I am not sure what is going on with here recently, maybe I have overgrown the place, or maybe everyday a little by little this place is getting filled with people who shouldn't be talking about CS.
niche /niːʃ,nɪtʃ/ (adjective) denoting products, services, or interests that appeal to a small, specialized section of the population.
The other tooling feels niche to me.
(The existence of a Vim config file disables Vi compatibility mode.)
In my current role (contracting at a gov dept in a part that uses Rails and PostgreSQL) it's about 30% using vim or neovim.
In the rest of the department where it's .net and Microsoft all the way, the devs likely have never heard of vim.
Dijkstra said computer science is about computers as much as astronomy is about telescopes.
I am not sure I agree with that, but it's definitely not about text editor choice.
I have a .vimrc file with LSPs and whatnot. But it was from 3 years back. These days I use VSCode and IntelliJ (depending on language) because they do so many things out of the box. I would say the choice of editor is the least consequential thing in one's understanding of "CS" and programming methodologies. On the other hand, using debuggers, profilers, monitoring tooling can have a real impact on how you solve some problems.
It's definitely possible but I genuinely don't understand how people work for decades and still move their hand all the way to the arrow keys just go move the cursor to another word. Especially when the solution for this inefficiency is so accessible, existed for decades and is widely available in almost every tool. It's something that goes against the spirit of the medium which is all about automation.
While I don't appreciate the weight of an IDE, the time commitment to create (and maintain!) a config for vim/nvim with LSP, agents, etc., loses out to the relative ease of adding vim-style modal editing to the IDE.
He said many stupid things when it was outside of his domain of mathematics and algorithms.
I know only one person from my dozens of developer friends and colleagues who is using neovim.
Your argument is that calling Vim niche should exclude someone from being able to talk about CS. Please rethink your stance and your tone and consider if you’re helping the discussion.