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Comment by mytailorisrich | Hacker News Reader

I have never used vim in my life (20 years in dev. including on linux and used linux since the late 90s). Many people talk about vim lately, probably the most I've seen and I'm still not sure why.

That said, VSCode is very good. But I don't believe in a web-based IDE and in remote Github repos. That's a recipe for disaster and unescapable vendor lock-in, and in any case it's only an option for web dev., really.

Edit: Since some people always take things literally: I have of course tried vim, like most people who ever worked with Unix/Linux I suppose, but never got beyond that. I am surprised that it seems to have become so "fashionable" lately. There are many alternatives to vi/vim and many IDEs. My experience is that vi has always suffered from its interface and has struggled to expand beyond "bearded Unix gurus"...

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> Many people talk about vim lately, probably the most I've seen and I'm still not sure why.

Extrapolating from personal experience, I think this might be down to Covid WFH where more people have had to ssh into remote machines and may need to edit files so might choose to use vim as it’s easily available. And vim is something that I find is better learned progressively where you pick up 1 or 2 tricks every week or something so those people might have been able to pick it up over the last year or so and are now evangelizing it.

Yes, you may be right.

I have also been WFH because of Covid but haven't had to change much or anything to my way of working and I do SSH to multiple machines every day. That might vary a lot from person to person, though. I have avoided doing actual dev. on a remote machine by setting up a VM to run Linux locally as any sort of remote desktop tends to be a pain.

Also, with distributed source control (git and friends) there is usually no need to access remote source files.

For what it's worth, you can open a remote directory via SSH from vscode. https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/remote/linux

Want to have your mind blown? Microsoft (yes that Microsoft) officially supports remote development on Windows Server via SSH. As in, run vscode on your Linux box, create an SSH remote on your Windows Server, develop remotely on the server via SSH. Fully supported.

I'm curious: What is a typical use case for this?

Porting cross-platform projects to the operating system that looks and feels very different to pretty much everything else out there. I prefer doing that from the comfort of my primary desktop OS.

>supports remote development on Windows Server via SSH

I was excited for this as a way to avoid touching Windows altogether, but it works pretty crappily in my experience.

Well of course you're "still not sure why"; you've "never used vim". How does one understand something they've never experienced?

How have you avoided vim this long? What did you edit config files with? I guess maybe if you mean you just used vi instead

You can use graphical editors over SSH.

I personally tend to install micro, or use nano if that's not possible.

If I just need to do a quick edit of a text file from the CLI I usually use nano, as well.

For dev. I use an graphical editor, usually VSCode these days. I used emacs at some point a long time ago.

The good thing with git and al is that there is no need to access a remote repo., and that's one of the points, so there is usually no need to edit source files remotely.

I had to google, I didn't realize nano was around 20 years ago. I didn't know it existed until about 2012, but I guess that makes sense then.

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