

Why Atom Can’t Replace Vim - mkozlows
https://medium.com/p/433852f4b4d1

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chromejs10
I appreciate the fact that this isn't some biased "vim is God" type post. It
has good points too about how editors do tend to follow the Emacs style where
"command x does y". To me, that works fine because most of the commands you
run will turn into muscle memory and never ends up being a problem. However,
there is definitely a lot of use cases with VIM's way by being able to build
up commands. It definitely cuts down the learning curve. Honestly, I'm not
terribly psyched about Atom. It doesn't appear to offer anything knew other
than instead of being extensible through VIM script, Emacs Lisp, or Python,
it's extensible via Coffeescript.

~~~
mkozlows
In practice, a lot of vim stuff ends up being muscle memory, too -- anything
you use frequently, you don't think about consciously. It's the less frequent
stuff where the composability really comes into conscious play.

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Watabou
This article does have great points. Vim commands are very short that do a
whole lot more than other editors.

I don't agree with the last paragraph though, that Vim needs half a dozen
plugins to get basic functionality.

I suppose, it all depends on what you would call 'basic functionality' but
people install some of the most pointless plugins sometimes, like NERDTree,
when there's already a built in, great file explorer called Netrw you already
get with vim that you can open with :Ex or :Vex (or :Sex _snigger_ ). You
already get the :find commands that's just as good as ctrlp.

Seriously, try typing :find <as><as>/<as> (substitute an * for <as>, HN
doesn't seem to like two asterisks for some reason) and then any file, and
it's as quick if not quicker than ctrlp.

People also install ack to grep through codebases when :grep exists and can be
programmed using grepprg, an ugly, slow statusbar with 200 SLOC, that everyone
seems to have problems with every other week. My statusbar is 2 lines and is
just as good if I may say so myself. Using vanilla vim without plugins isn't
very hard when you think about it.

In fact, the best way to learn vim is to actually try to learn vim, without
any plugins. You will find that this is a great editor already with a chalk-
full of features that you didn't know about. The most amazing thing is that
you learn new settings or options or motions every day if you read the :help
enough.

