Why we 💚 Vim
On this special edition of The Changelog, we tell Vim’s story from the mouths of its users. Julia Evans, Drew Neil, Suz Hinton, and Gary Bernhardt join Jerod Santo for a deep and wide-ranging discussion about “the best text editor that anyone ever wrote.”
Discussion
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Rory
2021-07-26T16:03:54Z ago
Interesting show, and I liked the format! It’s almost like an audio documentary. I’ve been meaning to up my vim game for oh, bout 20 years now. Maybe about time. The RSI argument is super compelling.
Jerod Santo
Omaha, Nebraska
Jerod co-hosts The Changelog, crashes JS Party, and takes out the trash (his old code) once in awhile.
2021-07-29T13:16:16Z ago
Glad you enjoyed it! If you do dive back in to Vim, I’d be interested to hear how it goes for you.
Thomas Vidal
Los Angeles
2021-07-28T21:21:13Z ago
I’m a trial lawyer, who started out as a developer. I’ve been using VI since 1990 and then switched to Vim. It is awesome. You might be surprised how useful it is in my day-to-day work. I also do all my hobby development work using Vim (mostly C code and some BASH and other scripts), with only a couple of plugins (C-Support, Workspace). Then I use all the other rich Unix tools, like Cscope and Ctags. It was great that Xcode added Vim support, and it works quite well. I really enjoyed this episode.
Jerod Santo
Omaha, Nebraska
Jerod co-hosts The Changelog, crashes JS Party, and takes out the trash (his old code) once in awhile.
2021-07-29T13:17:45Z ago
Wow, very cool. Have you ever come across another trial lawyer who uses similar tooling to you? I’d expect it to be quite rare…
Thomas Vidal
Los Angeles
2021-07-29T13:43:43Z ago
Not one! It’s funny, even my IT department removes it as my default text editor every time they have to do work on the machine. Lawyers and paralegals should use it, though. One of it’s biggest efficiencies in my work is batch processing long lists of documents and exhibits and other materials; searching through massive volumes of text; regex; sorting. I’ve literally saved days of time using Vim. It’s my secret weapon.
Luke Abbott
2021-07-30T15:52:45Z ago
Great episode. Moved over to Vim/Neovim in January, mostly for RSI reasons. What I ended up with (Neovim 0.5 + LSP + Telescope + Treesitter + some other plugins) was awesome when it worked… but I was spending too much time tweaking my config and dealing with plugin issues – which is totally my fault for being overambitious with trying to squeeze as much functionality out of it as I could. Just went back to VS Code this month to see if it would improve my productivity, and it did… but only because the vscode-neovim extension (which uses a real instance of neovim behind the scenes for most of the editing experience) is working so good for me. Could never go back to non-Vim keybindings now! Now if only I could get VS Code to use Vim’s interpretation of tabs…
Tim Uckun
2021-08-02T07:47:11Z ago
Great episode. Please do the same for emacs/spacemacs
Jerod Santo
Omaha, Nebraska
Jerod co-hosts The Changelog, crashes JS Party, and takes out the trash (his old code) once in awhile.
2021-08-02T13:31:29Z ago
This is actually something we’re considering. Who would make great guests for such an episode?
Tim Uckun
2021-08-02T22:05:07Z ago
Floss weekly had Dave Taht on their podcast recently and he was a very lively and entertaining guest. He is one of the unsung heroes of the open source world and would make a great guest for your podcast as well. At the end of every show they ask what editor and scripting language the guest uses most and his reply was emacs and C. See if you can get in touch with him and get a two for one. https://twit.tv/shows/floss-weekly/episodes/638?autostart=false
Other famous people that do (or used to at least) use emacs are Jonathan Blow (who might be great to talk to about Jai language), Rich Hickey of Closure fame, Matz (creator of ruby), Martin Fowler, Linus Torwalds, Guido Van Rossum etc.
There are also lots of non famous people who use it of course. Many people use it just for org mode . Maybe get it touch with this guy https://bofh.org.uk/2019/02/25/baking-with-emacs/.
BTW I am subscribed to go time (even though I don’t program in go) and changelog. Great podcasts, really enjoy your podcasts. A long time fan.
Jerod Santo
Omaha, Nebraska
Jerod co-hosts The Changelog, crashes JS Party, and takes out the trash (his old code) once in awhile.
2021-08-03T14:42:42Z ago
This is excellent!
I’m adding it to my notes for if/when we decide to put that episode together. 💚