Best of Vim Tips

Re:Best of Vim Tips by doorhammer on Wednesday June 25, 2014 @10:03AM (#7943895)

I agree.

As far as a business case goes, there's no real "vendor lock in" with a plaintext editor like this. You can always switch to something else and your files will be fine/the same. You're investing (potentially non trivial) time to learn using it, but it didn't take me long to learn ST2 to a depth that made it really handy.

I will say I'd buy a lot more into that argument for people who develop plugins.

That said I can respect the "open source" only mindset. I'm just not sure I'm that concerned about it in this particular case.

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Re:Best of Vim Tips by edwintorok on Wednesday June 25, 2014 @11:44AM (#7944656)

I don't know whats the lifetime of these "trendy" closed-source tools since I was never a fan of them, I'd be worried that you loose more time by having to switch to a new tool each month. Exploring alternatives is nice, but you can't be doing that all the time.

For example there was a time when I switched a Linux distribution each month, then at some point I realized that it is getting me nowhere: I didn't know either of them in-depth or how to deal with their specific problems. So then I made a choice: I'll use only Debian, and actually learn about how to deal with problems when I encounter them, instead of jumping ship to another distro.

Its the same with text editors, I eventually settled on Vim (for a long time without any plugins), then started using plugins as well.

Sure every now and then I check what new alternatives are out there (for example there are some interesting ideas in http://leoeditor.com/ but not really comparable to Vim), but closed-source tools are never on my list. I only ever heard about Sublime Text here on HN, and even then for a long time I thought its a Mac only tool.

But with closed-source tools I just wouldn't have been motivated to stick with any of them: if there were problems with it then I wouldn't know how to work them around, or implement missing functionality, not to mention I wouldn't trust them to begin with etc.

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Re:Best of Vim Tips by doorhammer on Wednesday June 25, 2014 @12:14PM (#7944866)

ST has been out for six years. That's not going to be comparable to emacs (mid 1970's - now) or vi/vim (1976/1991 respectively). I haven't jumped on Atom, or any of the other brand new editors because I want to know they'll have some staying power, but I don't think 5+ years is short enough for me to be concerned. I'm certainly not changing editors every month. I also do most of my editor exploration in my free time, and it's fun for me, so it's not really a waste of time (again, for me, in that context).

I should say that I can't really settle on VIM right now because I'm doing full time .net work at this point. I still use it reasonably often when I'm mucking about in C at home, and I used it as my primary editor for at least five years prior to that, but my use-case was me trying to get a decent haskell environment up and running on a fresh linux VM as quickly as I could. ST2 worked really well for that.

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