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Comment by mpereira | Hacker News Reader

I used data from the Vim git repository to create an annotated chart of some of the main moments in the last 20 years of Vim development.

Vim was the first text editor I've ever used (back in 2008), and it shaped the way I interact with computers forever. I'm grateful to all maintainers, and to Bram for creating it and shepherding it through all these decades.

The annotations are interactive, so if you hover them you'll see more context about the events.

I built the tool to make this visualization: https://www.contextualize.ai

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> The annotations are interactive, so if you hover them you'll see more context about the events.

It would be helpful to put this somewhere on the page. On mobile especially one isn’t likely to accidentally discover this with random mouse movements.

> Vim was the first text editor I've ever used (back in 2008)

How could anyone skip any other more "normal" editors and jump right into Vim?

I was thrown into vi, back in 1996, learning Linux. It was the default (or at least available) and the SuSE manual that came with the CD-ROM box had a chapter on vi/vim.

For me it was my first editor on Linux. Didn't stick until I rediscovered it some 20 years ago when I got fed up with the netbeans nonsense and gedit and Kate kept breaking on me.

When do most people use text editors? I think wouldn’t be that surprised if somebody fist used a text editor when they first got into Linux or programming.

I’d imagine most people’s first impression would be Notepad on windows- I wouldn’t count Word or even WordPad.

I bet you are right.

But, I also think there’s enough leeway in the idea of “using a tool” to not be surprised that somebody doesn’t count a one-off use of notepad. And I think there must exist at least some people who really never used notepad.

Nowadays I only assume someone between, like, 30 and 50 will inherently have to have used Windows at some point. Outside that range, you might get graybeards who were around before Windows, or younger folks who only ever used smartphones.

Anyway, all that rambling is to say, I’d put it in the “most but not shocking to hear otherwise” category.

Do you really think people younger than 30 won’t be using Windows in school or at home?

I mean, there exist and have always existed people who’ve never used it at home. And there exist and (ever since it came out) have existed people who have.

What I’ve tried to express is that there’s a small band where not having used it is unusual and surprising, and that isn’t the case anymore. I still think the majority of people have used Windows at least a handful of times but hearing that somebody hasn’t no longer produces a “how could anyone” sort of response.

They will use it, but they don’t know it’s Windows or what an OS is. They’ll just say it’s a Microsoft computer or PC. Or “not Apple”. Maybe even Android.

It was definitely notepad to edit some obscure .ini files on some pc game, or reading a Readme on a cracked/pirated game. On windows that would be the obvious case.

Downloading something over limewire or torrent and seeing a readme file for the first time is a pretty strong memory.

My first IDE was visual studio writing Visual Basic, I quickly binned that for netbeans and Java and then I think ended up using Eclipse.

Today I’m a casual evil mode emacs user mostly for magit and org-mode. also working in VScode for web languages.

WordPad is criminally underrated.

What was a "normal" editor in '08?

After trying out finger-twister with Emacs, vim was a breath of fresh air, and had better features than plain "vi", like it was improved or something.

Now, how do I save and exit?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_text_editors

Sort by creation date, notepad, kedit, kwrite, notepad++, Scite, and plenty more.

Notepad++ (Windows, 2003) / gedit (GNOME, 1998) / kwrite/kate (KDE, 2001) all existed in 2008 and are totally fine basic text editors for source code. I remember editing PHP in a more obscure editor (SciTE, 1999) on Windows in the early 2000s.

Most of all those are gui based, when running a small Slackware setup without X none of those are available.

You might be surprised to learn that the original version of Vim (on the Amiga: https://www.reddit.com/r/amiga/comments/l5j53m/the_text_edit...) was a GUI based application! Ok, it didn't have much in the way of an actual GUI, but it ran in a window which wasn't the shell/CLI window. I guess the actual reason why Vim is a console application on Linux is the lack of a "standard" GUI framework.

> I guess the actual reason why Vim is a console application on Linux is the lack of a "standard" GUI framework.

gvim (for GTK/Gnome) is an official part of vim!

And was called "Vi IMitation" not "Vi IMproved"? Interesting.

They're all GUIs. Most people using computers in the late 2000s were using GUIs, not X-less Slackware. You asked what "normal" was -- this is normal.

Using GUI doesn't mean not using CLI.

This is not responsive to my comments.

How many people's first experience of computers is a small Slackware setup without X? This thread is hilarious.

Be old. I went from VMS' EDT in the late 80s to JOE (Joe's Own Editor) on Ultrix, to Emacs, and finally Vim. I finally switched to Neovim after Bram's passing.

What made you switch from emacs to vim?

Its complexity. Elisp is both a blessing and a curse. It's great to be able to make deep, fundamental changes to Emacs via Elisp, but sometimes, you end up wading though very difficult-to-read code trying to figure out how it works. IME, vim is less flexible, but simpler when I just want to edit code and not think about Emacsisms.

I'm weird, I started using computers with Arch Linux and Vim :P

Like what? ed?

I think they probably mean a non-modal visual/screen editor (like NotePad on Windows or TextEdit on Mac). I used pico on Unix before learning vi, for example, which is probably a common progression.

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