[HN Gopher] Understanding the Origins and the Evolution of Vi an...
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Understanding the Origins and the Evolution of Vi and Vim
Author : amosjyng
Score : 66 points
Date : 2025-04-15 10:33 UTC (3 days ago)
(HTM) web link (pikuma.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (pikuma.com)
| ngcc_hk wrote:
| I was surprised to see this on pikuma... I guess " Also... Emacs
| sucks! " is ok to end the blog entry. To me it is just hard to
| use 2-3 figures and it seemed hard for inventory as well. That
| sucks.
| patrickdavey wrote:
| I was slightly surprised that they didn't add a mention of
| neovim.
| synergy20 wrote:
| while neovim is great and I intend to switch even, some time
| down the road, it caused a not-really-compatible fork and
| diverted the efforts, I wish them to be merged however hard it
| will be.
| kzrdude wrote:
| I am maybe just a year or so down from the switch from vim to
| neovim, but lua is a game changer. It's like, it's easy to
| configure stuff yourself now. Better plugins are written
| because the tools are better, or at least so I'm convinced.
|
| I will make a random comparison to latex vs typst
| (typesetting software). Both incorporate a programming
| environment, you can write a program right in your document.
| The difference is that the tex programming environment is a
| bit unapproachable and not very similar to other languages
| you may already know, while typst's equivalent is consistent
| and more similar to languages you know.
| sodapopcan wrote:
| Vim9script is actually a great language.
| kzrdude wrote:
| Well, I missed it because I seem to have departed Vim
| sodapopcan wrote:
| Ohhhh I misread, I thought you were saying you were a
| year away from switching, lol.
| behnamoh wrote:
| > ... lua is a game changer...
|
| Am I the only one who absolutely hates Lua? Its syntax, the
| fact that variables are global by default unless you local
| them, `foo = nil` isn't variable assignment but instead
| variable unassignment!, etc.
|
| There are far better scripting languages than Lua.
| tombert wrote:
| I've been playing with Rust a lot in the last few weeks,
| and I have been pretty happy with the Rust plugins
| available for NeoVim. It gives me most of the features I
| would want from a "real" IDE, but of course it's still Vim,
| so all my configs and other plugins still work.
|
| I'm convinced that the reason it's so good is because Lua
| is simply a better language than VimScript, making it
| easier to make plugins.
| sodapopcan wrote:
| If you follow any discussions around development, it seems
| the chance of this happening is essentially zero. I feel that
| they will continue to diverge into completely different
| editors.
| layer8 wrote:
| It's mentioned in the "last 20 years" graph near the bottom.
| The article largely focuses on how Vim came to be, long before
| Neovim.
| rfmoz wrote:
| And vis editor, that also has herietage from sam.
| jiehong wrote:
| Side note: that ADM-3A bears such a beautiful design. I like how
| its curves are akin to the screen curvature.
| nickandbro wrote:
| Vim is awesome! For my hobby project, Vimgolf.ai , I am trying to
| make it easier and more fun to learn vim by being gradually
| introduced to the different motions. I am eventually trying to
| create different bots to create a standard of difficulty for each
| level but that is TBD at the moment.
| qsort wrote:
| It's incredible how good of a design Vi is. Try this experiment:
| Busybox includes a tiny clone of vi with a reduced feature set.
| It's very stripped down when compared to Vim or even other vi
| clones, but as a pure text editor it's _still more powerful than
| most modern day IDEs_.
|
| I love my Jetbrains IDEs, but you can take my Vim plugin from my
| cold dead hands :)
| pugworthy wrote:
| I have used VI for many, many years and honestly use perhaps
| 25% at best of its abilities. But still I get comments about
| how fast and smoothly I can use it from other developers. Which
| I think speaks to how powerful even the basic editor can be.
|
| And yes, you can also take my VIM plugin (for Visual Studio)
| from my cold dead hands.
| agumonkey wrote:
| The history of ed, TECO and other pre live fullscreen programs is
| also worth reading.
| ggm wrote:
| Aside from neovim, no mention of nvi, Keith Bostic's fork which
| was BSD mainline, and the Japanese hacked on to add utf handling.
|
| The main divergence of note is tab expansion.
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