Why I teach vim

152 points by amichlin 5 years ago | 180 comments

fergie 5 years ago |

"I wish I could say I agonized over all the options at the time and decided vim was the best pedagogical solution, but the reality of the situation was that vi was what I used in college because my father taught me vi"

We dont talk about this much, but many of us hardcore Vi/Emacs users have had this knowledge imparted to us from a mentor. Thats probably why the use of Vi/Emacs is much higher in established tech environments (universities, big dotcoms), where there tends to be a tradition of mentorship than it is elsewhere. If anyone is looking for a slightly off-the-wall masters thesis, I'm fairly certain that you could extrapolate this out into a class divide- perhaps richer/more-established/well-educated users are proportionally more likely to use Vi/Emacs, and in some ways use them as "gatekeeping" tools?

pvg 5 years ago | |

They're not really the same thing, compared to vi[m], emacs is statistically dead. And there are already lots of people who're well into their careers in academia and industry who aren't users of either.

My own contrarian and probably equally wrong take is that it's mostly about accepting the (evidence-free) premise that modal editing is actually a good thing. It's hard, you suffer but lots of smart people tell you it's worth it and perhaps your suffering will help you be as smart as them. It ends up being closer to hazing and penance (your editor as hairshirt) than actual gatekeeping.

apocolyps6 5 years ago | | |

The "suffering" has honestly been overblown by jokes about not being able to quit on one side and the mythologizing of the leet ninja 10x programmer who is only bound by his typing speed and can't waste time reaching for the mouse, on the other side.

It continues to surprise me why people have such strong opinions about someone else's editor choice. My current theory is vim users are like vegans/gluten free/paleo/etc, in that its a personal choice that some are public about, and people love to hate on it and "disprove" it for the same reason.

rgoulter 5 years ago | | |

> it's mostly about accepting the (evidence-free) premise that modal editing is actually a good thing.

Kakoune's development has started fairly recently. The oldest tags on its GitHub repo are for 2018. I think this defies "people want to continue the legacy of actually-not-that-great thing because I had do suffer, so other people should too". I think you'd only put into making/promoting Kakoune if you genuinely thought modal editing is a good thing.

Whereas, if the bigger value in "I learned modal editing" is the signal of "modal editing is hard, so anyone who knows it must be good" (rather than value from a better developer experience), I think aiming to make modal editing more intuitive/accessible is counter-productive.

alwillis 5 years ago | | |

My own contrarian and probably equally wrong take is that it's mostly about accepting the (evidence-free) premise that modal editing is actually a good thing.

Yes, equally wrong. ;-)

We deal with modes all of the time—when you're backing up your car, the car is in reverse mode. Microwave ovens have modes depending on what you want to cook. I use the popcorn mode on mine a lot. Anyone who've ever used a VCR knows what modes are.

So having an editor with modes shouldn't be a foreign concept.

But it's not just about having modes; it's how well thought out Vim is. Even though I've been using Vim for about 10 years (after trying many other editors and getting frustrated for one reason or another), I keep learning more useful things.

I recently needed to edit lots of messy Markdown files for a friend. I knew macros existed but I never bothered to use them. Before I knew it, I was using a couple of macros that really cut down on the tedious work I had to do.

Same thing with regular expressions—I knew about them but I had never gotten around to learning them. Combined with Vim’s composability, regular expressions gives you super powers.

The other thing about Vim I've always appreciated—it's been around so long, articles and videos from 10 years ago are still relevant today.

For example, back in the day, I used to watch Derek Wyatt’s Vim tutorials.

Rewatching some of them today encouraged me to learn macros and regular expressions. When I recently watched this one (https://vimeo.com/15443936), where he extracts plain text out of a messy looking XML file using regular expressions, I was like I want some of that.

Any software made for people who take their tasks seriously—GUI or command line—is going to have a learning curve—I think it's exaggerated for Vim. But the payoff is well worth it.

I just installed Big Sur on my Mac. Everything went smoothly for me, but not everyone was so lucky. Even if I had other compatibility issues, Vim just works. As long as I have a terminal, Vim and web browser, I can be productive.

jdrek1 5 years ago | | |

I don't think your take is wrong. I have yet to see any actual argument from the vim/emacs crowd. I'm genuinely curious about what makes them defend their editor choice that heavily but whenever I ask them for their reasons all I get is a "modal editing is great because modal editing is great".

I can somewhat understand "don't have to touch the mouse" as that's a personal preference for them (even though IDEs have key binds too, I think they blow up that argument way too much) but on anything else they are suspiciously silent. Maybe I have just not met the right people to ask but that's my personal experience. Anyone I know using vim only does it because they either have been using it for 40 years or have been told to use it by someone from the first group and don't know anything else.

Siira 5 years ago | |

- I learned vim/emacs on my own in my second year of undergrad. Because I am the kind of person who wastes time searching for the best tool for the job.

- I have since tried to make more people use them, and pushed them as a TA of the advanced programming class. Nobody likes these stuff. They are useless for most people. The only real usecase is for sysadmins who need to quickly edit files remotely.

- Even if they were somehow some gatekeeped holy grail that only rich people with mentors got; So what? If rich people with a lot of resources (including mentoring resources) can’t do better than us normal folks, then doesn’t that mean sth is fundamentally broken? More resources should translate to more knowledge/skills. The fact that in our current world the conversion rate is so inefficient (especially since these rich folk probably enjoy mildly better genes as well) is evidence that our current education methods do not scale. A corollary of which is that the US should spend a lot less on education which in the end doesn’t produce any results. (Compare the US expenditures with other countries.)

mettamage 5 years ago | |

> but many of us hardcore Vi/Emacs users have had this knowledge imparted to us from a mentor. Thats probably why the use of Vi/Emacs is much higher in established tech environments (universities, big dotcoms), where there tends to be a tradition of mentorship than it is elsewhere

My mentor was vimtutor.

Seriously, learning basic vim takes 30 to 60 minutes with vimtutor.

scruple 5 years ago | |

My mentor was a humble man from the Turkish countryside. He held dual masters in EE and CompEng. He knew vi because what else would he possibly know? It's what he learned in university. And, so, he taught me what he knew. I've mentored about 2 dozen people and I've taught them all vi(m). As far as I know, though, it's only stuck with 2 or 3 of them. C'est la vie.

hyperpallium2 5 years ago | |

vim as initiation ceremony - a near-death experience where the initiate is reborn as a member of an arcane sorcery guild.

emidln 5 years ago | |

I work at a trading company on builds and developer productivity. vi is known by all 600+ people that touch code or admin systems as a baseline. I think we mention the basics in our dev school. If you need to edit somewhere outside your personal host, your choices are basically ed/vi. IntelliJ dominates Java development at well over 90%. CLion is what we teach for C++, but it's roughly 50% CLion, 30% vim, 10% Emacs, and 10% other (vscode mostly, but I've seen basically everything). I'm not sure of our Python breakdown, but I suspect IPython Notebooks/Jupyter dominates everything. For random edits, I see about 50% vi, 40% vscode/sublime, 10% emacs.

blackrock 5 years ago | | |

On Windows, use Bitvise. SSH into your Linux box. Use the file browser GUI to navigate to your file. Edit it in Sublime, or your favorite editor.

Vi is ok for viewing files on a terminal, and for small edits, but it’s rather mediocre for any significant amount of development work.

hrktb 5 years ago | |

Interesting take. I came from a CS background but our school was mostly in emacs land on the surface (e.g. newcomer CLI tutorials included it as an upgrade from nano, and nothing on vi)

What brought vi to our attention was the holy war itself, and the sheer appeal to decide which camp we fit in.

50 years ago I think it’s a completely different story, but from the point BBS and shitposting were a thing, we got most information we needed on the net, including editor wars, linux distribution elitism, PHP and javascript and so many things.

It can be a kind of indirect mentorship, but I think even today a lot of people go try vim for the memes (and stay or not for the efficiency)

GreenWatermelon 5 years ago | | |

Can confirm. "Can't exit vim" memes were what introduced me to vim. Though as a primarily windows user, I don't use it much.

pnutjam 5 years ago | |

I got into Linux from a networking background. Windows just didn't have the same network tools available, and they were all expensive. At the time I was mostly doing non-profit sysadmin work.

It took me about 5 years to transition from nano/pico to vi/vim. I'm still learning, but I recently loaded Debian on a VPS I use and was surprised when visudo defaulted to nano. It seems so much less powerful and actually more difficult to use.

hankstenberg 5 years ago | |

This probably common, but there's also people like me, who stumble upon a problem like having to edit text files via ssh and end up falling in love with it. I came to vim that way some 15 years ago and to emacs (evil mode) two years ago. Both are simply awesome, powerful programs that are not hyped often, but by learning them you hopefully learn something to use for decades to come.

__henil 5 years ago | | |

Same, I have never seen anyone else IRL using vi[m]. It mostly started for me due to my potato machine and I like to live in the terminal.

But I have not switched to emacs(evil mode ofc.) due to mostly philosophical differences and i completely just hate the defaults..

btschaegg 5 years ago | |

Then I have one counter point of anecdata for you:

I knew no one that was openly proficient in Vim when I picked it up. In my studies, I was already one of the two to three odd-one-outs who used Linux (>90% of students and professors didn't know anything besides Windows).

I bought an ARM-based chromebook, installed crouton and... quickly discovered, that nothing besides Vim/Emacs came pre-built for it. There even wasn't a simple, official way to build Electron (so all those editors weren't an option, either)!

So you could say, I only picked them up (I tried both) reluctantly. And I stuck to Vim-bindings because all other alternatives I know suck in comparison. The best I knew beforehand w.r.t flexibility was Sublime Text with its multiple cursors and regex searches, but that also pales when compared to Vim macros.

Make of that what you will. I'm certain your point about mentors isn't wrong, but it doesn't explain it all, too.

Also, if anyone could point me to similarly promising editing schemes, I'd be glad to have a look at them :)

gigatexal 5 years ago | |

Yup. I use vim because a senior team lead used it and it was the unspoken defacto editor to use and as a (very, very junior) dev at the time it was engrained in my psyche.

Stockholm syndrome aside I use it still because of all the inertia of learning I put in. I’m getting ever more productive with it so I’m sticking with it.

DerSaidin 5 years ago | |

https://kakoune.org/ is a vim variation which I think would be much better pedagogically. More predictable, and much more help and feedback as you edit.

rStar 5 years ago | |

i think the gatekeeping involved is more personality type. learning vim/emacs is kind of like learning to play minecraft. you either have to really want to, or on the receiving end of peer pressure. as an emacs user who’s never gotten into vim, I definitely am going to try this ‘vim tutor’ someday when I have some time to kill.

adembudak 5 years ago | |

Actually the gatekeeper is what they call themselves as "mentor", not the tool users.

swiley 5 years ago | |

IME almost everyone who's "self taught" started with some kind of mentor.

amagumori 5 years ago |

More so than even the choice of editor itself, I think the biggest argument for vim or emacs, especially for students, is that you “live in” the *nix cli.

The amount of stuff you soak up being a unix tool user is just night and day compared to using sublime text or something. Because using a cli text editor implicitly sets you on this path of learning through the command line. So you start with cding and lsing around, opening your file in vim, typing gcc or whatever. In a very frictionless and natural way, pretty soon you’re reading man pages, writing shell scripts and makefiles, etc.

In a very real way, the Unix command line environment has you poke around an interactive “boiler room” of your computer, and that type of learning, learning by exploration, is something far different from learning individual tools at a higher level of abstraction.

It’s like letting a kid loose into a master’s workshop instead of showing them one tool at a time. By seeing everything “together” and exploring what the different tools do, the “fog of war” of unknown unknowns clears much faster for a novice, and this provides a MUCH more solid knowledge footing to build on.

paradox_hunter 5 years ago |

What most people forget when they argue against learning vim is that vim is more that just a text editor, it's a whole new philosophy. Once you learn it, you can find it almost everywhere. Learning vim key-bindings was the first thing I did after learning to touch-type, and now I use the same key-bindings on VSCode, Intellij, a remote server I am SSHed into and with the help of Vimimum, even chrome!

And if ubiquity isn't enough, then I would point you to this article which does an awesome job explaining the really idea of vim, composability.

https://medium.com/@mkozlows/why-atom-cant-replace-vim-43385...

archgoon 5 years ago | |

Unfortunately, vim macros don't tend to get implemented when other editors implement keybindings.

This is unfortunate, vim macros are fantastic for reformatting text.

dfinninger 5 years ago | | |

Maybe not all of them, but you can use macros in IntelliJ and VSCode implementations (and, of course, Emacs).

pkulak 5 years ago | |

Exactly this. Vim is special because it's what we've all agreed on as a standard for modal editing. Luckily, it's also pretty darn good, but that's secondary. Learning one set of commands that can then be used across editors, operating systems, and even terminals is amazing.

thomastjeffery 5 years ago | | |

> Vim is special because it's what we've all agreed on as a standard for modal editing.

Well I didn't vote for you...

In all seriousness, Vim's keybinds are only popular because no one has really tried to make a good modal editor with different bindings. It's prohibitively difficult to change the bindings in Vim, and prohibitively difficult to change muscle memory, but I still wish that I had a good modal editor that didn't resemble Vi.

It's a similar story with keyboards and qwerty.

GreenWatermelon 5 years ago | |

chrome? how?

RMPR 5 years ago | | |

> with the help of Vimimum, even chrome!

Even though OP made a typo, he more likely wanted to say Vimium.

d21d3q 5 years ago | | |

Also "Vim vixen" for Firefox.

mettamage 5 years ago |

Here's why I taught vim to students (at a coding bootcamp, in 2017).

- vimtutor does all the work for you.

- Like the author says starting up and editing with vim "just works".

When I "teach" vim, what I'm really doing is grading their homework. After their vimtutor hour, no student asked me how to edit git commits.

I know it might seem lazy (it is), but when there's a teacher better than you, don't teach it yourself, delegate. I happily delegate to vimtutor. Miss or mister vimtutor, you're a better teacher at vim than I will ever be.

magoghm 5 years ago |

I learned to use vi because it was the only full screen editor available in the Unix machines I was using in 1983. At that time, I occasionally still used ed for simple edits because I didn't want to wait for vi to startup :)

tomhoward 5 years ago |

I'm a Vi/Vim user since 2000, when I started transitioning from my ISP junior tech support job into a corporate support/sysadmin job. Vi was what everyone used, so that's what I was taught. I was just shown the basic 5-10 key commands, then I was on my own. Life got a whole lot easier when I invested about $15 in a Vi cheat sheet coffee mug. Never looked back.

bitcoinmoney 5 years ago | |

Link to the cheat sheet and coffee mug?

tomhoward 5 years ago | | |

Here it is [1].

I just found it in the back of my crockery cabinet! Looks like it's stayed in amongst my possessions for the nearly 20 years since I got it, through several house moves and stints in storage. It's going back on my desk now.

I can't find any the same as this when searching for it online now, but this seems the closest [2].

I like the simple text design much more than the coloured keyboard layout [3]; much more in keeping with the vi ethos.

[1] https://www.dropbox.com/sh/ngj8wt96ld1di0q/AABcpi8fuQ9hUkIP-...

[2] https://www.cafepress.com/mf/10388170/vi-reference_mugs?prod...

[3] https://www.zazzle.com.au/vim_cheat_sheet_coffee_mug-1686145...

elygre 5 years ago | | |

Googling for “vim coffee mug” provides reasonable hits.

Rainymood 5 years ago |

Why I started to use Vim 5 years ago. I was coding a lot and I realised most of my work was editing code as text. So I figured, why not become really freaking good at it? Vim has a steep learning curve because it's a mental paradigm shift. I personally would recommend it to everyone because although no-code is taking off, most of the developers are still editing text. Sharpen that saw!

apta 5 years ago | |

> no-code is taking off

I don't see any evidence for that.

mxuribe 5 years ago | | |

There are many aspects underlying digital transformations that large enterprises are undergoing...among the many, is to empower more "citizen developers" with tools that are lower-code and no-code. (I'm not convinced that no-code is a great thing just yet...but not because of the tools, rather the mindset...so we'll see how the next generation adopt these no-code tools...or not). Within these transformations, the premise of "no code" is becoming bigger and more popular...so if you're not seeing it yet, you will soon enough more and more. Not that my following note is a large representation, but when i was applying for a new job during latter 2019/early 2020, over 90% of the jobs that i applied to made mention of some sort of "digital transformation", and no-code/low-code goes part and parcel with those types of efforts. Again, low volume of data, and biased towards mid- and large-sized enterprises...but, it is a thing for sure.

ensiferum 5 years ago | |

You shouldn't be editing "text" but "code" however. Text editing is low productivity task whereas code editing should happen mostly be at much higher level.

Geminidog 5 years ago |

I really wish there was a batteries included vim-like console editor with all the power of the jet brains suite of IDEs and convenience and lightness of vim.

As it stands right now I end up using both an IDE and vim.

Maybe emacs is the answer but honestly if I look past all the yak-shaving to get emacs to the power level of an IDE does it really get to the point where it has everything that say CLion has?

saagarjha 5 years ago |

> I always tell my students that the one editor they are likely to find already installed on a machine is vim

Well, vi, since it's part of POSIX. Unless you are fine with ed ;)

cweagans 5 years ago | |

In many (most?) modern distros, vi is a symlink to vim.

bch 5 years ago | | |

I think all BSDs (net, free, open, dragon fly) use honest-to-goodness nvi[0]. Of course vim is available as an installable 3rd party piece of software.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nvi

Lio 5 years ago | | |

There’s a vi clone in Busybox too, which whilst not Vim, is still really useful.

reidrac 5 years ago | |

Back at Uni I used joe because I was used to WordStar (DOS).

On one of my early jobs I had to telnet to an AIX machine to do some work and, of course, joe was not installed and vi was.

I had almost no idea on how to use it, and by the end of that project I had decided that I needed some vi skills!

arendtio 5 years ago | |

I am quite surprised to learn, that vi is actually part of POSIX. I mean that is pretty cool and wonder why someone would down-vote that comment?

beny23 5 years ago |

The ability to efficiently navigate and edit files while SSH’d into an instance is a very useful skill. You just wouldn’t have the permissions to install your favourite editor and vi is almost everywhere.

I had to learn vi when working on green screen terminals logged into HP/UX and there was no alternative but am very glad I did as I find that nothing as ubiquitous allows me to efficiently change files.

Does that mean I would go around advocating one editor over another? No, whatever works for you. I know vi works for me for editing files.

Would I use vi instead IntelliJ for development work? No, I found the development environment allows me to be more productive on project work.

But I think you’re doing students a favour teaching vi.

maccard 5 years ago | |

I've been a professional developer for 10 years and programming for longer than that. In all of that time, efficiency of editing files on a remote server has never been something I've needed to optimize or been concerned about. Have I had to do it? Yeah, occasionally. Yet when I do, it's almost always changing a config file in a minor way.

Back when I started it was editing the code on a live server so I used textwrangler/notepad++ with an ftp editor.

I don't buy the argument that learning an editing paradigm for this very specific use case (which is likely getting less and less common) at all. This is coming from someone who uses vim bindings in my daily editor.

cupofcoffee 5 years ago |

I used vim for some time could never really get into it. The benefits that it offers over other simple code editors like TextMate isn't really worth the learnign curve.

It pretty much feels like a mini programming language for text editing.

arendtio 5 years ago | |

I'm not so sure about that. Yes, I have the hard part of the learning curve behind me, but learning vim actually changed how I write code in a very positive way. Now, I think a lot more in terms of lines and e.g. rogue whitespaces happen rarely. I know that are tools who can remove them, but I want to illustrate, that the editor improved the quality of what I type.

In the end, it depends how much time it will cost you to learn vim and if that is worth the effort and I am honestly not 100% sure, but I wouldn't want to go back to how the world was before.

blt 5 years ago | | |

I agree that vim makes you much more line-oriented, but I'm not sure it's always a good thing. My non-vim collaborators find it strange that my LaTeX files have each clause of a sentence in a separate line.

pampa 5 years ago | | |

> In the end, it depends how much time it will cost you to learn vim

Is there really that much to learn? Open file, save file, exit, block select, copy paste, search and replace - thats about 99% of what you do in an editor. 15 minutes to pick up, ipossible to unlearn. Unless you have some other editor ingrained in your synapses. Switching between editors with different shortcuts is a torture.

tincholio 5 years ago | |

> I used vim for some time could never really get into it. The benefits that it offers over other simple code editors like TextMate isn't really worth the learnign curve.

https://wiki.c2.com/?BlubParadox

vulcan01 5 years ago |

I started programming about 5-6 years ago (I'm a high school student). I started with VSCode, but about 1.5 years ago I switched to Vim for the simple reason that I wanted to live in the terminal. Unlike some other commenters here, I didn't know anyone else who used Vim (or Emacs for that matter), so I learned on my own... (:help is actually good in Vim, unlike many help menus in other software).

vimtutor does a great job introducing vim, and it took me about 1 hour or so to get started.

jez 5 years ago | |

I have a pretty similar story. I was in senior year of high school and one of the colleges I was applying to had a “sleeping bag weekend” where you could sign up to stay overnight with a random CS freshman in the dorms and stroll the campus.

I saw someone working on their homework and their terminal had colored text and it blew my mind (I had only ever seen cmd.exe using black and white with that ugly font).

The summer between senior year of high school and starting college I installed Ubuntu and googled that program called “vim” that freshman had demoed to me. From there it was just like you say: vimtutor and reading :help pages, and now almost 10 years later I can’t imagine trading Vim for anything.

afarviral 5 years ago |

I wish there was a dedicated, light text editor that could be comfortably used as a typical vim config but was fully compatible with a windows/mac paradigm for discovering shortcuts or standards (e.g. with the mouse or using standard keybindings). Gvim isn't quite there but close. This fictional editor should still be usable by anyone in a terminal but should be used like vscode as a standalone tool and yet very, very low resource, low fuss. There just isnt such an editor. Vim itself is just too hard for a beginner. It took me far too many years to know it and Im still learning years later...but I'm hooked now and struggle to edit text using the mouse, end, home, delete, enter, tab and ctrl-chords. I'd recommend it to anyone but more as a fun learning project; an esoteric plaything with real-world applications that give you a bit of an edge oftentimes.

RMPR 5 years ago | |

onivim.io

kazinator 5 years ago |

I switched to Vim in 1994. At that time, I had been using Emacs for a bunch of years. One day I decided to cross over to the other side.

I hunted down all the readily available open-source Vi implementations, downloaded them and compiled them all. I tried Elvis, Nvi, Xvi, Vim and a couple of others I don't remember.

Vim was the best, by a long stretch, so I continued with that. I found the built-in tutorial very handy; I went through that, and within a week I was proficient.

A couple years later, I started seeing Vim in GNU/Linux distros as the default Vi implementation.

Nginx487 5 years ago |

In early 2000th I used to admin quite diverse network, including rare and exotic *nix systems, early Sun machines and HP-UX. One thing I was sure about - every of them had 'vi' after installation.

rStar 5 years ago |

i only had one good teacher in high school and I consider myself lucky. the students of the writer of this article have at least one good teacher as well. personally i only know vim enough to know that I prefer emacs, but I agree with virtually every point of this article. a further point I would make is when you learn these technologies(a text editor/cli/unix tools), you will literally use them for the rest of your life. With no subscription fee!

xenihn 5 years ago |

Would this author happen to have a blog post of how they teach it? I'm curious.

gbrown_ 5 years ago | |

Not sure about the article in question but I would highly recommend ':help user-manual', it's actually mentioned at the end of vimtutor. It can be worked through chapter by chapter and covers all of Vim.

dreamer7 5 years ago | |

Ya that would be really helpful. I've picked up bits and pieces of vim over the years. Recently, I even installed vimium on Chrome and the vim extension for VS Code in an attempt to get better at it.

It has been quite effortless to delete or replace words or lines but every time I've tried getting more adventurous with it - say, surround every line of text with double quotes etc, I end up finding the commands unintuitive or hard to remember.

There's also an issue with my older muscle memory of `CMD+Z` which works on a different stack than `u` and `CTRL+R` and I end up messing up my code.

Lio 5 years ago | | |

I guess I’ve got used to working with both sets of shortcuts but I miss the Vim undo system in other apps.

It’s worth noting that u and ctrl-r don’t operate on an undo stack but on an undo tree.

So if you have a series of edits and undo them all then do something else you can still get back to where you were before.

Use g+ and g- to walk the tree and the Gundo plugin is gives you a nice visual diff interface.

So having a separate shortcut and “stack” is actually a great feature of Vim IMHO.

waffletower 5 years ago |

vim is not for everyone. The cartoon poking fun at Emacs chording doesn't resonate with me at all. The statefulness at the core of Vim is maddening for me, where Emacs chords, perhaps because I have been a musician, are relatively easy for me.

hvasilev 5 years ago |

noone cares what editor you use, text editors have marginal impact on the product or service that you are developing.