The new Vim project - What has changed after Bram
The new Vim project - What has changed after Bram
The death of Bram Moolenaar, Vim founder and benevolent dictator for life (BDFL), in 2023 sent a shock through the community, and raised concern about the future of the project. At VimConf 2024 in November, current Vim maintainer Christian Brabandt delivered a keynote on “the new Vim project" that detailed how the community has reorganized itself to continue maintaining Vim and what the future looks like.
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Vim is dead as soon as Helix lands in debian repositories. People need to let go of stoneage tools. 😅
Vim still has a lot of advantages over helix. Being modern doesn't automatically make a tool better
e.g.?
The biggest thing missing from helix right now imo is plugin support, so a lot of plugins that I really like wouldn't be available. I use fugitive a lot for working with git for example.
Another one is the quickfix list in combination with ex commands. One thing you can do for example is setup
:maketo run your compiler and then when you get compilation errors they'll show up in your quickfix list. You can then use:Cfilterto focus on one type of error and then:cdoto for example do a find and replace on the remaining lines.In general, if I don't have an lsp available for whatever reason (I work in cmake a fair amount at my $DAYJOB for example) I would much rather use vim, in particular because of the stuff that you can do with ex commands that I mentioned above (also works great with grep) but also because of the ctags support.
Helix can do a lot of nice things out of the box for a lot of cases of software editing, but it's not nearly as broad or as customizable of a tool as vim
Yea I mean it depends obviously on the use case. But the defaults in Helix properly reached this millennium compared to vim, where you first need to get through guides in order to understand how to properly set it up.
Helix has better defaults for sure and I get why people might prefer it but I have a very hard time imagining it being a better choice than vim in every situation even with a lot more development.
Also, if you work with programming for example your editor is going to be one of your main tools and I think that "reading guides" is an acceptable amount of effort to put in to learning such a tool. Vim has a higher barrier of entry than it needs to (this can to some extent be explained with backwards compatability) but with Helix you still have to put some time in to understanding the editing model anyway.
but with Helix you still have to put some time in to understanding the editing model anyway.
With Vim you have that as well.
Sure, what I'm saying is that they're both editors that you need to invest time in. A bit less so with helix since it has better defaults so you don't need to spend as much time configuring it, but I don't think that makes a huge difference.
for the terminal
no thank you
there is currently no plugin system available
lmao
Well, thats exactly the reason you don't need vim. Check its feature maybe.
it's not just that this is not for me. i genuinely don't see the point of a terminal-only editor (even vim has a gui version) without any extensibility. the reason vim and emacs are still being used despite being old and full of cruft is that their extensibility makes them very adaptable. treesitter et al seem enough now, but what about ten years from now?
it's also weird their motivation for being terminal-only is better performance, as if guis are this super resource intensive thing and not something that's been mainstream for at least 30 years
I'll give you my vim when you pry it from my cold, dead hands.
Took a look at it and it didn't grab me. Different preferences for different people. I hope Helix continues to grow but I've no interest in it myself.
Fair enough, but somebody who didn't invest heavy into vim, there is no purpose to do now. Helix has better defaults and the differences in movement make more sense to me.
I agree with you when that tool is X11.
I don't understand.