37 comments

[ 1.8 ms ] story [ 95.2 ms ] thread
Are there still a lot of people using Vim?
I'm curious about your intent with this question. Do you sincerely wonder? Are you trying to make a joke?
I don't get the appeal of vim over vim emulators. I've always used essentially stock vim with no plugins so I find myself using JetBrains emulated vim. A language server has become necessary for me. If vim LSP competes with JetBrains LSP, I'd make the switch. I have never tried but if I was taking bets I'd bet on JetBrains for what I assume are obvious reasons.
Language servers are pluggable to any frontend via the Language Server Protocol (LSP), and vim has plenty of frontends to go with whatever backend you desire. I like https://github.com/neoclide/coc.nvim, check out the gif on the readme
Neovim 0.5 which will come with inbuilt, native LSP is expected to be released soon. It will also feature init.lua - vim config in Lua instead of vimscript!
I have never tried a Vim emulation mode that was not extremely irritating because it got some basic thing very wrong and multiple basic things not quite right.
I've been using nvim with LSP (via coc.nvim) for more that a year now. After switching from IDEA.

I feel much more productive with vim's speed and plugins then with IDEA\Goland, where I was using less that 20% of it's power I guess.

Not to mention that even on MBPr 2019 with 2-3 copies of IDEA in action - IDEA starts to lag like crazy.

Its a genuine question. Back in the day (90s) there were actual wars being fought between Emacs and VIM where the strongest argument against Emacs was that its somewhat bloated taking up a lot more disk space than Vim. That argument is no longer (as) valid since disk-space is so cheap, so I just figured VIM was either dead or dying.
If you mean as an IDE then yes, but most likely declining.

If you mean as a text editor, absolutely and most definitely yes.

I can crush my previous programming speed by orders of magnitude (~90wpm typist for years) with Vim extensions added onto whatever IDE, and prefer to just program in Vim as is anyway, being moderately new to programming.
I started out my coding career using sublime, moved to atom relatively quickly, experimented with jetbrains products but didn’t like it, and moved to VSCode soon after it was released and have been using it since.

There were a few people at work who had been on the same path as me before and were trying to turn me to the “dark side”, and I eventually gave in and told myself I would give it a try for two weeks and see how I liked it.

Up until a few months ago I would have thought vim would never replace vscode for me, but here I am typing this message having been using vim as my only editor/ide for the last two and a half months.

I use neovim nightly with the builtin lsp and treesitter support and I don’t think I’ll ever go back. It’s not only faster itself, but I am more efficient using it.

Not only are a lot of people using it, the number of active users and plugin creators seems to be growing. It’s a wonderful time to be a vim user.
It would be interesting to see some numbers on this, but I have the impression that (neo)vim users are growing in numbers. I'm just a HTML+CSS guy building small websites, and learning vim has been huge boost not only to my speed/efficiency, but to the amount of fun I'm having! I ditched VScode aprox 4 months ago an basically live in the terminal now with tmux, nvim and fzf. It's such a powerfull combination!
If you mostly use GitHub and use tpope/vim-fugitive, you can already do this with https://github.com/tpope/vim-rhubarb, visual select, :GBrowse.
Yup this is what I use too. :10,15.Gbrowse will open the current file selected from line 10 to 15
Fugitive supports basically every git web frontend including GitLab, SourceHut, and a bunch of others (via plugins).
As I discovered yesterday, :Gbrowse also works for other contexts such as jumping directly to the GitHub page for a specific commit after opening one via :Git log or :Git blame.
if, like me, you've thought "wait, but :GBrowse only opens the file", the trick is to _select_ a line first, i.e.

> :{range}GBrowse [args]

Yeah, I'm sure that other plugin is great and all, but once Tim Pope puts his name on something, it becomes an instant default for me.
What is the use case for this, I wonder? I am not being snide, genuinely not sure what I'd do with it, which is ok, however I am curious.
Maybe when you find a line you want to discuss/share with other people online?
I use a similar extension for VS Code. My use case is to share certain lines of code with coworkers. I didn't realize it would be so helpful, but I probably use it at least 3 times every day.
Which one are you using? I'd love this. It's usually precisely to reference it in a bug report, to a coworker, in a support case explaining software behaviour, etc.
I send links to specific lines or chunks of code pretty much every day (using a similar VS Code plugin), usually to show an example of a pattern or show where / how a particular piece of logic is implemented. Or sometimes to give an idea of a possible home for a new piece of logic
I use it all the time, the Fugitive version, to share or point a block of code with my tram.

I will select a block, :Gbrowse, then copy and paste the url to my collaborators.

Basically a round about way of linking to lines a file.

This use case doesn’t need to round trip to GH? The URL could be yanked straight into a vim register, including * or + (making it available to whatever clipboard your OS fancies)