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Vim Turns 20
quanticle writes "20 years ago today, Bram Moolenaar released vim to the public. From the article:'The Vim text editor was first released to the public on November 2, 1991—exactly 20 years ago today. Although it was originally designed as a vi clone for the Amiga, it was soon ported to other platforms and eventually grew to become the most popular vi-compatible text editor. It is still actively developed and widely used across several operating systems.' Share your vim stories and your tales of battles with emacs users."
It is more mature. It was initially released in 1976, and is still being actively developed, too. :-P
Computer simulation made easy -- LibGeoDecomp
emacs would make a great operating system, if only it had a text editor worth a shit
Why would they mention the argument with emacs? That was settled years ago.
Congratulations!
I like and use gvim all the time.
My main beef with it (solved by recompiling) is with fonts. I like the old fashioned font called "fixed". It derives from the ancient, non-scalable standard bitmapped font which came with X. It also happens to be very readable and to my eyes looks much sharper than the anti-aliased fonts. There are also excellent UTF-8 versions available too.
For some reason, this is almost impossible to get if one has gvim compiled as most distros do it (using gtk or gnome). Not only that but the fonts seem to change on the slightest whim of an update from the package manager.
The solution seems to be to recompile it with Athena or Motif support.
I must say, however that if Athena is the solution, then you really have problems :(
SJW n. One who posts facts.
... but it didn't work.
Emacs controls all its ex's.
I use vim, my wife uses emacs. We sleep in the same bed, unless she is swapping.
In Linux camp i lost my ":" key
Daily user thanks Bram. Vim is my hammer, my screwdriver and my wrench. I use it on almost every Unix-Like system I work on.
Although I'd be able to kick the gong around using a simple Vi, I find several Vim features making me much more productive. History and colours do it for me.
I hadn't the slightest objection to his spending his time planning massacres for the bourgeoisie... (P.G. Wodehouse)
i[ENTER] Happy Birthday, vim!!! [ESC]:wq![ENTER]
Honestly, both are excellent text editors. I, like most programmers, use the one that was favored at my university. Not because it was necessarily better, but because lots of other people used it and helped me get over the learning curve. I still use VIM today on every operating system I use or am forced to use.
At the end of the day, the text editor I use has to be something I use so well that I am not thinking about the text editor - I am thinking about the text I want to edit.
Can't we all just get along?
More Caffeine. NOW
I use it all the time, for editing, for development, for general work, for writing my todo list today. Hell, I sometimes catch myself trying to use VI commands in my web browser, or other GUI programs.
It's actually come to replace all my other stuff, from IDE's to graphical text editors. I'm really happy with it!
if ugandan kids use VIM too?
Good people go to bed earlier.
More like NANO, wtf?
In 1996, I developed Exuberant Ctags as a better ctags. Bram started including it in his Vim distributions and our programs were paired together in much the same was that Elvis was packaged with its own ctags clone, and Emacs was packaged with its own ctags. Eventually, Exuberant Ctags became large enough that it caused the Vim distribution to become too large to fit on a 5.25-inch floppy and Bram said it was time to let them grow separately. Exuberant Ctags, as well, got picked up by the Linux distributors as the resident ctags program.
I have always enjoyed working with Bram over the years and wish I could have met him. He is a very pleasant and easy person to work with, very accommodating, and very bright. I think very highly of him and I am glad to see his editor become one of the bulwarks of Linux distributions, as well as used on many other platforms.
Darren Hiebert
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Vim is the only editor I'll use. Well when I'm working in MS products such as Visual Studio I have to use ViEmu. Which works great since I have VIM inside VS. Love the fact that people are now emulating Vim. Love the that I can edit a 6M log file with no significant impact on the system and still have full search capability. Thanks Bram, I owe you days of saved time over the years.
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I use vim for programming, tweaking, both locally and remotely. Don't quite like its GUI, I prefer to use it on konsole, xterm or whatever terminal emulator is at hand, even though I use KDE. Nothing beats vim for programming, with its syntax highlighting, fast navigation within a file and among files, reindenting, searching and replacing, window splitting and many, many other features, all available in a couple or two of keystrokes. I consider myself a long time vim user, but I know I've barely skimmed over the surface of its ocean of features. I'm very grateful to Bram Moolenaar and the hordes of brave but anonymous vim contributors.
Hope vim lives on at least another twenty years.
Stupidity is an equal opportunity striker.
Fellow slashdotter Bill Dog
Ditto.
For a web browser look into vimperator.
Next to gcc, vim is the greatest open-source project ever created. I've used vim every day of my life since discovering it back in 1996 as a replacement for basic 'vi' on a Sun Sparcstation. I'm currently using vim to write software on my MacBook Pro in a terminal window.
I started off learning vi on a DEC workstation back in the early 1990s while trying to keep my head above water as a freshman CS major. Since then, I've used vim inside of Visual Studio (with a plugin), inside of Eclipse (with a plugin), as the editor for the mutt mail client, and in a hundred other contexts.
Vim is excellent software.
I use Emacs as an IRC client, an RPN calculator, a mini text browser, for browsing usenet, and I even play a couple of games in it... but when I edit text I use vim.
Well, It's All Text!.
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give focus to a text box/area and hit CTRL+t to go into command mode. A lot of vi commands are supported, but CTRL+i opens the contents of the text area in VIM just in case :D.
:h topic. It has completion for most things including ex commands etc.
Pentadactyl is much more than this. It allows you to fully navigate and control your browser using keyboard only in very natural vim-esque way. It has extensive help. Just type
It's one of the reason why I love and use Firefox.
As the island of our knowledge grows, so does the shore of our ignorance.
There's no editor more powerful than Vim or Emacs. People usually prefer other editors despite being less powerful, since that power comes with a big learning curve.
As for speech, I'm afraid you haven't thought of the implications of a room of programmers all talking to their machines.
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