• OpenStars@startrek.website
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    9 months ago

    The reason is b/c vim predates GUIs. Yes, as in all of them:-D. (Or rather, its predecessor vi did and vim unlike others very much remained true to its origins)

    Even now, there are many places e.g. when doing server maintenance or accessing a compute cluster via SSH, sometimes you do not have a handy GUI environment accessible, at which point your choices become extremely limited, and it helps that vim has been installed on every Unix-i/Linux-ish machine since the 80s.

    GUIs are superior, ofc, when they work. On a daily basis I even use a GUI for vim - MacVim (for Windows there used to be Cream but I am very out of date there), and there is always gVim. I could use something else but I am familiar with vim and it is EXTREMELY powerful - e.g. I could indent 100,000 lines in the middle of a file without having to manually select all of them at once first, or better still only do the indentation based on matching a pattern.

    It is very advanced, and thus not for everyone, and even those of us that use it often prefer the GUI way for simple tasks like select a contiguous block of 5 lines, but it offers the benefit that it works in the widest possible number of scenarios - e.g. more than nano. emacs does too, except its commands are so configurable that the X-windows GUI number 1, X-windows GUI number 2, and command-line versions all use entirely different shortcuts, so a cheat sheet would not help. vim offers consistency that, afaik, is absolutely unmatched anywhere.

    Now you know:-).

    • Doc Avid Mornington@midwest.social
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      9 months ago

      Even when Emacs had two GUI versions, the default keys were pretty much the same between them, as far as I recall, excepting features missing from one or the other. For a very long time now, it’s all been reconciled as GNU Emacs, anyhow, whether CLI or XWin GUI, or even on a Mac or (shudder) MS Windows. I just use my local running Emacs, with my preferred configuration, to edit files anywhere, such as inside a running container on a remote server in AWS, so it’s pretty consistent for me.

      • OpenStars@startrek.website
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        9 months ago

        Thanks for the update - I so rarely use emacs that I might be guilty of misinformation here, as in what may have been true two decades ago is not any longer. I’ll try to remember that.:-)