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by cookiengineer 1511 days ago
> An analogy would be, vim purists with 0 config vs people who have elaborate config

I find this pretty offensive. I have a vim config that automated my workflows, and integrated linters and build tools etc...and I am using Linux based systems for over 22 years now.

While I consent with the rest of your comment, I think that most people don't want to deal with shitty syntaxes that are less memorable than they should be. Computers and TTYs have moved far beyond 80 character screenlines these days.

Having a -s instead of "sync", for example, doesn't make sense from the UX perspective. Most of the reimplementations of common CLI tools of coreutils and others are mostly there because they were fed up with inconsistent parameters, options, and flags of those programs that have historically grown out of proportions.

On the other hand I can also understand why people use zsh, even when I don't like it because I'd consider myself a minimalist. Though I also have a lot of aliases for common tools I use, because I would go rogue when I would have to type all those parameters on a regular basis.

The issue most terminals try to solve is explainability and predictability, because they see terminals as a human interface, and not as a tool to write yourself one.

The clashes of those different philosophies are also found in shell implementations. I mean: off the top of your head, do you know all string manipulation syntaxes in bash? Probably not.

2 comments

> I find this pretty offensive.

First of all stop what you are doing. This is about vim configs, it is not this serious.

Pardon my French, but everything about vim is serious.
vim wars. I am on the vim side. I don't care about vscode that much. The only gripe is the first class support vscode gets in terms of plugins as compared to (neo)vim.
The vim purist having 0 config wasn't my original thought. I had heard about it before and I have seen talks where the speaker would do everything with default vim syntax and not use plugins or maps. I personally have a bunch of plugins and shortcuts because I can't touch type. so I need most used keybindings close by.

I agree the inconsistencies with coreutils. Having helper tools and scripts vs spoon feeding with all options using arrow keys. Just the extremes, having aliases is all good and I never remember awk and sed syntax.