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Comment by nategri | Hacker News Reader

Yeah you can go ahead and miss me with every single one of these vim-via-Electron monstrosities.

CLARIFICATION: For me the whole point of learning vim was that it's lightweight and ubiquitous. Stuff like this is 0 out of 2 on that front.

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I think one of the points that this and some of the other comments may be missing is that this isn't electron with vim keybindings, it's an electron gui for a real (neo)vim process running in the background. All your standard vim features are there. A user only familiar with Oni shouldn't have much trouble using a standard vim install.

There's definitely an argument to be made that Oni may not add much over running vim in a terminal, especially given the increased resource requirements inherent to electron, and I'd certainly like to see a high performance cross platform neovim gui that doesn't use electron, but I think Oni at least delivers a very useful experience on its own by building on top of all the work already invested into vim.

I use Vim and Vim keybindings for other editors. I learned Vim because like you say, it’s lightweight and ubiquitous. But for some larger scale projects I need the power of a full IDE. So then I use for example PyCharm with Vim keybindings.

As long as the Vim emulation is good you are still using the same “skills”.

In the case of the OP it’s a frontend to neovim even, so it’s not even just a partial emulation, it’s the real deal.

That being said I tried Oni a few weeks ago because I thought it would bring me something but I found no immediate advantage so I didn’t bother to keep using it.

Right, I can fire up vim on pretty much any old server out there and get a familiar editor. It may not have my vimrc and may not have a few plugins that I like, but none of that is crippling if you learn to appreciate and use vanilla vim and even vi.

That said, if you're doing almost all your work from your local machine, these editors probably serve a valuable purpose still.

> if you're doing almost all your work from your local machine

Lol, this is most people, and also the target audience of this application. Note that it doesn't claim to be a VIM replacement, just a modal editor for the desktop that's based on it.

Yeah one of the major points towards vim is pretty much every unix environment has vim installed.

Actually if you happen to ssh into the classical proprietary UNIX servers you might end up with plain old vi still.

But yeah, that is why even I as Emacs user always bothered to at least know my way around vi, usually Emacs is most likely not installed.

> Actually if you happen to ssh into the classical proprietary UNIX servers you might end up with plain old vi still.

Let's be honest: out of 10000000000's of SSH connections in a given 24 hours span, how many are to a "classical proprietary UNIX server"? 0.0001% maybe ? Is it really a use case worth optimizing for ? They should be treated as applicances, not as general-purpose computers.

Depends on where you work. It could easily be 100% of the ssh connections you make.

His point still stands because the vast majority of people have nothing to do with those systems :)

Vast majority of people have never even heard of VIM.

Let's say "the vast majority of people using SSH"

I'd add that if you have more than a handful of servers, and find yourself shelling into these and editing files by hand regularly, you're doing ops wrong

The kind of companies where budgets for Oracle and DB2 licenses are rounding errors.

As sibling noted, it depends on where you work. I've seen AIX and Solaris still in use.

Oni is basically a vim ide with vim tutorials included. it's trying to decrease the vim learning curve.

Product might not be for you.

On that note, I'm still waiting on a lightweight vim clone with a sane plugin/command system.

I'm glad everyone likes vim as an editing style. I do to and would prefer to use vim, however I was able to get VS Code configured with plugins how I want to work in a matter of minutes, as opposed to wasting days upon days (over my life probably a solid month) trying to get a sane vim config that works with my languages and tools.

Have you tried spacevim? https://spacevim.org/

Amen.

Anecdote: be on Windows. Need text editor to open 100MB file. Notepad sucks. Wordpad actually loads the file, but I just can't. Think about getting Notepad++. Decide to try out Atom because the UX looks nice. It can't load the file; have to kill the process. Install Emacs. Just works.

These things are cool for your portfolio, but they are less effective than 40 year old alternatives.

Yeah, in some situations those oldschool tools are just much more capable than their modern counterparts. Never had any filesize problems with sed and dd :D

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