Ask HN: What do you think of using Vi rather than Vim or Neovim? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What do you think of using Vi rather than Vim or Neovim?

4 pointsiio75 comments

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.

I have also developed some nasty habits with plugins that has caused me to forget some of the original commands.

So I am thinking about going pure Vi.

I think I can live without syntax highlighting, but have any of you gone pure Vi and not gone back?

View on HN

> 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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com