
Ask HN: What do you think of using Vi rather than Vim or Neovim? - iio7
I have been using Vim and later Neovim for a couple of years, but I have noticed they have become slower and more feels a lot more bulky, especially Vim.<p>I have also developed some nasty habits with plugins that has caused me to forget some of the original commands.<p>So I am thinking about going pure Vi.<p>I think I can live without syntax highlighting, but have any of you gone pure Vi and not gone back?
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psv1
> feels a lot more bulky, especially Vim.

> I think I can live without syntax highlighting

This is the fussiest of fussy problems. I can't imagine how vim can feel
bulky, and how bad it needs to be for you to be willing to trade away all
other features. But it's your setup, do whatever you like. I wouldn't make a
HN post anytime I think about switching my code editor or IDE.

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Foober223
Try

    
    
        vim.tiny -u NONE
    

For a smaller vim with less features. 3.9mb on my system. I don't have the
original vi to compare, but when we are getting this small, any further memory
savings are just noise, unless your dev box is a strange device. I doubt
original vi would be faster than tiny vim.

Also try mg. Only a tiny bit larger than ed, but supports modern screen
display and Emacs key binds. 1.1mb on my system. Screaming fast.

Also try GNU Emacs. It takes a bit of fiddling, but you can off-load much of
the start-up slowness into the build stage. Loading things into the lisp image
of temacs (at the cost of flexibility, you must rebuild when stuff changes if
you want to keep the speed). Then you have a fully featured IDE that boots up
in 0.2 seconds. Not bad and quite a bit faster than some tricked out Vim
IDE's. You can have syntax highlighting turned off too, for more speed at
runtime. Large, but it's in charge and not slow.

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karmakaze
I tend to use a mix of IDEs and vi, I've never converted over to using vim as
I don't always have it on every platform. I've read good things you can do
with vim+tmux but I haven't really felt my gap between vi and IDEs really
warranted picking it up.

The few times that I do find myself using vim, I have to override a number of
things to make it sane (e.g. :syntax off) for me--color especially bad
terminal palettes make my eyes try to focus text on different depth planes
which is very hard to read.

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Avi-D-coder
If I didn't rely on neovim plugins so much, I would use kakoune. Native modal
multi cursors and noun verb as apposed to vi's verb noun order have to be
experienced to be believed.
[https://github.com/mawww/kakoune](https://github.com/mawww/kakoune)

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Piskvorrr
You may want to look at `busybox vi`, if worried about bulkiness.

Asceticism _is_ a virtue; as for me, alas, I'm not ready to let go of modern
conveniences.

