[father_of_two]

I started using vi in the 90s and got very used to it. It's still my standard text editor (the nvi implementation, that is).

I've never grasped vim. It was too slow at the time and the extended command set consumed all the free keys I use to have available to do my own macros (eg: 'q' 'g').

I reckon vim grew to be much more than an editor, it is now an editing plataform, capable of so many things, and contains lots of shortcuts / builtins for common text-editing situations.

The article above contains many vim-only commands. For example 'di>' ("delete inner angle-block") doesn't exist on standard vi, neither the '>aB' ("indent a Block").

[geocar]

vim is very slow; "classic" vi, and more reasonable clones like nvi are much faster and that seems completely wrong to me. It also has terrible defaults (like kindergarden-useless syntax highlighting which only make it slower!).

I have hopes that neovim will sort some of that out -- it makes a certain amount of sense that vim is slow because of some baggage it carries, but I'll admit they aren't very high hopes: I've been using emacs recently.

How funny is that? That I use emacs because vim is too slow!

[cturner]

Haha. When I first this, I thought your problems might be from editing large files with syntax highlighting switched on. Or doing PHP or JSP, which I've found to struggle in the past. But then I saw the username.

Indeed, if you're writing lots of code with hardly any newlines (like k lang), you will probably have performance issues with vim.

    > It also has terrible defaults

This can vary from distribution-to-distribution. Certainly the default debian setup comes with annoyingly intrusive defaults, some of them used to have an impact on speed. Three settings you probably want in your $HOME/.vimrc on debian:

    filetype indent off
    filetype plugin off
    filetype plugin indent off

[this might be obsolete - that config is more than a decade old]