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Comment by baron816 | Hacker News Reader

There’s no way that many people use VIM.

The ones who use hacker rank do. All the other people don’t bother using a site like that they are just living their lives playing baseball and other things outside of the job

That one stat made me question the entire survey. There's no way so many people use VIM over Atom, Sublime, etc. Right? Someone reassure me here.

I've recently been having issues with Sublime randomly freezing and restarting (may be due to a package, but I'm not going to waste my time verifying what packages are misbehaving out of the hundreds I have installed), I've gone back to Vim.

After setting Vim up for multiple environments (PHP, Go, Python, and JavaScript) it's now my daily driver. Maybe other people feel similar?

> may be due to a package, but I'm not going to waste my time verifying what packages are misbehaving out of the hundreds I have installed

Welcome to vim, but if you go overboard on plugins then you will have the same issues with it, probably more so.

I'm finding with Vim that less is more, or maybe as I become more experience I'm not relying so much on the GUI aspect of text editors (creating new files, git integration, color pickers, etc) but instead just sticking to the command line for a variety of operations.

Among the hundreds of professional programmers I've seen, talked to and worked with, in Europe at least, Eclipse (Java), Visual Studio (.Net), Sublime/Visual Studio Code/Atom/Notepad++ (web folks), IntelliJ are far and away ahead of all other editors.

I'm one of the relatively rare birds to also use Vim.

You're probably right, I'm the sole full-time vim user at my place of work (primarily a python shop). I was vindicated in my choice yesterday when somebody forgot to pay off the credit card and the jetbrains license payment bounced, so nobody could work because their pycharm locked them out. I get why people love pycharm though, it does a good job, but I always felt like it was such a pig. Plus you can write some hairy code because the IDE will just let you prance through it without a care in the world.

Its a VIM vs Emacs question, all the other answers are in the (other) category. Considering that, the results make sense.

I use both Visual Studio Code and Visual Studio with VIM keybindings. Does that count?

Same here. This does not match up with other similar surveys. Also, apparently my opinions line up with that of a 55yo programmer...I'm 28. They must have sampled an older crowd that all use Vim and happen to like JavaScript more than most.

Hold up. They asked “Vim or Emacs?”, not “What’s your favorite editor?” That’s why the answer distribution looks like that. I think we all know there are more normal text editor/IDE users than vi/emacs users.

I use mostly Sublime Text or VSCode, but with Vim plugins. So I'd answer Vim even though I rarely actually use it (mostly on servers).

And it's reasonable to expect that people who use neither vim nor emacs would likely have more exposure with vim rather than emacs.

I think there's a problem with their data or their analysis. Vim is probably very well known and held with affection for a lot of developers whereas IDEs are far more subjective and occasionally hated.

There's also a fundamental problem of expectations. Vim is miraculous as far as terminal-based text editors are concerned. You can be amazing productive without a mouse. I can do 100X more and do it all faster with IntelliJ Ultimate but since I paid a wad for it, all I can see are the flaws.

Go on a random terminal and fire up emacs. It isn't there. Also, your favorite editor isn't there. That's why. The practical choice is Vim vs. Nano or Joe or Ed or whatever.

There are dozens of us.

One Vim to rule them all, One Vim to find them, One Vim to bring them all and in the darkness bind them

I am proudly one of those dozens.

Mostly I use IntelliJ, but when I’m futzing on the commmand line I end up in vim. Couldn’t resist the joke.

My machine org professor plans on teaching it this semester because employers in the area are preferring it. I was surprised by how many people knew it already.

I use it all the time when I ssh into prod/staging/test...

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