One day we will have a text editor thread unrelated to vim without someone mentioning vim.

Not today.

No, we won't. At least not in our lifetimes.

Actually, I love vim, because vim is on each server and can be used without any extra effort, so vim is out of competition here. But I love smooth fonts, scrolling, and appearance of Sublime Text, so I made it my primary editor.

Emacs can be installed on any server (and can be used to edit files on any server, from a client …), and it has smooth fonts and scrolling (if you like that; I turn off the scrollbar). And of course it excels at mouseless editing, navigation & automation.

https://github.com/zk-phi/sublimity might be useful to you, too.

I use emacs with vim emulation (evil mode) and am addicted to it, partly because I can bind vim's leader key with emacs lisp functions that can be quite complex, to do great things with a single key press while editing.

and the war begins

Emacs needs to be installed. Vi is already installed most of the time.

Especially on embedded devices there is often no real competition to vi.

The question is how much time you spend editing files on embedded devices versus how much time you spend editing files on your main development machine.

You can always setup automatic process of synchronization of files that you need to edit, so editing process will be most efficient.

If you have ssh access to the remote machine (goes with most methods of automatic synchronization) then you can use TRAMP mode to directly edit the remote copy.

I test different configurations on the target before syncing the right one into my build environment. If I mounted the RootFS via NFS then its possible to use ${EDITOR}, but thats not always the case.

> Vi is already installed most of the time.

60% of the time, it works every time, eh? :-)

I use vi too, but less now than I used too. It's definitely a powerful little editor.

Interesting is logging into UNIX servers like HP-UX and friends and getting the real VI, not the improved ones.

vim supports scrolling [1] and smooth fonts (in modern terminals)...

[1] https://github.com/apinstein/dotfiles/blob/master/vimrc#L162...

There is an amazing Vim plugin for Sublime Text, which still makes Sublime my preferred editor: https://github.com/guillermooo/Vintageous

Why wouldn't you use the default Vintage plugin? What's better about Vintageous?

A discussion of Vintageous's design:

https://github.com/guillermooo/Vintageous/wiki/Design

The Vintage plugin is very basic and limited in many regards.

(cross file) bookmarks, missing navigation options, no commands (like search and replace, ...), and so on.

Aren't most people using neovim now?

I personally use nvim, but most of my coworkers (also vim users) haven't yet switched. There's a surprising number of people that are aware of nvim but haven't bothered switching because vim works fine for them.

The main selling point for neovim when I found out about it was the async plugin support. And I remember reading that the creator of neovim mainly did it because the maintainers of vim refused to accept his patch to add async plugin support for vim.

But about a month ago, vim added async plugin support. So now what? I switched to neovim, and now I am undecided if I should switch back to vim or not.

neovim has a fresh start, cleaner code base but less support/timetested code than vim. What do you guys think?

My understanding was that Neovim's main strength was the fact that it is a fresh rewrite for modern platforms only. Whereas Vim has tons of legacy code in it for all sorts of legacy platforms, which makes it harder for people to contribute code, and makes it harder for the dev team to find and fix bugs, or to add features, etc.

In any case, whatever the outcome of the fork is, this is an interesting experiment : Will the cleaner code base, using more extensively tests and CI move faster than the legacy one ?

Not accounting the number of people contributing to each project, the logic said it should. It will be interesting to see how long it takes to pay the dividend.

No, not at all.

neovim is still lacks stability.

Is this from experience? I've switched back to regular vim from neovim because of platform support, but I've never had stability issues when I did use neovim.

Yes, it's from experience. I'm maintainer of https://github.com/SirVer/ultisnips snippet plugin for vim, and I'm often see issues when people can't get it work under nvim due nvim internal issues.

From experience:

neovim often forgets basic settings for indentation, it's the only flaw I've experienced myself but it's enough that I can't use it.

Not that I know of. I mean, I've been a heavy vim user for years and haven't even bothered trying neovim.

Sorry, but no. Maybe emacs or gvim, but not vi/vim.

Its not a terminal editor.

emacs is a terminal editor too … I have vi aliased to 'emacsclient -c' for just that reason.

I know. Thats one of my reasons of saying "Maybe".