literally are
| unable to do anything unless you're some sort of
| "signatory" or the actual account holder. No amount of
| if, buts, maybes, and certified/stamped copies of death
| certificates will convince them.
|
| I couldn't even cancel the health insurance company's
| recurring payments after a death. And they had the
| audacity to send a "how was your hospital stay"
| questionnaire to the account holder's email after they
| were "discharged" by the hospital.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| > And they had the audacity to send a "how was your
| hospital stay" questionnaire to the account holder's
| email after they were "discharged" by the hospital.
|
| That feels like an email that deserves an honest
| response:)
| lowercased wrote:
| Being able to unsubscribe to a service, as someone else
| mentioned.
|
| In social media world, posting some final "xyz has passed on.
| this account will be closing" or similar 'wrap up' activity
| is often useful.
| chasd00 wrote:
| When my father in law passed away his wife asked me to get
| some photos on a thumb drive for her. I knew his password
| from watching him login, I also went ahead and deleted his
| browser history.
| sonofhans wrote:
| The real hero is always in the comments. That was very
| humane of you.
| ibejoeb wrote:
| I'd pay for this service
| OskarS wrote:
| Lots of other people have mentioned very good practical
| reasons (and you can read the linked post for others, like
| people being unsure of what the password to the Vim FTP is),
| but there are lots of good sentimental ones as well.
|
| When something like this happens, you lose your mind
| slightly, and you become obsessed with preserving whatever is
| possible to preserve of the person. I went so far as to
| record his voice-mail message, just because I felt i needed
| to.
|
| Of all the internet stuff, the thing that was most important
| to us was photos: he was a photographer, and he used a photo-
| uploading service (I think it was Google Photos, but I'm
| unsure, it's been a couple of years) and I was able to get an
| archive with all his thousands of photographs.
|
| Eventually, I put everything I could possibly find
| (computers, internet services, whatever) into one big zip
| file, and put it on my local NAS (which is backed up to the
| cloud). I don't think I'll ever have the heart to go through
| it again, but my brother had young kids who never really got
| to know their dad. I figure one day they might want to look
| at it (even if it's 30 years from now) so it makes me feel
| good to know that it's been preserved.
| ncann wrote:
| If you are perfectly prepared for your passing and made your
| will, arranged all the financial stuffs, told your friends
| and family everything needed etc. then you don't need to give
| access to your accounts. But many people don't have that
| luxury. When death is unexpected, things get messy, e.g you
| may want to continue paying the mortgage on time, or shutdown
| social media accounts, or make announcement of their passing
| using those accounts, or contact their lawyer, or cancel
| subscribed services, and so on.
| Nzen wrote:
| While most people have focused on post-mortem account
| recovery, that's not the only occasion. The small company
| I've worked for has had the last three administrators leave
| the company in arrears for a time with quick departures and
| little handoff of procedures. It is all the more frustrating
| because we overtly use a shared password managment tool for
| accessing client servers.
| bluGill wrote:
| When my dad died my mom needed access to all the accounts to
| do things like pay the electric bill. That is all done online
| so without him logging into the online bill pay she would
| have no way to know what was owed. I suppose after a few
| months of not paying they would send a paper bill, but then
| there are late fees and the like.
| swader999 wrote:
| The finger doesn't need to be alive to unlock the phone. But
| yeah, don't put your loved ones through that.
| nicechianti wrote:
| [dead]
| RalfWausE wrote:
| Its not just about passing away, even a sudden incapacitation
| from which you do recover may pose a bit of a challenge for the
| relatives:
|
| Some time ago my dad had some severe heart problems which lead
| to him being hospitalised for multiple months and a lengthy
| recovery where he was in full "vegetable" mode in the
| beginning. As he is somewhat of a "patriarch" personality the
| whole family finances, insurances etc. where all on his
| personal system.
|
| It really was "fun" to sort everything out for us and even more
| "fun" for himself making any sense of his whole accounting
| sheme after suffering some memory loss during the whole ordeal.
|
| So... having some "letter of last resort" deposed somewhere may
| even benefit yourself...
| em-bee wrote:
| that's what would scare me the most. to forget my passwords
| due to some accident. if i pass away it wouldn't matter to
| me, but the thought of recovering from an illness but then
| not being able to access things that i had before is
| horrifying.
| JohnMakin wrote:
| I have a deadman switch where if I don't log into a service for
| 90 days it sends all my passwords and information to my closest
| living relative.
| macinjosh wrote:
| If you'd be willing I'd be interested to know more about how
| you did this.
| akvadrako wrote:
| Bitwarden has a service for this, fully E2EE.
| em-bee wrote:
| i am interested too.
| k1t wrote:
| Easy option: https://www.deadmansswitch.net/
| wild_egg wrote:
| Seems there's also a similar .com one
| JohnMakin wrote:
| My system is a little custom and complicated and tailored
| for me specifically, but basically my device periodically
| sends a ping to a service I built in cloud. I also have
| something like the google inactive account manager set up
| which is probably easiest for most people who use gmail:
|
| https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/3036546?hl=en
| not_the_fda wrote:
| I've recently been planning for my death, no urgent need, but
| you never know.
|
| I've put a backup of my keepass passwords on a USB as well as a
| printout of the passwords and the master password in a firebox.
| I also keep a list of assets and financial accounts in there
| along with birth certificates and passports. My spouse and I
| both have a key.
|
| I would have used a safe deposit box but those are
| disappearing.
| hoherd wrote:
| I had a similar situation where I lost my brother very
| unexpectedly. I ended up having to run a password cracker on
| his windows account because nobody had a recovery email.
| Thankfully his windows credentials were not very strong and his
| gaming GPU was able to crack the password in a few days using a
| Linux livecd, and I was able to expand from there into his
| 1Password account. Like you, I realized that having a trusted
| second party with the keys to my digital kingdom would be a
| wise choice in case of a disaster.
| tomjen3 wrote:
| I am sorry about your brother.
|
| When we talk about these things it is always assumed that we
| want our family to have access to our digital lives after we
| die. I have lots of pictures from shared memories that I want
| my family to have - and they already do.
|
| Other things I want to die with me - things that were not
| shared with my family before I died shouldn't be shared with
| them after I die.
|
| Why is it that we generally assume that we should get access to
| other peoples private stuff because they are dead?
|
| Again, not trying to make this an attack on you.
|
| And of course I am excepting getting access to bank accounts
| and insurance.
| hoseja wrote:
| I'm with the other guy. Your unique pattern of electronic
| activity has ceased irrecoverably. No need for your patterns of
| electronic activity in computers to be any different.
| benreesman wrote:
| My condolences about the loss of your brother. My kid brother
| passed away a few years ago as well, and his digital footprint
| is one of the most vivid portraits of his last years, and to me
| a treasure beyond accounting.
|
| I strongly second the imperative to preserve as much as
| possible in the event that any of us suffer a mischief.
| patrick451 wrote:
| I'm genuinely curious why this needs to be done. Maybe I'm
| weird, but I don't think I have anything valuable online that
| my family would want. Of course, there are all my financial
| accounts, but I would think that just a password wouldn't do
| them much good with those, at least to legally drain them. I
| would think (and could be wrong) they would need to go through
| legal channels for that. What else is there? I can't imagine
| they want download my email which is mostly just business
| transactions anyway.
| joe5150 wrote:
| I can think of a handful of things that it might be nice or
| convenient for someone to be able to access (subscription
| services and whatnot), but I agree that it seems legally
| unwise to encourage anyone to try to log into my financial
| accounts and move money around after I die. Naming a
| beneficiary is a sounder strategy.
| petee wrote:
| Another consideration, when my dad passed we had his passwords
| but not his phone or tablet pins/patterns.
|
| Both devices are encrypted, and the samsung I believe is set to
| wipe after a number of failed attempts. While there probably
| isn't anything on them, it's always been a pain to not know.
| ThrowAway1922A wrote:
| > While there probably isn't anything on them, it's always
| been a pain to not know.
|
| I know I wouldn't care because I'd be dead, but I really do
| not want my family getting on to my personal devices after
| I'm dead. Those are things that I will never give them the
| passwords for, not everything is their business.
| petee wrote:
| I think that's fine; albeit a potentially awkward
| conversation, I personally would rather have known "hey,
| here's what you can get into, here is what is private" but
| we never talked about it at all.
|
| Especially important to communicate that in your case, on
| the off chance they want to hire a data recovery firm in
| some hope of saving wedding photos or something
| ThrowAway1922A wrote:
| > Especially important to communicate that in your case,
| on the off chance they want to hire a data recovery firm
| in some hope of saving wedding photos or something
|
| I share any photos with them they might want, but I
| hopeful that Apple's security setup prevents any
| practical data recovery. I know my family too well, if I
| explicitly said "this is private" they'd be trying to get
| in the moment I was cold.
|
| There's nothing _bad_ on my devices, but there 's lots
| they don't need to know about me.
| BeFlatXIII wrote:
| Imagine once bronies age enough that they kick the bucket
| en masse and their families spend tens of thousands on
| data recovery only to discover "damn, that's a lot of
| horse porn."
| cdelsolar wrote:
| yeah same here. Do I have to give out my passwords, or can
| I just make a doc with important things?
| petee wrote:
| Doesn't matter as much what you do or how, but more
| importantly that you've communicated it to the people who
| will have to deal with your stuff if you were to kick the
| bucket tomorrow.
|
| My parents simply made a list of passwords on a piece of
| paper, buried with the other important papers.
| em-bee wrote:
| it depends on where the important stuff is.
|
| i have all the family photos on encrypted devices, and
| the most efficient way to share them is to share the
| passwords for those devices. my phone they don't need
| because the important stuff from the phone is backed up
| anyways, so they just need that backup.
|
| so i guess the easiest way is to keep separate backups of
| stuff you want to keep private and stuff you want to
| share.
| shever73 wrote:
| I have a doc, which is password-protected and shared with
| my wife. It contains details of bank accounts, how to
| access shares, who we're insured with and passwords /
| passcodes for things she might need access to.
| Hamuko wrote:
| Same. I'd also like them to throw all of my objects with
| locks on them into the nearest lake.
| bombcar wrote:
| This is one of the reasons that I've begun to pare down the
| number of online financial accounts I have, even though
| churning for bonuses is fun.
|
| Every single one will have to be dealt with eventually by
| someone, so if I can reduce the number of banks I deal with
| it's worth it, even at some small cost of not being "perfectly
| optimal".
| OJFord wrote:
| Banks are the last thing I'd worry about (I wouldn't) -
| they're highly regulated, audited, and have been dealing with
| this forever, since before 'passwords'.
| bombcar wrote:
| I have no worry about the funds being lost. It's just
| imagining my heirs having to contact and close fifty+
| accounts.
| chipsrafferty wrote:
| Why would they have to?
| xmdx wrote:
| In the UK you can use something like this:
| https://www.deathnotificationservice.co.uk/
|
| There are a few of these, one official one for notifying
| the government and a few private ones.
|
| I imagine this services exists in other countries, if not
| then might an opportunity to create it.
| rokizero wrote:
| Serious question: How common is having dozens of
| accounts? I live in NL and have 3 at the same bank. Why
| would anyone have 50+ accounts?
| saikia81 wrote:
| The only reasons I can imagine are fund transfer times,
| and some isolation security for big amounts. As a fellow
| dutchie, I just use one bank for personal, and one for my
| business.
| spiralpolitik wrote:
| Pretty common in the US verses the EU/UK. The basic
| middle income set would be:
|
| A checking account A savings account (might be at the
| same institution as the checking, might not)
|
| From your employment you may have.
|
| - A 401k Account - A Health Savings Account (HSA) - A
| Health Flexible spending account
|
| These will be at whatever institution your employer uses.
| As these change every time you change jobs you might have
| multiples of these in play unless you are diligent in
| rolling over and closing old accounts.
|
| You also might have:
|
| - Individual Retirement Account (possibly two, one Roth,
| non-Roth) - College Savings Account (if you have kids and
| want save for collage in a tax friendly way) - Money
| Market/Broker account for stocks etc.
|
| If you live in a community property state then you
| probably have a second set of some these so you that you
| don't mix individual assets with community assets.
|
| Market consolidation has made it easier to go with an
| single provider for a lot of the above, but it's still
| busy work keeping on top of everything.
| Tyr42 wrote:
| Sign up bonuses. Some give an extra few percent on
| interest when you sign up, so you move all your money in,
| collect, then close the account out and go to another
| bank and repeat.
| throw0101b wrote:
| Someone may have chequing+saving at one bank, a stock
| brokerage (or retirement savings) account at another
| institution, and a may have credit card(s) from
| completely different one(s).
|
| So that could potentially be (at least) three different
| financially-related accounts.
| bombcar wrote:
| You sign up for them and never close them. I probably
| have nearly 50 credit card accounts _alone_ and since
| they 're free of monthly/yearly fees, I really don't have
| much motivation to close them.
|
| On top of that I have two retirement accounts, four bank
| accounts (not counting various accounts AT those banks),
| and more. They collect if you don't weed them out.
| jonhohle wrote:
| My wife and I have four kids and for each of them is a
| personal savings account, a savings account we keep for
| them to accumulate over time to avoid a taxable lump sump
| "gift", and a tax advantaged educational savings account.
| For ourselves we have brokerage, savings, checking, and
| each have pretax and post-tax advantaged retirement
| accounts and health savings accounts. Many tech employees
| would also have 401k and possibly equity compensation
| accounts. And then any credit or debt (mortgage) accounts
| on top of that.
|
| Our family is big, and the number of accounts scales with
| the number of people, but that's about 25 without getting
| into anything moderately interesting.
| EtienneK wrote:
| Not so uncommon in NL. As a Dutchy you should have heard
| of Bunq which allows you to open unlimited accounts. The
| idea is to use each as savings pots for specific things
| such as a holiday, car, groceries, etc.
|
| Other banks allow the same thing via virtual accounts.
| macinjosh wrote:
| That dude is probably quite wealthy.
| jonhohle wrote:
| It's not necessarily related to wealth (except that you
| need some savings), but when ING Direct was a thing my
| wife and I had an account for every savings goal and used
| it as our "envelope" system. There was no cost per
| account and you could open one in seconds, so we had a
| bunch of low value (dozens of dollars! Dozens!) accounts
| for saving for our next phone or vacation. That could
| have been done with a spreadsheet, but it was less work
| to just make separate accounts.
| detourdog wrote:
| The US based financial industry is a make work project
| for bankers as far as I can tell. The US creates all
| sorts of classification of money causing the need for at
| least 3 retirement account types, a college savings
| account per Child per contributor.
|
| I'm only scratching the surface of the number and types
| of accounts an American can have. It is also useful to
| have different banks for different services.
| kemotep wrote:
| Additionally, if you don't list a beneficiary on any of
| these accounts, they have to go through probate court to
| gain access. The fewer hurdles and headaches that your
| loved ones have to go through the better. Having dealt
| with this early this past year with a family member,
| having the list of "chores" to do upon passing helps and
| reduces the headaches. Especially if those funds are
| necessary to pay for the sudden bills that a funeral and
| so on can bring up.
| dumpster_fire wrote:
| Yeah I used to have a massive spreadsheet tracking the
| entirety of household finances. I was worried that no one
| would know where the money was if I suddenly died, so I
| started a monthly finance 1:1 with my spouse. Even wrote an
| "upon death or incapacitation" playbook for her.
|
| The second session was just her saying WTF I can't keep track
| of the location, ownership and tax benefits of 40 accounts!
|
| I've since closed 3/4 of all accounts because of that.
| bombcar wrote:
| The killer for me was working out how much time I was
| spending playing Excel Warrior and how much it was "making"
| me and realizing that I was working in my free time for
| Pennie's.
| darkwater wrote:
| Good and honest realization. It seems easy once you do it
| but it can be really hard to actually get to that point.
| em-bee wrote:
| that is what keeps me from getting into all this detailed
| finance management or worse trading, likewise any other
| side business that could earn some money but just isn't
| the kind of work i want to do.
|
| making a budget is useful, as is tracking your expenses,
| but that's about it for me.
| xmdx wrote:
| Had the same experience with my dad passing recently, we had
| access to everything because we know the passwords he uses and
| he was ok with sharing those with us.
|
| Will definitely look into the 1password emergency kit, thanks
| for mentioning it. 2fa is the other big challenge after that.
| DicIfTEx wrote:
| Useful checklist: https://getyourshittogether.org/
|
| Others in this thread have talked about safety deposit boxes
| and buried crates. I'd add that you can just give some trusted
| party a normal encrypted USB flash drive, and eliminate the
| risk of getting absolutely rinsed out in the event of a house
| burglary by splitting the password amongst an arbitrary number
| of your other contacts using the Shamir's Secret Sharing
| algorithm.
| flobosg wrote:
| Additional links:
|
| * What to Do Before You Die: A Tech Checklist -
| https://archive.is/6vjqQ
|
| * Cheat Sheet For If I'm Gone - https://archive.is/lnWX6
| -https://github.com/christophercalm/if-im-
| gone/blob/main/exam... (HN discussion:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31748553)
| DicIfTEx wrote:
| Also https://g3rv4.com/2022/04/using-shamir-secret-sharing
| which includes a link to an easy-to-use SSS tool that can
| output shards as QR codes.
| hardburn wrote:
| I wouldn't trust USB flash drives with anything long term.
| Best archival method would be to print something out (perhaps
| an encrypted message in a QR code), have it put away
| somewhere secure, and use that for a key to unlocking
| everything else.
| vimbtw wrote:
| Bitcoiners have been thinking about this storage problem
| for a decade now. Secure electronic devices in faraday
| cages and tamper and water proof bags or engraved steel
| plates (possibly cut up and distributed) seem to be the way
| to go for storing small bits of extremely valuable
| information.
|
| Or of course you can use multiple key storage techniques
| and have a 2 out of 3 or more type setup. It all depends on
| how valuable the information is.
| semi-extrinsic wrote:
| Engraved steel plates cut up is actually extremely easy
| and virtually indestructible.
|
| You can buy a piece of 100x50x3 mm 316 stainless steel
| (thats 4"x2"x1/8" in freedom units) for around $5.
|
| Engraving it is a simple matter of using a $10 automatic
| center punch and write the password out in dot punched
| letters.
|
| If necessary, cut plate in N pieces with a hack saw,
| distribute among N people.
|
| I always mark bicycles this way, dot punch my last name
| underneath the bottom bracket shell.
| calfuris wrote:
| Security against unauthorized use and data lifespan are
| separate concerns. They're not fully orthogonal--security
| tends to make things more brittle--but you can apply
| whatever form of security you like and then store the
| secured data in any way you like. Hardburn seems to have
| been talking purely about the useful life of the archived
| data. The charge in flash storage leaks, so the data is
| eventually lost if not refreshed. A flash drive is
| reliable for a year, but not a decade. If you want long
| term storage you're going to want something else. Paper
| would be fine for most uses. An ordinary printout
| subjected to ordinary handling is good for a few decades
| with reasonable storage conditions.
| augusto-moura wrote:
| Yes, this, USB flash drives live at most 5 years or
| something. Things get even worse for SSD.
|
| If we are talking just about credentials, you can just
| print the password and access instructions to a password
| manager and give it to the people you trust. This is one
| place were having a cloud password manager might be
| helpful, otherwise you would need to also provide the
| access to a device containing the offline manager (or a
| updated copy of it)
|
| You probably don't need to keep a whole flash drive for
| credentials. Unless you also want to keep some other files
| secure _without_ being on other devices
| sshine wrote:
| I call this a Horcrux.
|
| Also, unless your arbitrary number of friends are
| cryptographers, it's a sure way for them to collectively lose
| your shit.
| Someone wrote:
| Create transparencies with the text If you
| put at least 3 of these on top of each other, my
| Google recovery code will appear here: 2
| PS 3 > ]7 7#A E
|
| (each with different characters shown, of course. Ask a
| mathematician to make sure any 3 will show the full code,
| and any 2 won't show enough to recover it)
|
| Put them in envelopes, write "open in case John Doe dies"
| on them, and distribute them among friends.
|
| If you distribute enough of them, I think there's a
| reasonable chance they'll recover your data.
|
| As an improvement, distribute them not to your friends, but
| to their kids (the probability is higher they'll be sane of
| mind when you die), and tell your attorney who has one.
|
| I think that's overkill, though. I've done it simpler: I
| wrote the full recovery codes down a few times and put them
| in a few places in my house.
|
| I think that's fine if I assume burglars won't take them or
| won't know what to do with them and I won't die in a
| disaster that also destroys my house.
| DicIfTEx wrote:
| > I think that's fine if I assume ... I won't die in a
| disaster that also destroys my house.
|
| You might not die, but you might still end up in a pretty
| bad position: https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2022/06/ive-
| locked-myself-out-of-my...
|
| Incredibly unlikely, of course, but you'll certainly feel
| like a dick if it _does_ happen.
| atoav wrote:
| I'd say a regular will, sealed at a notary is just okay.
|
| If you are really paranoid, why not write a service that
| works like a dead mans switch and when you don't trigger it
| for n days it sends all the keys to the kingdom to those
| who should receive them.
| pr0zac wrote:
| Google actually provides this service:
| https://myaccount.google.com/inactive?pli=1
|
| At this point I've moved almost everything off Google and
| basically now only use my Gmail account for logins on
| websites I don't want to give my real email address to
| and to keep Inactive Account Manager setup to send the
| necessary info to get into my 1Password account to my
| brother if I die.
|
| I have a will setup with all my financial details and
| have set beneficiaries everywhere but this feels like a
| good backup in case I forget to update it with something
| or my family has trouble gaining access using other
| means.
| ed wrote:
| That's a helpful link! Do you know if google allows
| access to Gmail once inactivity is triggered? Ideally my
| contacts could use it to recover access to my password
| manager.
| pr0zac wrote:
| You have the option to allow that yes. When you add
| people to be contacted you're able to granularly decide
| what parts of your google account they get access to and
| can optionally add a personal message as well.
| hobo_mark wrote:
| > The setting you are looking for is not available for
| your account.
|
| Google Apps strikes again...
| jagged-chisel wrote:
| Step 1: Kidnap $target
|
| Step 2: keep for N+1 days
|
| Step 3: ...*
|
| Step 4: profit!
|
| * where "..." just means "wait"
| civilitty wrote:
| Kidnapping $target works for just about every contingency
| once you include $hammer.
| hospadar wrote:
| Why bother waiting!?
|
| https://xkcd.com/538/
| __s wrote:
| Only a couple need to be into cryptography. You can setup
| so than N-of-M keys work, so that you're resilient to M-N
| losing their key
|
| You can have 2-of-20 which encrypts an encrypted blob whose
| key you share in your will
| r3trohack3r wrote:
| I'm sorry to hear about your brother.
|
| > all my passwords and credentials are in my password manager,
| and the password to that was only in my head.
|
| It's not just death I worry about. Anything that causes me to
| lose my memory of the password, from disease to head injury,
| leaves those trying to help me locked out of everything.
|
| A password manager is an incredibly helpful tool to leave
| behind, it's a compiled list of all vendors you have registered
| an online account with.
|
| But, IIUC, without legal authority to access those accounts on
| my behalf it might not be sufficient. I'm planning to talk to
| an attorney that specializes in taking care of the legal side
| too. IIUC there are accounts you need legal authority to access
| even if you have the password. For example, if I give my friend
| the password to my 401k with the purpose of managing my estate,
| them using that password can put them in a legally gray area.
|
| Also planning to work out a rough order of importance and
| context for a subset of accounts can help. Like writing down
| which financial vendor is managing the life insurance policy
| and whether that's tied to my employer or not (if I lose my job
| leading up to my death, I.e. during a long battle with an
| injury, will I lose my life insurance before it pays out?)
|
| A "red binder" project is on my families short list - the "I'm
| dead or incapacitated, here's what you do" playbook. The above
| is how I'm thinking about things. I would love to hear more
| thoughts/perspectives
| WorldMaker wrote:
| > But, IIUC, without legal authority to access those accounts
| on my behalf it might not be sufficient.
|
| Relatedly, most digital accounts explicitly _don 't_ survive
| the user in their Terms of Service agreements. I think there
| are a lot of legal battles to come over digital inheritance
| rights for accounts like Movies Anywhere and Steam and App
| Store purchases.
| danielvaughn wrote:
| My brother-in-law's mother passed away last year and he was in
| a similar situation. Even beyond the digital realm, there are
| so many details in a person's life that have to be attended to.
| Insurance, mortgage, vehicle ownership, etc etc. It's really an
| overwhelming process and it took a toll on him.
|
| I've been thinking about building a platform to help prepare
| for and guide families who are faced with this kind of
| situation.
| bityard wrote:
| I think the hard part is more that it's difficult to focus on
| the business decisions against the background of a loved
| one's death, more than the process itself is difficult.
|
| You pretty much need an estate lawyer just to navigate all of
| the legal stuff associated with a person's passing, and I
| went through this a few years ago with my own father.
|
| But the majority of attorneys who handle estates can also
| handle all of the financial and personal details as well. The
| only times this really NEEDS to get complicated is when the
| estate has a negative net worth (which means a potential lack
| of funds to close the estate), contains businesses that need
| to be sold or split up, or when survivors fight each other
| for their percentage of the inheritance.
| detourdog wrote:
| I had to go through this for my Mom an ex-pat in Israel. The
| account I was using was a joint-schwab account we had shared
| for 2 decades.
|
| I mentioned to Schwab that she had passed and they froze the
| account until I could prove the estate was less than $14
| Million. Needless to say this was a disaster as I was in a
| foreign country writing checks left and right.
|
| The issue was that it was foreign addressed account of a US
| domiciled bank. The IRS places the liability of the taxes on
| the bank if the estate is over $12 Million. Schwab would
| recognise a letter from the IRS stating that or any US
| probate court. My Mom's estate with no US assets has no US
| based probate court access. The IRS rule was enacted after
| our joint-account was opened and blew up our estate plan.
|
| Needless to say in 30 years I only had one problem with
| Schwab (which I had praised as the best bank ever until that
| moment). I have been unwinding all of my families Schwab
| accounts.
| markstos wrote:
| With lazy.nvim, I started with like 60 plugins in 17
| milliseconds.
|
| The resulting feature set was closer to VS Code than Vi. If
| that's "slow", it was still so fast it felt instant.
| javier_e06 wrote:
| I'm saddened by the news.
|
| Required reading: https://evrone.com/blog/bram-moolenaar-
| interview
|
| "Software development is much more of a craft. A craftsman uses
| whatever tools he thinks will get the best result, no matter if
| they are what everybody else is using or something different. And
| a good craftsman makes his own tools when needed" -B. Moolenar.
|
| As someone who had made vim is part of the development dna: Thank
| you.
| jauntywundrkind wrote:
| Embodies the most amazing part about vim well. From text-
| objects to macros to registers, vim is a dynamic programming
| environment where we are capturing state and invoking little
| scripts.
|
| Vim is spellcasting in the fly. Not puzzling out complex rotes
| to perform dutifully, but building a potent ether around us &
| then applying a little twist just so to alter the universe
| around us.
| fl0ki wrote:
| This is not a dig, just a concerned citizen: I would
| encourage you to check whether your microdose schedule has
| crept up from the standard 10-25ug into what looks like
| 50-75ug. It's one of those things that other people suspect
| long before you do. In any case, have fun, practice safe
| sorcery.
| nunez wrote:
| Google webcached version:
| http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:EFAGYiT...
| sylware wrote:
| Any interpo noscript/basic (x)html link?
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37075688 links
| https://web.archive.org/web/20230810094255/groups.google.com...
| which seems to load for me without JS
| sylware wrote:
| working in links and lynx and etc.
|
| Thank you very much.
| fnord77 wrote:
| google groups won't even load
|
| > Something went wrong. Please try again later.
| fortunateregard wrote:
| What is it that prevents the rest of the vim community from
| adopting neovim? From what I can observe, a great deal already
| have. But for the folks holding out, what is it that outweighs
| all that neovim has to offer?
| plugin-baby wrote:
| I tried switching recently, mainly because I wanted treesitter.
| I couldn't get it working after half a day messing about, a lot
| of documentation seemed out of date, and I don't think my
| standard plugins + .vimrc worked out of the box. My main focus
| is getting things done, not fiddling with configs and versions,
| so I gave up. I figure I'll try again in a couple of years if
| it's still tempting.
| colordrops wrote:
| I fiddled with it for half a day 5 years ago to get it
| working and have reaped the benefits for 5 years.
| gorjusborg wrote:
| Weird. That hasn't been my experience at all.
|
| I copied .vimrc to .config/nvim/init.vim, did a
| :PluginInstall and was up and running.
| layer8 wrote:
| By now the two have diverged enough that switching
| configurations between both is an issue. Vim is still much more
| widely available (installed by default) than Neovim, which
| makes it the obvious choice to maintain your configurations for
| if you don't specifically care about Neovim features.
| Furthermore, additions like Lua support, while pragmatic, make
| Neovim feel less organic to me.
| ansible wrote:
| In that vein, you are probably fine with whatever version of
| Vim is installed by your distro. But if you want LSP support
| for more cutting-edge stuff (like Rust), you probably need to
| install the latest release of Neovim by hand, not using the
| OS packaging system. Because stuff is changing too fast.
| syndicatedjelly wrote:
| I would like to use Neovim, but it's not as fully featured as
| VSCode is, so when I need to boot up something more powerful
| than Vim, I go to VSCode instead.
| highpost wrote:
| There is an excellent NeoVIM extension that integrates NeoVIM
| into VS Code. https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?item
| Name=asvetlia...
|
| Best of both worlds.
| massysett wrote:
| My Vim needs are very modest. I just don't need anything Neovim
| has. It's complication I don't need.
|
| If Vim got no new features, I wouldn't care. If Vim became
| unmaintained but still available from distributions, I'd still
| use it. If Vim became unavailable (e.g. due to lack of
| maintenance) I'd be more likely to switch to nvi than Neovim.
|
| I could probably switch to nvi now, but I have no reason to.
| throwaway290 wrote:
| FWIW you can use Neovim like Vim with your existing config,
| without any of the other stuff. That made the switch easy for
| me. Of course this means you'd rely on Neovim maintainers
| honoring that compatibility in future...
| massysett wrote:
| One of the things I really like about Vim is how it
| maintains compatibility with Vi. The manual obsessively
| points out features Not in vi. It retains some ill-advised
| things like :Print because Vi had them. Ancient platforms
| still work, supposedly.
|
| I care about this not because I used Vi (I never have) but
| because it's less likely that some new Vim with a newer
| distribution release will do something I don't expect. Vim
| does want I need it to do. I don't want it to change.
|
| Neovim on the other hand exists entirely to change things.
| That's all well and good. I just don't want it. My editor
| is complete.
| throwaway290 wrote:
| Uhm if you read my comment it is specifically about how
| nvim doesn't change the preexisting behavior of vim. And
| if I were to believe you then compatibility with vim
| means compatibility with vi
| massysett wrote:
| I did read your comment word for word: "Of course this
| means you'd rely on Neovim maintainers honoring that
| compatibility in future."
|
| I knew that maintaining compatibility was extremely
| important to Bram Moolenaar. I also knew that Neovim made
| a big deal out of removing "cruft" and old stuff they
| decided no one needed. I preferred Bram's values.
| enriquto wrote:
| > what is it that outweighs all that neovim has to offer?
|
| You should ask, and answer, the question in reverse. What does
| neovim offer me, as a regular vim user? I don't see anything
| particularly interesting for my usage, so I don't have any
| reason to change. Also, some features are missing (like gvim-
| gtk, that I enjoy using to edit LaTeX occasionally).
|
| Furthermore, as of today, plain vim has an aura of venerability
| due to Bram's legacy that neovim cannot match. So I'll stick
| with vim.
|
| It would make sense to port back some of the most popular
| neovim features into vim. It is a good thing to have innovative
| forks that experiment aggressively with new features.
| gorjusborg wrote:
| > You should ask, and answer, the question in reverse. What
| does neovim offer me, as a regular vim user?
|
| Well, one of the goals of neovim was to make it easier for
| new people to contribute.
|
| So, there's an obvious feature you might be overlooking: the
| project surviving past its creators passing.
|
| Beyond that, async, lua, lsp and treesitter support are other
| things neovim brings to the table. I don't use vim much
| anymore, but I know that neovim incorporated them first. If
| vim did follow on some of those innovations, consider how
| long it might take for new vim maintainers to get to a point
| where Bram needed to be to keep up, without his guidance.
|
| I wonder if there is a need for both vim and neovim in the
| future. Neovim was born out of wanting to do similar things
| to what the vim maintainers are considering.
| maleldil wrote:
| I know you listed Lua already, but it's important to stress
| that. Bram _did not_ want Lua as the main scripting
| language, and created Vim9 Script as a "better VimScript"
| instead. That's a stark difference in the direction for the
| project, and it signals to me that Vim is not meant to
| reintegrate with Neovim. It's no longer a question of Vim
| catching up with Neovim.
|
| However, this was Bram's vision. We don't know how the new
| leadership will affect that.
| gorjusborg wrote:
| > Vim9 Script as a "better VimScript" instead. That's a
| stark difference in the direction for the project
|
| Great point. I wasn't following vim much, so didn't know
| the context around the language changes.
|
| That does seem like a core philosophical difference. I'm
| interested to see what the future holds.
| gkfasdfasdf wrote:
| Neovim's language server integration is a killer feature that
| got me to switch.
| bradly wrote:
| Can you explain the benefit? I'm not familiar with the
| feature.
| linsomniac wrote:
| Absolutely! I started using LunarVim packages+configs on
| top of neovim), looks like a couple of years ago according
| to my work notes, and the LSP has been a huge improvement
| in my editing.
| infinitezest wrote:
| Maybe not important to some but the ability to use Lua over
| VimScript is a big win in my opinion. In fact, I use a mix of
| thr two where necessary.
| pmoriarty wrote:
| How much of the rest of the vim ecosystem is Lua-based,
| though? As far as I know it's still mostly vimscript.
|
| Vimscript's dominance in vim is one of the things that got
| me to switch to emacs when I got interested in Lisp and
| Scheme more than a decade ago.
|
| Sure, even then I could write scripts for vim using Vim's
| scheme compatibility mode, but I'd probably be one of the
| only ones doing so. Pretty much everyone else was using
| vimscript.
|
| In Emacs the whole ecosystem is in eLisp, so I'd feel right
| at home there, could naturally integrate other eLisp
| codebases/projects, could easily get help on anything
| related to working with eLisp in emacs.
|
| If I'd written scheme scripts in vim my work would always
| be a second-class citizen in the vim ecosystem.
|
| How's the vim ecosystem now? Is vimscript still dominant?
| ftaghn wrote:
| > How's the vim ecosystem now? Is vimscript still
| dominant?
|
| You can have a full neovim experience with all sorts of
| modern extensions without using a single line of
| vimscript. Some people even replace their init (neovim's
| vimrc) with lua, but I am of the opinion that it is a
| step too far, as lua isn't particularly adapted to
| writing configuration files and the result is too verbose
| to my taste.
| berkes wrote:
| My config is a horrible frankenstein of both.
|
| I use lua when examples are in lua or when I need some
| "logic" (such as assigning defaults to a var and then
| passing that around/overriding). And that's embedded in
| vimscript.
|
| I don't really like either. VimScript has always been a
| horror to me, eventhough I've been using vim for some 20
| years now, almost exclusively. Lua is "that thing that I
| should really sit down and learn. But not now, I've got
| stuff to finish".
|
| What does lua -for an end user- offer that something like
| yaml+python cannot offer? I really won't mind setting all
| sorts of flags, defaults and vars from some init.yaml,
| and then have some init.py to handle the few places where
| I do need actual logic. Why was lua picked, why did vim
| build its own language and not move to an existing one
| for its config? Am I just weird for never sitting down
| and learning lua? Or vimscript? Or both?
| enriquto wrote:
| independently of vim configuration, lua is a cute
| general-purpose language worth learning in itself. It is
| much simpler than python, and the documentation is
| outstanding.
| CorrectHorseBat wrote:
| Lua is faster than Python and also easier to embed in vim
| [1] which are both big advantages for the end user. It
| means fast plugins and no hassle with having the correct
| python version.
|
| Why Bram build is own language and then doubled down on
| it with vimscript9 I don't really understand.
|
| [1] https://neovim.discourse.group/t/why-was-lua-chosen-
| for-neov...
| enriquto wrote:
| > Why Bram built his own language [...] I don't really
| understand.
|
| What language would have you chosen in 1991 instead of
| creating vimscript? The vimscript language is a very
| natural extension[0] of Bill Joy's "ex" language, that
| was used in vi since 1976. The history of vimscript is
| not weird, it's just a fairly natural continuation of
| existing practices. Vimscript9 is a least-friction update
| for modern times.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vim_(text_editor)#Vim_s
| cript
| bongobingo1 wrote:
| Ah you see, you just wrap that lua in a lisp in some
| terse macros and there you go, instead of writing `:set
| formatoptions+=j` (yuck, vimscript!) or
| `vim.opt.formatoptions:append"j"` (vom, lua!) you can
| write the _clearly_ superior `(opt formatoptions +j)`
| (heck yes, ivory tower).
| kzrdude wrote:
| I have mainly lua config but just put in some vim files
| where I put bits and functions that were already written
| in vimscript.
| __tmk__ wrote:
| I've also seen neovim plugins written in fennel [0], so
| if you want something lispy, that's possible now.
|
| [0]: a Lisp that compiles to Lua,
| https://github.com/bakpakin/Fennel
| kzrdude wrote:
| I think the ecosystem is more or less splitting. As a
| user, not dev, it looks like neovim "distributions" are
| mostly lua and would be feature complete (with some
| substituted plugins) even if 100% lua was enforced.
| apetresc wrote:
| Neovim's adoption has been incredible. Virtually every
| major vimscript plugin has either been ported or
| overtaken by a Lua-native alternative in the Neovim
| ecosystem.
| arp242 wrote:
| > the ability to use Lua over VimScript
|
| The Neovim people went a bit further with the integration,
| but you've been able to use Lua with Vim for like 20 years
| or so, and you can use it to write perfectly functional
| plugins with it. Probably the main difference is that in
| Neovim Lua is always guaranteed to be available, which
| isn't the case for Vim.
| BaseballPhysics wrote:
| One of the big ones for me was Wayland support in neovim-gtk
| (https://github.com/Lyude/neovim-gtk), which therefore,
| unlike gvim, fully supports fractional scaling.
| mrzool wrote:
| Ubiquity. I have Vim on every machine I log into without
| installing anything extra.
| infinitezest wrote:
| In my experience, Nvim and Vim are similar enough that I
| don't have any trouble SSHing into any server with Vim and
| using it after using Nvim all day for development. So far
| Nvim has been a purely opt-in experience for me.
| rgoulter wrote:
| With caveats:
|
| - Different servers may have different versions of the
| program. Some distros are very "stable" and have very old
| versions of programs.
|
| - It's common (especially for vim) for users to have
| significant configuration files to make use easier.
| nemetroid wrote:
| $ rpm -qi neovim package neovim is not installed $
| dnf search neovim No matches.
|
| I don't have anything against it, but prefer being able to use
| the same tool across environments.
| berkes wrote:
| strange.
|
| > Neovim is available through EPEL (Extra Packages for
| Enterprise Linux)
|
| from https://github.com/neovim/neovim/wiki/Installing-
| Neovim#cent...
|
| > Neovim is in Fedora starting with Fedora 25 > sudo dnf
| install -y neovim python3-neovim
|
| from https://github.com/neovim/neovim/wiki/Installing-
| Neovim#fedo...
| nemetroid wrote:
| Not so strange if you've met the kind of sysadmins that
| don't enable EPEL.
| stcroixx wrote:
| For my use case of simple editing, vi was feature complete like
| 30 years ago. I don't have any preference at all what open
| source project build implements those features.
| zelos wrote:
| I've switched to Neovim, but there doesn't seem to be a macOS
| UI nvim client that's quite as polished as MacVim.
| anta40 wrote:
| That's why I still keep vim updated on my mac system. For
| nvim, the closest one I found is VimR.
| zelos wrote:
| I'm using Neovide for now, which seems to be gathering
| momentum, but I still miss MacVim. I had a fair few crashes
| with VimR that ruled it out for me.
| beej71 wrote:
| If neovim had the same keystrokes to move out of a terminal
| window as it does to move out of editor windows, I'd switch.
| But as it is, it's super clunky compared to vim.
|
| I know about rebinding to alt, but that doesn't work in all my
| terminals.
|
| So for me, it's that one lousy thing that keeps me from
| switching. And if someone knows the magic setting to make it
| mimic vim, please let me know.
| imbnwa wrote:
| I hear this and the workaround has been opening terminals in
| a floating window. The "toggleterm.nvim" plugin wraps a bunch
| of good behavior around this.
| kzrdude wrote:
| What keystrokes does vim use for this? I've never been a big
| user if terminals inside vim
| [deleted]
| ansible wrote:
| I've never used those features, and instead rely on GNU
| screen (or `term`) to manage my terminal windows. Sometimes I
| also use horizontal / vertical splits with GNU screen, but it
| is a bit clunky.
| OJFord wrote:
| Well, why should I? I don't need a reason _not_ to do
| everything, by default I 'm not doing things, it's changing
| from status quo that requires a reason.
| rgoulter wrote:
| It's easier to maintain one codebase than to maintain two
| forks.
|
| If development of vim dropped and neovim was nominated as its
| successor, I'd think most vim users would be just fine.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| > It's easier to maintain one codebase than to maintain two
| forks.
|
| Not necessarily; if the two codebases are maintained by
| groups of people with incompatible ideas about how the code
| should work and what it should do, then keeping things
| separate is much easier.
|
| > If development of vim dropped and neovim was nominated as
| its successor, I'd think most vim users would be just fine.
|
| Agreed; they don't diverge _that_ much from an end-user 's
| perspective.
| OJFord wrote:
| Yes, if vim were unmaintained I would switch, that would be
| a reason to change. But it's not, or at very least hasn't
| been, so I haven't, that hasn't been a reason to.
| halostatue wrote:
| Not those of us who gvim/MacVim.
|
| Give a _real_ alternative to those instead of the many
| quarter-implemented GUI shells that are really no better
| than running Electron, and the switch might be able to
| happen.
| arp242 wrote:
| - It's not backwards compatible.
|
| - Features I find useful have been removed.
|
| - I dislike Lua, and significantly prefer Vim9Script.
|
| - Gvim is useful at times.
| nequo wrote:
| Out of curiosity to better understand the ways in which Vim
| can be used:
|
| > Features I find useful have been removed.
|
| Which ones specifically?
|
| > significantly other Vim9Script
|
| What do you like more in Vim9Script?
|
| > Gvim is useful at times.
|
| What are your use cases for the GUI?
| arp242 wrote:
| I'm pretty sure I wrote a long comment about all of this at
| some point, but I can't seem to find it right now; this is
| the closest: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21954164
|
| If I look at some Lua plugins and compare that to some of
| my Vim9Script (or even "legacy VimScript") plugins then I
| think /Vim9?Script/ "wins" hands-down; it's just much more
| convenient for programming an editor. It also doesn't help
| that IMHO Lua isn't all that great of a language to start
| with - it's not horrible either, just not great.
|
| On Windows gvim works loads better (even on Unix systems
| gvim is arguably better, because terminals kind of suck and
| you run in to loads of graphical and input limitations
| pretty quickly).
|
| But in general: neovim doesn't offer me anything I want or
| need, I will have to spend time on migrating (e.g. my vimrc
| would error out, I need to deal with changed defaults,
| etc.), and for most things I prefer the "highly compatible"
| attitude from Vim/Bram, which is a trade-off that's not
| without its downsides, but I really like it (for most
| software).
| cossatot wrote:
| Personally, I do heavy coding and writing in Neovim (with
| more extensive config, like LSP and Copilot), but I use
| macvim and gvim (depending on which OS I'm using) for quick
| edits or file viewing, because I often need to open files
| from Finder or Nautilus and I don't have a terminal open in
| that directory.
| senknvd wrote:
| From what I've read[1], vim9script was pushed and developed
| almost exclusively by Bram. With him, a lot of knowledge
| about its internals and vision for its future dies.
|
| [1]: https://github.com/vim/vim/discussions/12736#discussionc
| omme...
| arp242 wrote:
| You're correct it was very much a "Bram project", but that
| doesn't mean the language needs to die with him: other
| people can work on it (and already have!) Vim9Script is
| also "finished", more or less, as "finished" as languages
| get anyway. The features Yegappan mentions are what we
| might call "optional features".
| suprjami wrote:
| cscope support
| BanazirGalbasi wrote:
| I feel like I've said the same thing here 3-4 times now, but
| for some of us it's about what's the most minimal setup
| required to use the tool. As a sysadmin, I want to be used to
| the most common tools and configurations that will be on a
| server without having to take the time to install something
| new. I could include NeoVim in my Ansible configs for setting
| up new servers, but generally servers are kept lean so I would
| rather just use vi/vim for basic edits anyway.
|
| I do use NeoVim with a lightly-customized LazyVim setup on my
| personal desktop, but I don't use it much differently than I
| use Vim at the moment. I'm not a power-user, just someone who's
| comfortable enough with the keybinds that I leave :w everywhere
| when using a non-vi editor.
| guhidalg wrote:
| Serious question: how is neovim "heavier" than vim?
| thefifthsetpin wrote:
| vim often ships with the base image, so you'd be comparing
| installing neovim on top of that to installing nothing.
| tomwheeler wrote:
| > for some of us it's about what's the most minimal setup
| required to use the tool.
|
| That's was the case for me. When I moved from vi to vim 25
| years ago, I devoted a lot of time to customizing it for
| maximum developer efficiency. Around that time, I got a job
| where I regularly used five different HP/UX machines, a
| couple of Solaris boxes, and a few other random machines. At
| the next job, it was HP/UX, AIX, and IRIX. Few of those
| machines had vim at all, let alone a version compatible with
| the setup I had on Linux.
|
| I eventually stopped doing the fancy things and settled into
| using plain vanilla vi, knowing that it would at least work
| consistently on every machine I used.
| kolme wrote:
| I would need to migrate my chunky config files. Some issues
| should be easy (moving files to ~/.config), some other trickier
| (vim-specific functionality).
|
| But alas, the motivation is not big enough for me to invest the
| effort.
|
| Some features I'd like from Neovim are built-in LSP (but Vim
| has that thank to plugins), and tree-sitter based syntax
| highlighting.
|
| That's not enough for me to move to Neovim.
| ALoverOfLats wrote:
| Can't speak for everyone but in my day to day most systems I
| work with already come with vim preinstalled or more convenient
| to install than neovim. I'd rather just pull my vimrc (If I
| even have to) and get down to editing quickly.
| tambourine_man wrote:
| From what I remember, NeoVim drops vi compatibility mode.
|
| vi is part of POSIX. That alone would be a reason to mantain
| Vim as a modern superset of vi.
| rgoulter wrote:
| In what circumstances would you run `vi` and find yourself
| upset that you end up in `vim`?
| tambourine_man wrote:
| You won't, but vi is scriptable and part of POSIX.
|
| It's a basic infrastructure that you don't want to break.
| rgoulter wrote:
| Apparently the original vi isn't POSIX compliant; nor is
| vim. https://vimhelp.org/vi_diff.txt.html#posix
|
| I think "if the script worked before, I want it to work
| later" has much more practical weight. Though, on the
| other side of practicality, I've heard sed, awk, and perl
| suggested for manipulating text in bash scripts far more
| than I've heard of vi recommended for the task.
| ansible wrote:
| Yes. If you need to do some text manipulation in a shell
| script, `sed` or something like that is what I'd reach
| for first. (I haven't used `awk` or Perl for quite a
| while.) I'd think even `ed` would be a more
| straightforward choice than `vi`.
| revscat wrote:
| Neovim is a superset of vim, so this argument applies to
| both.
| johncoltrane wrote:
| No, Neovim is not a superset of Vim. Vim has things that
| Neovim doesn't have and vice-versa.
| marcthe12 wrote:
| Neovim remove set compatible (hardcodes set nocompatible).
| Vim support the POSIX vi via that option.
| tambourine_man wrote:
| Not quite. Vim is vi compatible by default. You have to
| explicitly opt in for the newer behavior.
| sdfghswe wrote:
| From my admittedly somewhat limited experience, neovim felt a
| bit more sluggish to launch. Not a good sign.
| petepete wrote:
| nvim --clean --startuptime /tmp/neovim 003.174
| 000.001: --- NVIM STARTED ---
|
| vs vim --clean --startuptime /tmp/vim
| 004.274 000.001: --- VIM STARTED ---
|
| Maybe your config had an impact on it, but config-free
| they're incredibly close.
| sdfghswe wrote:
| 3/4 seconds??? Something's wrong with your system, right?
| petepete wrote:
| They're milliseconds!
|
| I abbreviated the output, if you run the above command
| and check the file, at the top it says
| times in msec
| sdfghswe wrote:
| Oh that's awesome actually.
| svlasov wrote:
| gvim and vimscript9
| kps wrote:
| Every time I've tried it, something was missing or broken.
| Currently it's at least :! which breaks apparently because it
| tries to do something 'clever' and complicated, whereas vi and
| vim just run the command.
|
| (I can live without cscope, since I no longer do significant C
| and mlcscope has been dead for aeons, though it's shocking that
| LSPs are _still_ less capable in some respects.)
| minusf wrote:
| not a heavy :! user, what i used there worked, but afaik
| neovim recommends :te . that's one of the bigger differences.
| neovim was very proud to have a fully integrated terminal
| andrewla wrote:
| For me, it's the use of Lua. I switched to neovim in no small
| part for the sane defaults, the XDG layout support, and the
| async/terminal stuff (and I found the code simplification,
| addition of tests, and removal of ancient legacy stuff to be
| very appealing).
|
| The terminal and async stuff has been "backported" to vim, as
| it were. But the plugin ecosystem is diverging. The other items
| are still open, and maybe those will move forward.
|
| At this point Vim9 is the clearly superior language (don't hate
| me) since it's very domain-specific, while Lua has only very
| primitive hacky support. But the plugin ecosystems have
| diverged -- I don't see NeoVim coming back home without native
| Lua support, and I definitely don't want native Lua support in
| vim.
| oblio wrote:
| Inertia.
|
| Such base programs basically need to go through the Debian
| packaging gauntlet if they want to succeed.
|
| What I mean by that is that generally they need to persuade
| distros to be anointed the "official" tool, i.e. Debian or
| Fedora would have to select Neovim as the new default text
| instead of Vim.
|
| Then you need a few years for the changes to trickle down
| everywhere: Debian -> Ubuntu-> Mint -> ..., Fedora -> RHEL, ...
| After that distro releases need to be cut and people need to
| upgrade.
|
| I think a full cycle, where a tool becomes ubiquitous if it
| gets adopted in the base installs, is probably 10 years. See
| systemd.
| user3939382 wrote:
| > Inertia.
|
| At some point I tried to switch and some setting broke in my
| config (mouse mode?) I forget what it was. It took me another
| 3-4 years before I tried again.
| trealira wrote:
| > What I mean by that is that generally they need to persuade
| distros to be anointed the "official" tool, i.e. Debian or
| Fedora would have to select Neovim as the new default text
| instead of Vim.
|
| You're probably right. However, I think it's more likely that
| the Linux distros drop Vim entirely and make Nano the default
| editor than that they replace Vim with Neovim.
|
| The BSDs have nvi as the default editor, IIRC, so they won't
| need to change anything.
| layer8 wrote:
| Nano already is the default editor (via
| /etc/alternatives/editor).
| planede wrote:
| In what sense vim is default in Debian?
| [deleted]
| layer8 wrote:
| It's not, Nano is.
| h11h wrote:
| MacVim and gVim. I've looked at neovim and there are many GUI
| options (paradox of choice), some of which I've tried, but at
| the end of the day, I'm more comfortable with what I'm already
| familiar with.
| rmwaite wrote:
| Likewise. I'm a heavy CLI user but gVim/MacVim are so
| entrenched in my workflow that the lack of a stable GUI for
| Neovim made it pretty much a nonstarter for me.
| veilrap wrote:
| As some one who only uses vim/neovim in a terminal window -
| what's the advantage of having GUI support in vim?
|
| Mouse support in my terminal seems fine, even over ssh.
| Being able to do things like run it inside of a tmux
| session has always made it seem like the GUI would be a
| step back?
| w0m wrote:
| I did the Vim -> NeoVim switch a while back (pre-vim9script)
| and lack of standardized GUI is a non trivial issue. There
| are solution(s) - but allof them have had too much friction
| to fit in a workflow for me. Definitely a concern.
| sigzero wrote:
| This is my biggest hurdle as well. The UI not being part of
| the core is a non-starter for me and I have tried several of
| the neovim ones.
| jzb wrote:
| Loyalty? Inertia? I never felt like there was a reason to
| switch. I admired Bram's work on Vim, still do, and didn't see
| any benefits to switching. Still don't, as long as the rest of
| the Vim dev community are willing and able to carry it forward.
|
| For my purposes, Vim is complete. I don't require new features,
| as long as it is maintained and runs on modern OSes.
| [deleted]
| earth2mars wrote:
| Why so many people love vim? I have a genuine question. I was
| trying to delete contents of a file and paste new content. It was
| nightmare for me to remember the 3 or 4 finger combination
| shortcuts with small and cap letters involved during the process.
| I like if the shortcuts using Ctrl or shift or Alt or Command or
| Windows buttons over 3 finger with caps changing keys. The
| cognitive load in remembering shortcuts is nightmare. Please give
| me a genuine opinion and justification. Does it really makes
| someone that productive? If they are keyboard wizards to type
| faster can't they do even faster with modern ides with similar
| proficiency. I know this topic is near and dear to many.
| Especially, the creator is died and folks can get even emotional.
| But I have same complaints about any terminal based ides. I just
| don't get complex long form keyboard shortcuts!
|
| Edit: typo
| syntheticnature wrote:
| Vim's major benefit is that commands are composable. For
| example, `d` means delete -- but delete what? Well, that's
| based on the motion command you supply, from lines, to the end
| of the file, or even looking for a specific character.
|
| Perhaps a better discussion: https://ferd.ca/vim-and-
| composability.html
|
| Edit: Another benefit: vim works very well over all sorts of
| connections, even ones that do not support the full set of
| Control/Shift/etc. For some of us, this is very handy. (Also,
| vi, the ancestral editor to vim, is very small and often
| available in environments other editors do not fit into -- and
| the commands are much the same.)
| samvher wrote:
| If you use vim every day, the common operations become muscle
| memory, I don't even think about jumping through the file, find
| and replace, block edits etc, they just happen.
|
| For me personally, the context in which I edit files changes
| constantly - sometimes it's inside a Docker container,
| sometimes it's on a server, sometimes it's on my personal Linux
| machine, sometimes on my work Mac... Vim is easily available on
| all of those, and I just use the default configuration.
|
| I do see my colleagues benefit from VSCode. If my work
| environment was very consistent (same computer, same language)
| I think you're right that I would possibly gain in productivity
| from using VSCode (with Github Copilot, perhaps). But my work
| environment is not consistent, so Vim it is.
| medeshago wrote:
| I think this explains it very well
| https://learnvim.irian.to/basics/vim_grammar. You stop thinking
| about doing specific things tied to a specific keymap and you
| start to interact with your code using vim's grammar. Besides
| that, its nice having a consistent keymap between the different
| IDEs, text editor, browser and shell. Personally I hate if
| theres a keymap that uses more than a two keys at the same time
| and I much prefer having a sequence of keystrokes like vim
| does, I do touch typing so it's natural for me to type a
| sequence, but if you introduce any modifier key I have to move
| my fingers from their position. Also, you can find vim in most
| unix machines that you are going to interact with.
| dmbche wrote:
| Very simply - Vim is a program that you are required to be a
| "poweruser" of to make work. You NEED to know most keypresses
| and shortcuts ( at some point, Vim is a language that you're
| speaking to the text you're editing ). This is not the case
| with most software - but find anyone that is a poweruser of any
| software and they'll love it to death.
|
| Because most things can be done 10 different and equivalent
| ways, you develop your own personal way of interacting with it,
| and it's "personalised" to your workflow - not by design, but
| because you won't remember things you don't use/understand.
|
| Learning Vim shows you to rely on yourself and to persevere,
| and if you do it you are likely to stick with it. Just like
| Emacs!
| wruza wrote:
| For me the answer is simple: I think in vim.
|
| It's unclear how I got there. It was long ago but my guess is
| two key things: I believed in rumors/stories and I didn't give
| up.
|
| Tbh, if vim wasn't vi-like, I'd still use it for its
| programmability. <- This is the main point beyond learning
| curve. Maybe I'd like emacs too, if I learned it. Or other
| modern editor. I'd even use vscode as it looks nicer and has
| many widgets, if only it wasn't such pain in the ass to program
| and/or tune up to your taste.
|
| I'm certain that everyone has to use what fits their
| personality.
|
| (Added: not concerned with speed or whatever unless an editor
| starts choking or popping up interfering crap randomly. I use
| mouse when it's convenient and mostly move with arrows except
| for AIO^$ - I don't have homerow discipline anyway.)
|
| _I know this topic is near and dear to many_
|
| Not at all for me. Vim is not everywhere and when I have to
| take a quick note or copy-paste I often open Notepad2 (because
| I don't want to switch between editing models). I just prefer
| vim model when it comes to long/structured editing sessions.
| wruza wrote:
| Btw, did you know that ctrl/shift-arrow editors are also
| different? This also has something to do with my vim
| preference.
|
| When you use it, either in a text field or in an editor,
| there's a little uncertainty where ctrl-stops are and how the
| cursor behaves regarding EOL. Is symbol/char a ctrl boundary?
| Does it jump forwards at the same positions like backwards?
| If I move up to a shorter line, will it retain a column index
| and an EOL flag? If I <End>, does it have EOL flag at all?
| Which way do you select whole lines? Home shift-down? Home
| home shift-down? Ctrl-L? You want to select whole lines to
| not deal with extra indent on paste. Or does an editor fix
| that?
|
| There are _lots_ of editors that behave differently. Almost
| all of them.
|
| What bug me in it, is that you now have to wait for ctrl-
| arrow to finish somewhere, but you don't know where. So,
| combined with a high repeat rate (which you want unless you
| like watching a snail to run or paint to dry) it becomes a
| release-timely game. I definitely remember struggling with
| that when I still used windows-style editors.
|
| It would be not an issue if I chose one and used it. But they
| die or get ancient wrt useful plugins so quickly. Norton,
| borland, ulti-something, notepad++, various IDEs, linux zoo,
| sublime, atom, vscode. There's no end to it. One decade and
| it's either "obsolete" or requires a high-end ssd to just
| start.
| nunez wrote:
| Vim is a nightmare if you don't use it very often. Moving
| around a text editor with a keyboard feels extremely strange
| coming from a traditional text editor or IDE.
|
| However, once you get used to it, it's absolutely amazing. You
| can move as fast as your thoughts, sometimes faster.
|
| I forced myself to use Vim for two weeks after having been a
| long-time eMacs user (and Notepad++ prior to that). Those two
| weeks were hell. I felt like a baby learning how to walk.
|
| It felt like second nature a few months later, and any editor
| that didn't have keybindings felt primitive a few months after
| that.
| chipsrafferty wrote:
| Why do you love the way _you_ do it? You 're used to it. vim
| users don't have a cognitive load because 99% of them learned
| vim at the same time as learning programming. Is it worth it in
| 2023 to learn if you're used to a standard input method?
| Probably not, the majority of complexity in most people's job
| takes place in the mind and saving even a hour a day is likely
| not worth it - consider that even if there is no added
| cognitive load with vim, the fact that you can input faster
| means you're moving faster which can be exhausting. I for one,
| like the menial aspect of typing as a way of taking a break
| from everything.
| redrobein wrote:
| > I was trying to delete contents of a file and paste new
| content. It was nightmare for me to remember the 3 or 4 finger
| combination shortcuts with small and cap letters involved
| during the process.
|
| Vim rarely uses multi key combinations like emacs or most other
| editors do. Copying and pasting involves some knowledge of how
| the copy registers work. It can feel confusing when you first
| try it, but you figure it out eventually...
|
| > Please give me a genuine opinion and justification. Does it
| really makes someone that productive?
|
| The best way I can explain this is that vim is language. The
| process of editing in vim involves speaking this language. And
| once you're used to it, this language itself helps you reason
| about and execute editing tasks faster. It's also faster
| because the commands are very concise, and imo pretty easy to
| remember because they are mnemonics for the operations they
| perform. Imagine a task like selecting a string in quotes and
| changing it to something else with a mouse. In vim that's
| <ci">. c(hange)i(nside)"(doublequotes). Performing this is as
| instant as having thought about it.
| kyleee wrote:
| the cognitive load approaches zero with continued use
| cirelli94 wrote:
| The cognitive load of using vim is the same you have while
| riding a bicycle, or while typing with ten fingers on the
| keyboard. After you get used, it's very easy. You just need to
| study or to play with it, e.g. with https://vim-adventures.com/
| !
| cgeier wrote:
| Don't think about it as a way of "shortcuts", but as a language
| of sorts. Yes, it will take some time to learn.
|
| While I'm a heavy vim user myself, I'm not sure if it really
| makes me more productive. But it is more fun to me than, e.g.
| working with VS Code.
| hnfong wrote:
| Most "complex long form shortcuts" that Vim use are one or two
| keystrokes. Add an extra Escape key for switching between
| insert and command mode.
|
| The "normal" Ctrl/Shift/Alt/Command/Meta shortcuts are two
| keystrokes as well.
|
| I think it's a matter of preference and habit. I like not
| having to move my hands away from the home position of the
| keyboard when I'm intensely typing. Perhaps some people have
| much greater accuracy than I do when (for example) moving their
| hands to press the the arrow keys and then returning to the
| home position. For me, that distracts me a tiny bit having to
| spend brain cycles to check whether my hands are in the right
| spot.
|
| Just sharing a personal anecdote.
|
| Oh btw, why do so many people "love" Vim? It's been around for
| decades. I'm pretty sure unless you use Emacs, you've changed
| your main text editor over time. The most popular one today, VS
| Code, didn't exist a couple years ago. Not sure what people
| used before that, but IIRC no mainstream text editor was around
| for so long, on so many different platforms, and in such a
| consistent manner.
|
| Vim has been around for 30+ years, and I've personally been
| using Vim for 20+. It's easy to be attached to something if it
| has been around for so long, and so consistently.
|
| And also, sometimes, maybe, when a creator pours love into a
| product, the users can feel it. Maybe.
| artogahr wrote:
| The point is you don't remember them, they become second
| nature, intuition, and you just sort of... do it without
| thinking. Assuming you've given time to learn it, editing with
| vim takes less mental effort and is faster.
| tuwtuwtuwtuw wrote:
| Do you have any source for that claim?
|
| I had a coworker who swore that X was the fastest way to do
| Y. Turned out it wasn't and X just made him very busy hitting
| keyboard quickly.
| medeshago wrote:
| What source can he give you? It's clearly a personal
| annecdote that is shared between a lot of people that use
| vim. What kind of source are you thinking about?
| tuwtuwtuwtuw wrote:
| I don't know, I'm not the one who made the claim that X
| was faster than Y.
|
| Are you saying that studying how efficient various text
| editors are for some groups of people is not possible?
|
| Here's what I believe to be an example of some study on
| how text editors compare:
|
| https://mjambon.github.io/vim-vs-emacs/
|
| Not saying that this is a good study - I haven't even
| read it. Merely providing it as an example that at some
| point a study has been made in this area.
| medeshago wrote:
| I'm not saying that you can't do it, you obviously can.
| It's just weird asking for studies for something that was
| clearly a personal annecdote. It's like asking someone:
| "Which knife is your favorite knife?" getting an answer
| and asking for a study that validates the answer.
| tuwtuwtuwtuw wrote:
| Sorry, English is not my first language so I guess I
| misinterpreted it. What I was replying to was:
|
| > Assuming you've given time to learn it, editing with
| vim takes less mental effort and is faster.
|
| What gave away that it was a personal anecdote? I
| interpreted the "you" part as if he was speaking
| generally about other people and not only himself
|
| In my main language, we would have written something like
| below if it was a personal anecdote (rough direct
| translation):
|
| > I was able to edit faster using Vim after taking the
| time to learn it.
| yoyohello13 wrote:
| As a vim user, I am 100% convinced that I am not that much
| faster than my colleagues who use normal key binds.
| However, I subjectively feel a lot less friction editing
| with vim keys than I do with the mouse and arrow keys. So
| Vim makes me happier...
| wruza wrote:
| Same thing. Not sure why everyone is obsessed with the
| speed argument. Reducing cognitive load is the goal. How
| do you do that - with vim or something else like snippets
| or copilot or just muscle-memorying ctrl/shift-arrow
| motion is up to you.
|
| Asking why people prefer vim is like asking why they
| prefer skateboard over rollers. You're proficient at what
| you learned the most. The only thing you have to keep in
| mind is that every tool has its limits, so choose what
| you're going learn from that perspective as well.
| 40four wrote:
| This is the way I look at it. The productivity claims are
| probably a bit overhyped. For me Vim is just simply fun!
| It makes me think of the best way to do something, and
| there is always something new to learn. It makes me happy
| as well :)
| hnfong wrote:
| While your perspective is totally valid, I think the idea
| that you always have to think about and learn how to use
| your editor seems to confirm the original commenter's
| point about the whole thing being too complicated.
|
| To which I say, I've been using Vim (and nVim) for more
| than 20 years now, and the learning part is optional
| after a year or so of intense use.
| artogahr wrote:
| I don't have a paper I can cite you, however if you talk to
| vim users most will tell you they feel more efficient and
| less friction compared to "normal" way of editing code.
| There's a reason this program is so popular and there are
| vim keybindings for any popular editor, after all.
| hnfong wrote:
| You're talking about two totally different things.
|
| GP is saying Vim users generally have muscle memory of
| their shortcuts (I might add, to the extent that some of
| them may not even be conscious which keys they are
| pressing). GP also mentioned that Vim takes less mental
| effort (due to muscle memory) and is faster.
|
| The faster part is easy to argue even from a theory
| perspective. Your hands basically never leave the home
| position. The time saved from physically moving your hands
| to and from various keyboard/mouse positions are reduced.
| At least Vim can be faster in that sense.
|
| You're saying you have a personal anecdote about a coworker
| (who from your description isn't necessarily using Vim).
| How is that relevant?
| tuwtuwtuwtuw wrote:
| > How is that relevant?
|
| I keep reading and hearing folk claiming that X is
| faster, as in this thread. It would be nice to read some
| actual study showing this to be true, but it seems like
| it mostly ends up being strongly held opinions based on
| anecdotes.
|
| You say it's easy to argue. Sure, it's easy to argue but
| that doesn't make it correct. I could argue in the other
| direction and then we end up wasting our time.
| hnfong wrote:
| It's true for me, and that's good enough for me.
|
| Perhaps an objective, statistical significant study helps
| you decide, but ultimately, some people are more
| productive in Vim, and some people aren't. A study just
| gives you the average, but it doesn't necessarily imply
| anything for your personal experience with the tool.
|
| Arguing what is "correct" here is a waste of time TBH.
| Nobody is really trying to prove anything. The person you
| originally replied to was trying to answer "Why so many
| people love vim?" . It's not because it is "objectively
| faster for everyone who uses it, provable in a
| reproducible large scale study", but rather because
| people perceive it making them work faster.
|
| You don't have to accept the answer. Just leave it be.
| nequo wrote:
| > The cognitive load in remembering shortcuts is nightmare.
|
| The cognitive load is no greater than it is to remember that
| Ctrl+C is copy and Ctrl+V is paste. Once you learn them, you
| don't think about them.
| thrownaway561 wrote:
| deepest sympathies for Bram and the VIM community.
|
| reading the post it seems that the project will continue after
| some growing pains from the lead. one thing to take from this is
| projects as popular as VIM need to hand the keys to the kingdom
| over to the community before anything drastic happens.
| junon wrote:
| Best of luck, this transition period is going to be chaotic for a
| while I'm sure. Glad to see the project in the hands of someone
| who seems to be on top of things. I also appreciate the
| carefulness of changes to the codebase after assuming leadership.
| causi wrote:
| I keep a couple of m-discs in my gun safe encrypted with a
| password most of my family knows, but they don't know the safe
| combination. If I kick the bucket they can cut the hinges off in
| a few minutes with my angle grinder. They could also use my
| corpse's finger to unlock my phone but that's a bit morbid.
| pwpw wrote:
| I never realized a tool I use every day was still being actively
| maintained. An endless amount of thanks to Bram Moolenaar, the
| many others that have contributed to it, and those that are now
| helping in the transition.
|
| ---
|
| As an aside, browsing this website on an iPad is terrible. It
| doesn't respect my request to increase the font size, and when I
| zoom in, it starts moving and wrapping the text defeating the
| purpose of the zoom. That being said, the quote formatting and
| response is fantastic and how online communication should be.
| gpvos wrote:
| I'm getting "Something went wrong. Please try again later." (both
| latest FF and Chrome). I don't think HN can slashdot Google yet,
| any ideas?
| bjord wrote:
| I had to join the group in order to see the conversation(s).
| ritzaco wrote:
| I get the same on firefox with ublock origin, but it works if I
| turn off ublock or use chrome.
|
| on my android firefox, I can't load any google properties - it
| just redirects to a help page about how to clear my cache
| (clearing the cache doesn't help)
| bondant wrote:
| I had no problem browsing that page with firefox a few hours
| ago, but it's not working anymore.
|
| So yes, maybe the servers handling google groups are a little
| too busy.
| gpvos wrote:
| It's showing for me now, so apparently there was some kind
| of temporary problem, maybe busy servers indeed.
| meitham wrote:
| I do hope this gets taken as a chance to merge Vim and Neovim,
| otherwise a divided community is not great for the editor
| nerdponx wrote:
| They're already getting to the point of being two different
| editors with a common lineage and legacy support for Vimscript.
| The Neovim people also probably don't want to re-merge with
| Vim, it would probably have to be Vim basically winding down
| development. Doesn't seem likely.
| bhaak wrote:
| > They're already getting to the point of being two different
| editors with a common lineage and legacy support for
| Vimscript.
|
| Let's see how much traction Vimscript9 will get. From the
| distant view of an outsider I got strong NIH vibes from that.
|
| > it would probably have to be Vim basically winding down
| development. Doesn't seem likely.
|
| It depends on how much Bram was the main focus point of
| development and if the remaining contributors are able to
| transition to a less centric development structure.
|
| I would rather expect a EGCS/GCC "merger" than a true code
| merger. But only time will tell.
| ftaghn wrote:
| > Let's see how much traction Vimscript9 will get.
|
| In practice, none. It's a wasteland. Extensions that aim to
| be compatible with both vim / neovim use the old vimscript,
| while lua has very, very significant traction in the neovim
| world among people who try to bring IDE like feature to
| vim. The amount of people willing to write extensions that
| only work on vim proper, which is what would happen if they
| used vim9script, is close to non existent.
|
| > I would rather expect a EGCS/GCC "merger"
|
| Or libav vs ffmpeg.
| Legion wrote:
| > Let's see how much traction Vimscript9 will get. From the
| distant view of an outsider I got strong NIH vibes from
| that.
|
| Honestly, that's what most recent Vim development in the
| Neovim era looks like to me.
|
| Bram rejected async patches for years. Neovim gets made and
| proves out the demand for async. Vim suddenly is motivated
| to cook up their own, incompatible version of async.
|
| When Neovim began, I thought the inevitable future was the
| Vim project cherry-picking the best features from Neovim
| each time such a feature reached sufficient maturity and
| popularity, and merging Neovim's implementations back into
| the core project. I underestimated how strong the NIH
| syndrome was with Vim proper.
| suprjami wrote:
| I don't. Neovim have dropped "old useless" features which are
| the entire reason I use Vim.
| djtango wrote:
| I've not tried neovim mostly because I'm hopelessly loyal.
| curious what features were cut?
| suprjami wrote:
| vim-cscope, which is the only reasonable way to read large
| C projects like the Linux kernel or BSD
| umanwizard wrote:
| What's wrong with clangd via lsp?
| kps wrote:
| For one thing, LSP (last I checked) was still unable to
| distinguish between read and write.
| devnullbrain wrote:
| n.b. LSP support was the reason cscope support was
| dropped
| suprjami wrote:
| You need to build the project to generate compilation
| database. I switch around kernel versions far too often
| for that to be viable.
| random_mutex wrote:
| What features?
| kzrdude wrote:
| One "meta feature" that was dropped was the ability to
| build the editor with or without different features. vim
| --version shows a long list of +/- features, neovim doesn't
| do that.
|
| I'm sure neovim dropped a lot but I don't have the full
| overview. Prominently it dropped support for giving
| !commands access to the actual tty. Commands that access
| the tty have to be used through the command :term instead.
|
| Neovim prominently dropped support for gvim as well (GTK
| UI). Instead they focus on being embeddable in new ways to
| create UIs.
| random_mutex wrote:
| >One "meta feature" that was dropped was the ability to
| build the editor with or without different features. vim
| --version shows a long list of +/- features, neovim
| doesn't do that.
|
| What's wrong with all features enabled by default?
|
| > I'm sure neovim dropped a lot but I don't have the full
| overview.
|
| https://neovim.io/doc/user/vim_diff.html
|
| >Prominently it dropped support for giving !commands
| access to the actual tty. Commands that access the tty
| have to be used through the command :term instead.
|
| Why would you run an interactive command with `:!` ?
| NobodyNada wrote:
| > Why would you run an interactive command with `:!` ?
|
| I ran up against this limitation recently. The kitty
| terminal exposes APIs allowing processes to communicate
| with the terminal using escape codes. I wanted to
| configure Neovim to access the system clipboard using
| kitty's API, so that I could copy/paste from within
| Neovim even over SSH. However, this would require Neovim
| to give the clipboard subprocess access to the
| controlling TTY. (Running it within :term would not work,
| as the escape sequences would thus be passed to Neovim's
| virtual terminal emulator, not the instance of kitty that
| Neovim itself is running within.)
| aumerle wrote:
| neovim supports OSC 52 out of the box so clipboard over
| SSH should just wrk in kitty or any terminal that
| supports OSC 52. kitty of course supports a lot more than
| OSC 52 but for basic opy/paste of plain text, OSC 52 is
| sufficient.
| NobodyNada wrote:
| Neovim doesn't support OSC 52 unless I'm missing
| something. There's an open issue:
| https://github.com/neovim/neovim/issues/3344
|
| It's easy to implement OSC 52 copy with a simple
| script/plugin, but apparently not paste without adding
| some code inside of Neovim itself.
| kzrdude wrote:
| What's wrong? I didn't mean it like that, I've just
| listed it as a thing that was removed.
|
| And about !, It's also listed as a thing that changed, no
| judgment. Regarding usecases I think if it's possible,
| some user will take advantage of it.
| kps wrote:
| > Why would you run an interactive command with `:!` ?
|
| Why _wouldn 't_ you? Vi's `:!` is simple and general.
|
| If neovim has an equivalent, it must be obscure enough
| that no one has mentioned it yet, and it seems to me that
| the obvious thing to do would be to make `:!` do it by
| default, and put neovim's current `:!` behaviour behind a
| `compatible` flag for those who want it.
| kzrdude wrote:
| That does sound kind of like a missed opportunity. Not
| sure why it's not like that.
|
| The closest neovim equivalent I can think of is :term
| <command>
| kps wrote:
| `:term` is much more intrusive; you can't just `:!foo`
| and get on with what you're doing. For one thing, you
| can't `:term foo` with a modified file, which is not an
| unusual state when you're editing.
| kzrdude wrote:
| Using `:!` as a filter for text and running interactive
| commands doesn't overlap for me, so I haven't seen that
| as an issue.
| devnullbrain wrote:
| !pwd works for me in nvim, I use it every day
| kps wrote:
| Try something that uses input, e.g. a pager (`:!git
| log`), or a password (`:!sudo something`), or `:!top`, or
| something with even the simplest formatted output
| (`:!watch -n1 lsusb`).
| kzrdude wrote:
| !git log is a good example. It works differently in vim
| and neovim.
| suprjami wrote:
| vim-cscope, which is the only reasonable way to read large
| C projects like the Linux kernel or BSD
| random_mutex wrote:
| A language server is way better than cscope ...if you can
| get clangd to work with your codebase.
| suprjami wrote:
| It works but I don't want to build the kernel to generate
| the compilation database every time I check out a new tag
| or branch. With BSD it would be even worse.
| ctenb wrote:
| Yes, although the forks have diverged quite a bit by now :(
| oblio wrote:
| True, but if there's a will, there's a way.
|
| They can compromise on the process and maybe aim for a medium
| to long term merge.
|
| I.e. they start aligning coding conventions, standards, etc,
| and when they're ready 1-2 years from now they pull the
| switch and re-merge the code bases.
| halostatue wrote:
| There is one thing that vim provides that the neovim folks
| have said that they will never provide, and that's a GUI.
|
| Unless the vim project gives that up (and there will be
| significant outrage over that), or unless the neovim folks
| give up that particularly shortsighted stance (having a
| first-party cross-platform pluggable GUI is a _good_
| thing), I do not see a merge ever happening.
| kzrdude wrote:
| Why not? vim and neovim have been separate for a long time
| already, wouldn't it work to continue like that?
| meitham wrote:
| There's no future to Vim without Bram. A merge of the two
| fork's isn't what Bram has wanted, but it's the best way to
| keep Vim alive
| sigzero wrote:
| None of that is even remotely true.
| oblio wrote:
| I wouldn't be so dismissive.
|
| Vim is a marquee project, tons of hackers will want to
| contribute because it's cool or because they want to have
| that name on their CV.
| krossitalk wrote:
| Pretty much this. I'd like to take a crack at updating
| that vim.org page away from PHP5/MySQL.
| The_Colonel wrote:
| > tons of hackers will want to contribute because it's
| cool
|
| It's one thing to contribute a couple of PRs/patches, a
| very different thing to spend a large part of your free
| time on the project for years (which is what Bram did to
| make vim what it is).
|
| These projects are no joke and a few hurray contributors
| not lasting more than a couple of months won't cut it.
| ftaghn wrote:
| > These projects are no joke and a few hurray
| contributors not lasting more than a couple of months
| won't cut it.
|
| Those same contributors that remained on vim instead of
| neovim didn't put much effort into vim9 ecosystem either.
| I can't imagine them being willing to maintain all of
| vim's baggage when literally nobody writes vim9script.
| Classic vimmers tend to stick to the old vimscript.
|
| As you said, contributing a few patches to classic vim is
| one thing, but becoming an actual maintainer of the
| behemoth that comes with a ton of useless baggage is a
| whole another thing. Maintaining a programming language
| no one uses.. sisyphus would be proud.
| GneissFrog wrote:
| No future for Vim without Bram? People said the same thing
| about Apple when Steve Jobs passed away. Turns out, as long
| as you have loyal users and competent people working,
| things can keep on chugging right along.
|
| It seems a bit ridiculous to dismiss reunification when you
| don't even know what kind of compromises might be made to
| make it happen.
| coldtea wrote:
| > _No future for Vim without Bram? People said the same
| thing about Apple when Steve Jobs passed away._
|
| Well, they were making a wrong prediction, but also a
| totally unrelated to the Vim/Bram situation comparison,
| then.
|
| This is not the case of a huge multinational company with
| tens of thousands of employees, hundreds of billions in
| cash, hundreds of millions of users, a strong product
| lineup, and a strong C-level team, who has been preparing
| for 2 years for its CEO eventual demise, complete with
| another person taking his CEO role way before that
| happened.
|
| As Apple was at the time of Job's passing.
|
| This is a FOSS software project, strongly associated and
| mostly solely written almost predominantly by a single
| person [1], with another fork that has a vibrant
| community and more modern features.
|
| So, to keep the relevant parts of a comparison, this is
| an multi-person entity fully prepared for the demise of
| its leader, with people ready to take over, and stocked
| to the brims with the essential fuel to continue it's
| operation (cash), vs an entity that was essentially an
| one-man-show, with no preparations for the next day, and
| with a quite popular alternative ready to take over.
|
| [1] Bram has 16,515 commits, the next biggest contributor
| has 68 times less commits. Or, 1/50th lines added. And it
| goes downhill from there, with the rest of the
| contributors added together being 1/50th Bram's
| contribution as well.
| ftaghn wrote:
| I would not be so prompt to compare the situation with
| Apple and Jobs. Apple is a company that provides
| something no one else does while also holding a lock on
| its users. You can't go and install iOS apps on android.
|
| On the other hand, vim and neovim are almost the same
| thing, and wherever they diverge, it is always to the
| detriment of vim. I would not be very optimistic for the
| future of vim considering that nobody uses vim9script and
| that alone is quite the massive baggage to maintain, an
| entirely separate, new programming language? one that is
| used by.. no one? 99% of extension developers either use
| the old vimscript or lua, and neovim's lua base has
| significantly grown to the point where we can imagine a
| future that has no vimscript.
|
| Where will they find people willing to continue working
| on vim's code base when it has this kind of really big,
| really useless baggage? and if they were to cut it out of
| the code base, would it still be vim? I respect Bram for
| his contribution to open source, and vim is one of my
| favorite, most used software, but his decisions in the
| past few years have been extremely poor and were not
| friendly toward the possibility of vim being community
| maintained.
| em-bee wrote:
| _Where will they find people willing to continue working
| on vim 's code base_
|
| the same place where neovim found its developers. if one
| group of people can organize themselves to maintain and
| develop their version of vim. so can another. i don't
| know how many contributors vim has, but i am sure they
| can figure out how to move forward. finding new
| leadership can be difficult when there is no clear
| candidate, but if the contributors had not wanted to work
| on vim they would not have been there in the first place.
| coldtea wrote:
| > _i don 't know how many contributors vim has, but i am
| sure they can figure out how to move forward._
|
| Bram, for 98% of the commits/lines, plus some statistical
| noise.
| em-bee wrote:
| i didn't realize that. given this and what others say
| about how bram treated contributions, i'd think it's best
| to put the original vim into maintenance mode and keep it
| as the version that bram intended. there is no need for
| another group of developers to emerge if it wasn't
| already there when they most likely would just end up
| repeating what neovim already did, since none of them
| would be a replacement to do things the "bram" way,
| especially considering that bram apparently was
| reimplementing many neovim features anyways.
|
| it feels to me that not changing vim would be what bram
| would have wanted. any new developments may as well
| happen in neovim.
|
| of course anyone who disagrees or doesn't like where
| neovim is heading may fork vim and make their own version
| of it.
| Dobbs wrote:
| > On the other hand, vim and neovim are almost the same
| thing, and wherever they diverge, it is always to the
| detriment of vim.
|
| They are quite different at this point and personally I
| prefer vim over neovim. I've never gotten NeoVim to work
| satisfactorily. I've had issues with the async setup
| where the backend and frontend start having issues with
| each other or lag. So on. Personally I find vim to be a
| lot simpler to work with and MacVim in particular to just
| be a perfect GUI for me.
|
| Of course YMMV. The point being is that there are a many
| of us that prefer normal Vim over the NeoVim work. That's
| okay. Its also okay that others prefer NeoVim over Vim.
| There is nothing wrong with that. What there is something
| wrong with is the way that many NeoVim people are
| reacting to this.
| JetSetIlly wrote:
| You've hit the nail on the head for me. From my point of
| view, vim is simpler than neovim. I value that and
| wouldn't like to see neovim subsume it (although I'm sure
| people are happy with neovim for very good reasons)
| The_Colonel wrote:
| Time will tell, but I think vim is likely to fade away with
| slow development pace. People are all sentimental right
| now, but we'll see how many of them will remain in a couple
| of years still committing to vim daily.
|
| Looking at the commit history, vim was largely a one-man
| show, I'm a bit skeptical about that changing basically
| overnight.
| Anthony-G wrote:
| The commit history does not accurately reflect the
| contributions to the code-base. As I understand it,
| contributors would write and provide patches to Bram who
| would then commit the changes to the code-base.
| imbnwa wrote:
| Why would anyone amend the author in an open source
| project?
| Anthony-G wrote:
| From what I can tell the reason is that that's the way it
| was always done. As I understand it, back in the days
| before there were distributed version control systems,
| Bram was the only one who could commit to the code-base
| so he would credit the actual author of a submitted patch
| in the commit message. He continued this practice after
| the Vim project moved to Mercurial (and Git).
|
| Related discussion:
| https://github.com/vim/vim/issues/1554
| imbnwa wrote:
| Ah, thanks
| Anthony-G wrote:
| On reflection, it might have been clearer to have started
| my comment with:
|
| "Taken at face value by most modern users of Git, the
| commit history does not accurately reflect the
| contributions to the code-base".
| oblio wrote:
| If the project leads can agree to a shared vision - which
| frankly should be similar considering the scope of the
| projects - it's most likely better if they merge.
|
| Open Source projects never have enough resources and
| splitting them into 2 clone projects is generally not great.
|
| I know about competition but it's not like Vim/Neovim,
| programming text editor, is lacking in competition even
| without the other side of the fork :-)
| tokai wrote:
| >better if they merge
|
| You and meitham are very focused on this, but it is very
| much an opinion and not a fact.
| oblio wrote:
| It is an opinion backed by watching Open Source projects
| for several decades.
|
| Long lived forks are rarely good for an individual
| project. Frankly, the most successful forks I've seen
| unfortunately... kind of strangle off the original.
| Jenkins/Huson, LibreOffice/OpenOffice, MariaDB/MySQL,
| ConsoleZ/Console2/... Though there are cases where the
| original wins out: Emacs/XEmacs, etc.
|
| Especially since it's not like Vim/Neovim are already
| lacking in features to implement, bugs to fix, ways to
| extend their architectures :-)
| umanwizard wrote:
| LibreOffice is the mainline, not a fork in anything but
| the name.
| tokai wrote:
| Eh I'm not going to go through your list, but putting
| libre/open office on there is disingenuous. Open office
| was run into the ground by Oracle, not because of the
| forking.
| bhaak wrote:
| Couldn't you say the same about Hudson and MySQL?
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| There are also cases where the fork is caused by
| differences in philosophy and result in divergent
| codebases that are perfectly fine doing their own things,
| like NetBSD and OpenBSD.
| roblabla wrote:
| The first three all have the same story though, where
| Oracle acquired the project, forced changes that drove
| the original authors out, who then forked the project and
| resumed development there. So Hudson/OpenOfice/MySQL
| essentially lost the key developers that had all the
| institutional knowledge, killing them.
|
| I do think there would be a lot to gain to merge
| vim/neovim, but they're in a very different position. I
| don't know enough about the other two forks to draw
| parallels to them.
| 5e92cb50239222b wrote:
| > killing them
|
| MySQL 8 was released nine years after the split, and was
| one of the best releases throughout the project's history
| (cleaning up many decades old problems, modernizing the
| underlying storage engine, introducing window functions,
| CTEs, transactional DDL, lots of other stuff like that).
| hnfong wrote:
| The ones that "strangle off the original" are the
| successful cases. It means that users were given a
| choice, and they chose to use the forks, which were (for
| them) "better".
|
| Without the forks, there would be no competition. Would
| the improvements have been included in the original
| project if there was no fork? Maybe. But usually forks
| happen because the intended improvements were either
| rejected or otherwise not accepted. If there was no fork,
| and the forked project did not "strangle" the original
| one, users would not have the chance/option to use the
| "better" one.
|
| I think all you showed was that competition is good. I
| don't see how you would come to the conclusion that
| merging is better.
|
| In a sense this is mostly a philosophical question of the
| Ship of Theseus kind. What happens is that when one side
| gains traction because of some specific feature, the
| other side either gets obsolete quickly, or they adopt
| the same features. So in the end everything converges in
| feature (and often even code), only not necessarily in
| name/leadership.
| 5e92cb50239222b wrote:
| MariaDB didn't "strangle off" MySQL. The latter is still
| significantly more popular (probably 10 times as much, if
| not more) if you look outside our HN/Linux bubble. It
| also had one of the best releases ever under Oracle's
| guidance back in 2018, many years after the split, when
| very few of the original developers were still at Oracle.
| Meanwhile, MariaDB development slowed down significantly
| over the past few years as they're having financial
| problems.
|
| (You might counter that by saying that the last MySQL
| release was in 2018, but it's not really comparable:
| Oracle does all of its development behind closed doors
| and then does major code dumps when it's ready. MariaDB
| prefer shipping small releases every 6 months or so.)
| nicce wrote:
| It depends on the differences of their goals and
| principles.
|
| It is fact that 1 + 1 > 1 if you compare available
| resources.
| kzrdude wrote:
| Vim was developed by Bram commiting and controlling every
| change. Neovim very much already unlocked a greater than
| one situation by adopting a different development model.
| majewsky wrote:
| Can someone copy-paste the text, please? I cannot read it because
| Google hates Firefox users apparently.
|
| EDIT: The Internet Archive has a functional copy.
| https://web.archive.org/web/20230810094255/groups.google.com...
| hoten wrote:
| The page isn't loading on my mobile Chrome either.
| sigzero wrote:
| No issues with FF for me. Probably the HN effect maybe?
| nabakin wrote:
| Interesting that HN was able to DDOS a Google service
| cobbaut wrote:
| It is called the Slashdot effect :)
| thejammahimself wrote:
| I've tried loading on Chromium but that doesn't work either it
| seems.
| jefftk wrote:
| Not a Firefox-specific issue; I don't see it loading in Chrome
| either.
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