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Comment by robotmay | Hacker News Reader

I can boil my preferences for Vim down to a single thing that I can't find anywhere else: it's fast. I can open stupidly large files and not worry, or mash page down and have no lag. It's a pretty much invisible part of my daily workflow and any time I have tried another editor the speed is the first difference I notice and find immediately frustrating. Every other editor I have tried, even including Emacs (sorry), has at least a slight, but perceptible, difference in speed.

Yes I probably shouldn't open massive log files and hold page down, but it's nice to know that I can.

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Try nvi. It'll open files vim chokes on. Try Ni string esc where N > 1000000 (insert 1000000 copies). Or however high you need to go to watch vim choke and gasp and wheeze and make you think your computer hung. Then go do the same thing in nvi and watch it happen in one second.

Likewise, find the file of size that vim can't handle on your machine, then open it with nvi.

For those virtues, speed and opening large files, nvi eats vim's lunch.

I love vim for quickly looking at files, but when it comes to working in a large codebase, I like to have a lot of information visible at once, such as having a Find panel with results, multiple files open in multiple panes, a file list, list of currently changed files, etc.

Oh, and I use proportional fonts so VIM is out.

Aside from the last sentence, I do all of those things with a combination of emacs + tmux. My workflow would easily be translated to vim. I split my screen into multiple windows each with multiple panes. Then use things like fswatch to trigger automatic execution of various things like the test runner and the build system.

What can I say, I use the mouse a lot. Despite using i3 I still rarely use shortcut keys to change focus. Then again, I shouldn't be apologetic for being a mouse user. It's just another tool.

I find moving around tmux panes kind of annoying and scrolling them even more annoying, but that's probably more of a lack of comfortability with it than anything else.

You need a

    set -g mouse on

in your ~/.tmux.conf file.

You can have multiple files open in multiple panes in Vim. It even has a built in terminal emulator, which removes most of the reasons to use tmux.

Maybe discoverability is the problem. GUI IDEs make discoverability really easy with lots of menus, settings, modals, etc. which lowers the barriers to entry and learning curve.

> having a Find panel with results

That feature is built into Vim with quickfix commands.

> multiple files open in multiple panes

That's also built-in.

> a file list

There's at least two built-in features that provides this, netrw and quickfix.

> list of currently changed files

That's also built-in? It's like the most basic of features.

> I use proportional fonts so VIM is out

You can use a terminal that supports it, or perhaps some NeoVim UI.

all at the same time? If out of the box VIM does all that I've certainly never found out how to do it.

Regardless, I have no plans to switch because I can't see it improving my productivity enough to justify the learning curve.

I'm not trying to convince you to switch at all. Choice of editors is just a matter of personal preference.

I'm just pointing out that all the features you've listed as lacking in Vim are built-in, widely used, and documented. And of course, these features can be used at the same time, there's nothing preventing you from doing so.

I didn't realize that git support (changed files/diffs) was built-in. I'll have to research that.

Git support, as opposed to getting a list of unsaved files, would be better served by installing vim-fugitive.

> I can open stupidly large files and not worry, or mash page down and have no lag.

In my experience, vim tends to start choking on files in the 100MB/1GB range.

Haha yeah that's probably close to my experience too. But I wouldn't even dare try in other editors.

My experience with vim always seems atypical when I read blog posts like this. For me it's a hard-to-kill, reliable text editor. I barely know any of the commands (despite using it for a decade) because I've honestly never felt like I was missing anything. Just having something reliably fast lets me get away with inefficiencies that are problems elsewhere. I can't stand hjkl navigation, or remember anything more complex than how to find/replace strings. But I'm perfectly happy with it just like that.

For files that big I often find myself switch back to vi. However, vi also has its limits. If the files are really huge, then grep, head, tail and awk are my best friends.

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