[brabel]

I am in this thread because this is not a thread about how Vim is great, it's a thread about how Vim became popular, which I honestly don't understand in a day and age where modes are completely unnecessary. I see lots of happy Vim users telling the rest of us how they are so happy with Vim and they can't understand how anyone can do anything without it... so I thought I should point out I feel extremely productive on any non-mode text editor (all my shortcuts work even in this HN editor, on a browser, in Word, basically anywhere except old editors like Vim). Been programming for nearly 2 decades now and even when I started, I thought Vim was a tool from a time when we didn't have Ctrl and Arrow keys and we already had better alternatives.

At this point, I feel like "I use Vim" is like "BTW I use Arch", said usually with an air of superiority as if choosing "the hard way" was somehow smart.

[alwillis]

which I honestly don't understand in a day and age where modes are completely unnecessary.

Modes are everywhere. My microwave has a defrost mode. Cars have reverse mode. Pill bottles have modes where the bottle has to be held differently to open it.

Modelessness isn't all it's cracked up to be.

I’ve used many editors on the Mac—BBEdit, SubEthaEdit, Chocolate, TextMate, TextWrangler and a few more obscure ones.

I switched to Vim and haven't looked back nearly 10 years ago because the "modeless" editors had limitations and issues I didn't like.

I used Emacs when I worked at MIT because that's what everyone used, but it never took for me when I had to use Unix.

What the author didn't mention is that when Ruby on Rails was the new hotness, so many of the leaders in that movement were Mac users, on TextMate. But when TextMate went into limbo, and then eventually died, that tribe needed a new editor and they essentially all moved to Vim.

Many of the early Rails videos were done on Vim; they were quite influential.

I wanted an editor I wouldn't outgrow in a few months and Vim fit the bill nicely.

And to this day, I feel like I'm pretty proficient with Vim but I also know I'm using like 10-15% of what Vim can do and it's nice to know all that capability is there for when I need it.

[Lio]

So if I understand you correctly you're angry that people choose to work in a way that you think is unnecessary and that they're just doing it to show off.

I can't speak for other vim users but I think it's pretty obvious to us how other users work without vim and we know you can be productive without it.

Personally I make a point of not telling people to learn vim but equally I think, for example, not having a shortcut to repeat a complex visual selection is a pain.

I never feel the need to enter a thread about IDEs and point out this missing feature (especially if it's a program I don't actually know well and that might not be the case).

However I often see people that don't know vim well make statements like "vim can't do x" without actually checking if that's true.

Then we look "superior" when we point out how to do it in vim.

It's hard to win because your argument sounds like an emotional one.

[brabel]

To win what? This is not a contest or even a debate where one point of view may prevail... we're just expressing our opinions about Vim and its alternatives here. Obviously, if you like Vim, great! But it seems to me you're the emotional one if you find it necessary to question anyone pointing out they believe Vim is not a good tool at all (it promotes modals, which should have died as soon as they became unnecessary due to hardware improvements as they are objectively harder to use) and wondering why it's still somewhat popular.