[phlyingpenguin]

> it works out of the box with no configuration (batteries included).

You don't really believe that, do you? Competent users tend to have preferences. There's no need to worry about installing plugins if you have to have a .vimrc to begin with, just have the .vimrc do the installing as well.

[ronjouch]

Sure, but "Competent users tend to have preferences" doesn't exclude slow evolution of sane-by-default preferences for programs part of a same class. A newcomer text editor, say, comes in town, settles its default configuration as the sanest of previous generations, while existing programs of the same class are (reasonably!) stuck due to compatibility.

Which means newcomer text editors need less configuration, and users generally staying closer to the default stable, tested configuration.

You can argue that you're part of a margin needing XYZ specific setting, or that new programs don't necessarily make good default config choices. To me it feels generally reasonable to believe so.

Case in point, with text editors / light IDEs. I did Sublime Text -> Atom -> VSCode. At each step, the size of my config size decreased. Of course I still have a VSCode settings.json, but it's twenty lines. My sublime prefs are ~100 lines, my .vimrc is hundreds :)

[phlyingpenguin]

The plugins you need to make Atom/VSCode great (no experience with modern Sublime) definitely count as configuration in my book, and often come with their own configuration load. If I sit down at a new machine, they won't be there. Most of my .vimrc is a couple of lines per plugin configuring the plugins, for example.

[wasted_intel]

You're going to get a fuzzy file finder, Git integration, syntax highlighting, symbol navigation, and and a package manager immediately available to you in those editors. None of those are available in Vim by default; that's the inspiration for Amp.

There are additional perks to including things by default, too. Jump mode is a good example of that: it's integrated with its select mode. You can start a selection and then switch to jump mode to move the cursor to complete the selection.

Lastly, there's simplicity in including things rather than asking new users to pick from a dizzying array of plug-in options. Rails is a good example of this: there's a lot of functionality that could have been left to 3rd-party gems, but having the framework include them by default means they'll work out of the box, and there's a single canonical solution to [sessions, templates, ORM, routing, etc].

[kingosticks]

I don't disagree with your approach but I'd just point out, since it's a little ironic, that rust's standard library is a good example of the opposite approach!

[wasted_intel]

You're absolutely right. :)

I'm going to resist adding everything but the kitchen sink to Amp. Upcoming features like tasks and language server protocol support will allow Amp to integrate with language/framework-specific tools as easily as possible, but without steering Amp towards any specific choices. I couldn't avoid that with syntax highlighting; it's just too essential (and it powers the symbol jump mode). It's definitely a balancing act!

[paavoova]

Vim doesn't have syntax highlighting? News to me. Git and file finder is available to you by opening a new terminal tab/window and simply using git/standard unix utils. There's no need to integrate such features when you can extend a terminal into an IDE as your needs suit.

[wasted_intel]

Vim has very simple highlighting, and doesn't support symbol jump; that's why ctags is an external dependency for that behaviour.

As for a file finder, I'm curious how you can use a separate tab to open that in the current instance of Vim? From when I'd last used it, most folks were using Ctrl-P to solve that problem, and usually with an external indexer like fzf or ag.

[oblio]

Fragmentation also hurts the ecosystem. Just look at Linux distributions or desktop environments to see the effects.

The best thing is to provide some sensible overridable defaults and basic functionality expected these days from a programmer's editor, such as simple project management: index files, fuzzy file finder, etc. Vim and Emacs are a pain in the butt for precisely this reason: they don't take ANY decision, they just throw the entire burden on the user. They're forgiven because they're classics, but any kind of editor launched in 2018 would be utterly ignored if it didn't have these features.

[wiz21c]

>> Fragmentation also hurts the ecosystem. Just look at Linux distributions or desktop environments to see the effects.

I don't think so. I've never felt that having 10 linux distributions was a problem, I just can pick between at least two super robust choices : Debain, RedHat. I can even choose between inkscape, krita, gimp. Or KDE and Gnome...

You can argue that progress would be faster if we have less choices but more choices also means more developpers...

[PurpleRamen]

Choice is a process which can hurt when it takes too long or when you lack the ability to execute the process itself or in a good manner.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overchoice and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analysis_paralysis

This is BTW no limited to OSS but AFAIK it comes from sales-research. People confronted with to many products of similar type can end in a deadlock, avoiding those products or even start to avoid the whole category.

> You can argue that progress would be faster if we have less choices but more choices also means more developpers...

More developers reinventing the wheel doesn't automatically make the wheels faster. It can mean healthy competition, but it also can mean wasted ressources. It's case by case.

[wiz21c]

yup, now that I read myself again, I see my bias. For me, more developpers working on several "identical" GPL'ed software makes the viability of the GPL software better... So, well, I'm biased :-)

[lvncelot]

On the one hand, I agree. I've spent whole days just checking out software alternatives, booting new distros, DEs, hosting webapps, just to see what they were like, and it's always great fun.

On the other hand it can hurt - for example I'd like to have my main workstation running mainly one gui framework. (Or at least, most of the software). But the KDE/GTK split makes the most popular and sensible software to use for most cases pretty much evenly distributed between those two. (Though this is obviously not a major issue, just an example).

[oblio]

It definitely hurts mainstream adoption. And it also kills distribution of most commercial desktop applications.

[wasted_intel]

Amp, and convention over configuration in general, don't prevent configuration, they just try to avoid it. There are a bunch of things you can configure in Amp, if you'd like: https://amp.rs/docs/#configuration

[phlyingpenguin]

That's not really what I was doubting (I could see that). I just doubt that it's likely to not need a configuration file if I were to replace vim with it. In GP's assertion that this is the best reason to use Amp over vim, that's not really a huge benefit in the end. A config is a config is a config, or something to that effect.

[wasted_intel]

Unfortunately, configuring Vim is rarely just pulling a config file. Pathogen and Vundle have made installing/tracking plug-ins easier, but unless things have changed, those tools required their own bootstrapping outside of simply being referenced in the config.

And that's just for Vimscript plug-ins. There are several situations (e.g. fuzzy file finders) where external binaries are preferable, for performance reasons. The idea is to include those directly in Amp, so that it's _only_ a configuration file that's needed, if at all.

[phlyingpenguin]

All depends on your taste. My .vimrc handles ensuring that I have a plugin manager installed and that it installs those plugins on my behalf if they aren't there. And I do all of that in ~10 lines of vimL config. It's totally reasonable to have your plugin/config ensure the external binaries exist as well. The popular golang plugin has a command for that.

[wasted_intel]

It ensures you have a plug-in manager installed, but it won't install it for you, right? I know that might seem like a minor nit, but if package management is considered an essential part of Vim, I'm of the mindset that it should work out of the box.

That said, Amp doesn't have plug-in support at the moment, so it's a little unfair for me to judge Vim on that front. But if it did, the package management portion would be baked in so that you'd only need to pull your configuration file and Amp would handle the rest. :)

[phlyingpenguin]

No. I have it install the manager. Literally all I need is the .vimrc and to start vim.

[Mashimo]

I have not tried amp yet, but just as an example why I switched shell. I use fish shell because of the sane defaults. I don't want to be bothered with setting up code completion and history size.

Just install it and use it. Works.

I like projects that provide similar experience.

[wasted_intel]

Yes, fish shell is a beautiful example of that philosophy! Its design documentation[0] reflects a lot of the values that drove me to create Amp.

[0] https://fishshell.com/docs/current/design.html

[tbrock]

Also see: Ruby on Rails

[wasted_intel]

Yep, another great example. :)

[tbrock]

Yes I do. Ever use textmate or Atom? Sure you can configure a bunch of keys if you want to change them but nobody ever does.

[sfifs]

This discussion reminds me of the classic "standards" xkcd

https://xkcd.com/927/