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Comment by 1MachineElf | Hacker News Reader

Speaking of Plan 9 and Vim, readers may also find interesting the Vis editor: https://github.com/martanne/vis

A tutorial, if you don't know what it means by being influenced by "sam":

http://doc.cat-v.org/bell_labs/sam_lang_tutorial/sam_tut.pdf

I've tried out vis and it's very nice editor. I'd love to see something like vim-slime developed for it so it could be used for repl-based development. I may even get off my lazy a-- one day and try to implement it myself.

Structural regular expressions seem pretty great. If Vis ever gets some Vim features that allow operating across multiple buffers (quickfix et al) I'd probably switch.

Like https://repo.or.cz/vis-quickfix.git? (More plugins: https://github.com/martanne/vis/wiki/Plugins)

That would cover some of my wants but not all of them. Whilst I like the idea of structural regular expressions they're not a big enough of a motivation for me add anything I'd miss to Vis when Vim is "good enough". That said I'm less and less impressed with Vim as time goes on so that will likely change at some point.

I think that's the biggest challenge for a project like this. If it's going to break backward compatibility, it's hard to attract new users even if it's clearly an improvement over vim. Ironically, that was the whole issue with Plan9. It was better, just not a big enough improvement to justify replacing something that was widely viewed as "good enough".

I mean it's a separate project so it has nothing to break "compatibility" with and it's made clear [1][2] the aim is to be different. Given the author is part of the suckless community I really don't think they care about attracting users either.

I admire Vis but at the end of the day a text editor is just a tool. When the investment into changing out such a tool becomes worth it is entirely user dependent.

[1] https://github.com/martanne/vis#non-goals

[2] https://github.com/martanne/vis/wiki/Differences-from-Vi(m)

Fair enough. I wasn't posting that as a criticism. I'm a big fan of suckless tools, dwm, st, and surf in particular (I may be the only person who likes surf), and I truly hope vis succeeds and is around for the long term. I'm hoping vis can attract enough users to develop enough of an extension ecosystem that it could be used in place of vim or neovim as a daily driver

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