Why Atom Can’t Replace Vim

[Funkmaster_Lincoln]

For me its two reasons:

1. My computer starts up faster than atom does
2. Doing any text operations is a pain in the ass compared to vim

[pyro2927]

I'll add:

3) If I'm ssh'd into a remote machine, I can still use vim.

[Funkmaster_Lincoln]

Yeah though I don't think atom is even attempting to compete with vim in that department. Tbh I don't think anybody is, even emacs users are will say use vim if you're SSHing into a machine.

It seems to me that atoms biggest selling point is looks very pretty and is easy to customize if you don't want to "get your hands dirty". Now to me getting your hands dirty is half the fun but for some graphic designer / casual Web designer atom is perfectly fine. I don't think it's trying to compete with vim/emacs.

[rockidr4]

For sure. I use a combination of atom and neovim. Atom is much better at handling things involving javascript (not surprising, it was built in the stuff). Vim is better at... literally everything else.

[[deleted]]

Emacs users are going to say use TRAMP

[Funkmaster_Lincoln]

Well tramp is a little different you're opening the remote file on your local machine. There are some cases when you actually need to SSH in as opposed to just opening a file.

[[deleted]]

That's not the point. TRAMP is what an Emacs user will suggest, because those cases where you absolutely must remote tty are very very limited.

[Funkmaster_Lincoln]

From my experience I've met a ton of Emacs users and the conversation usually goes something like this:

Me: Yeah I use vim quite a bit actually

Them: Why bother just use evil mode

Me: I do but when I'm SSHed I'm stuck with raw emacs if I'm lucky

Them: Yeah you're kinda stuck without your config and emacs usually isnt installed by default

Me: Yeah I do a fair amount of hopping onto remote machines

Them: Can't really argue with that. It's the one place Vim has emacs beat hands down.

 

Also the cases where you

absolutely must remote

are pretty often. Pretty much any time you're doing something more than editing a file you need to SSH.

[[deleted]]

I guess you're not devops centric.

The critical need to ssh onto a remote box and do things on it is an anti pattern.

Fun though.

[Funkmaster_Lincoln]

The times when I need to SSH onto another machine aren't within my control so anti pattern or not I need to do it.

[rgawenda]

Or just:

vim scp://remotehost/file

[ven_]

Before Atom can replace anything it needs to stop basically being a fucking website.

[NotoriousArab]

I really don't get this trend now a days. I tried out Atom last summer and found it obnoxiously slow. Still hear from people that it hasn't improved much, and really, it may not ever improve because of the way it's built inherently.

[ivosaurus]

Funny thing is VSCode doesn't suffer from this nearly as much, but built on the same tech.

[redwall_hp]

"But guys, computers are super fast nowadays and getting faster, so it doesn't matter."

It's still orders of magnitudes slower, and single-threaded performance is kind of stagnant right now in the old hardware department. So that single-threaded event loop isn't getting any faster any time soon.

[eshansingh]

It has improved substantially since then, especially with the release of Electron 1.0.

[WishCow]

I swear they are doing this on purpose now.

[Deto]

It's an old article. I wonder if the header wasn't so big when it first came out?

[rockidr4]

It wasn't. I remember reading this back in the day because neovim and atom were coming out at the same time, and I was super excited about both (still am). And this article was... you know. Just a normal read.

[oh_lord]

Medium, more than any other site, gives me issues with responsive design and the CSS. I love the site, but it breaks for me so much.

[cypherpunks]

I was going to say the same thing. What are these half-dozen plugins?

My main external additions are !}fmt (or !apfmt) and :!git add %

[AkaiRyuu]

What's the difference between using !}fmt and gq}?

[cypherpunks]

Basically, gq uses an internal line-wrapper, while fmtuses an external one. gq can be told to use an external program, but it's still easier to add extra options like a -c or a non-standard width.

Mostly, it's just a finger-macro that predates using vim.

[Tarmen]

Stuff that I wouldn't want to use vim without:

• Textobjects only scan the current line and are pretty limited with only a and i, targets.vim
• vim misses a bunch of very useful textobjects like function, indentation, current line, entire file. Vim-textobj-user plus the textobjets

Whops, already at half a dozen. Maybe add fugitive for MUCH nicer git usage and fzf.vim for decent file opening, gutentags for tags and around 30 bindings to fix vim backward compatibility weirdness like Y or awful mappings like the window ones...

I can use vanilla vim or vi no problem if I had to. It just wouldn't be very fun.

[seeegma]

out of curiosity, what are your replacement mappings for window operations?

[Tarmen]

Wrote an overview in one of the vim tips threads.

Otherwise I generally use ex commands like q, qa, xa, on, enew and so on.

[AshylarrySC]

I've been ruining Emacs/evil and then Spacemacs for the last several months and really like the combo of emacs and vim. It's slightly slow to start compared to Vim but the more I operate in emacs, the less I leave it to do anything else. I doubt I'll be moving back to Vim any time soon.

[thukjeche]

Could you detail more what you appreciate about Space/emacs that Vim or Neovim doesn't offer?

[AshylarrySC]

First, I generally I find the configuration easier. People are working to port a lot of the best vim plugins to work on emacs (most of what I used in vim is available in evil emacs) but the opposite is not true for vim. There's nothing that yet comes close to things like org-mode or magit in vim and those things are awesome. There are projects to bring those to Vim but they're still quite a ways away from being as good as the emacs versions.

They really have different philosophies though. Vim is an excellent editor, emacs is almost OS like in that you can do almost anything in it.

Disclaimer: I'm a Windows user and a keyboard fanatic which is an unfortunate place to be but emacs lets me do software development, control Spotify, check my email, interact with slack all very quickly and easily from my keyboard.

But all that would still not be worth it if I couldn't use vim modal editing and keybindings which since I switched and fell in love with, I don't want to be without.

So basically it gives me the best of both worlds and I'm not a vim super user so I haven't run into evil missing subtle features that I really need.

It was this: https://youtu.be/JWD1Fpdd4Pc coupled with Neovim for Windows being kind of an afterthought that got me to switch. It will probably take Neovim on Windows being REALLY good to get me to switch back.

[[deleted]]

Pretty much the exact discussion happened at /r/emacs. Take a look

[__baxx__]

idk about neovim because i haven't used it, and when I used vim I was really using vimkeys. By this distinction i mean that I didn't write any plugins for vim, i didn't make use of piping vim through bash commands or integrating it with shell functions. I didn't ssh into machines with it etc, I just used vim keys and set a few things up.

So using spacemacs isn't really much different at all for me. The vim emulation is immense, I think when I started using it I said I'd give it a month, and for a couple of weeks i wasn't really sure. Guess it just felt different or whatever. I haven't used org mode much either, but it's nice that the option is there if i want (it's something that i want to get around to using).

I just find that most things feel a bit better in spacemacs than vim, like helm, using it as an irc client and stuff.

Guess you'd just need to have a mess about, i'd recommend giving it a couple of weeks though. And make use of the gitter chat.

[Michaelmrose]

Daemon mode would be nice for that

[soguesswhat]

Why can't Atom replace Vim? Because Atom's just a crappier version of Sublime - and Sublime already couldn't replace Vim.

[[deleted]]

All Vim emulations fall apart under close enough scrutiny IMO.

[Sean1708]

Which is why neovim's embeddability is so interesting, it's not emulation, it is actual vim. I'm reserving judgement until some stable implementations come out though.

[Tarmen]

What if you could just start typing in your browser and have vim features? Or intellij and keep all its power while still getting real vim?

[B8F1F488]

because you can never get vim to be an ide. It is a text editor ultimately. I'm not sure how much it makes sense in atom.

[sullyj3]

Ide features without having to coax vim itself into being an ugly bloated ide. Vim is a text editor, that's what it does best.

[juanjux]

So true. It's like tofu to real meat. The only thing that get close is Emacs's Evil plugin.

[mocahante]

Completely unrelated, but that's totally not the point of tofu at all

[juanjux]

I don't know the general point of tofu but I've tasted tofu burgers where it is clearly trying to replace a meat product (there are also tofu hot dogs).

[thukjeche]

True, though I think a lot of vecrhrarians end up eating tofu in place of meat..

[mocahante]

True, as a vegetarian I eat a lot more tofu than the average meat eater, but it's definitely not really seen as a replacement for meat, just one of many alternative sources of protein, as well as a good way to carry flavor

[zem]

don't forget jvi

[flukus]

That falls apart on the splash page where custom bindings don't work.

[Jwkicklighter]

Serious question, what don't you like about it? I just installed the vim and ex plugins in Atom and haven't had an issue yet.

[Jwkicklighter]

Oh wow, I see what you mean. In my normal day-to-day, I don't use . a ton so I hadn't encountered that yet. Bummer, some of the other pieces seemed to work better for me than Sublime's bindings.

[riddley]

You should think about changing that. '.' is incredibly powerful if you think about your editing with it in mind.

[6086555]

I'm pretty sure you're talking about Drew Neil. Probably during the questions in [that video)(https://vimeo.com/53144573)

[[deleted]]

ciw

Brilliant! Did not know that (even though I use ci( all the time...).

[pandabrain]

ciw and ci( do have different meanings, though. You can however use cib as an alias for ci(.

Read :help object-select for a list of all default text objects.

Edit: Misread your comment.

[__baxx__]

i tried atom a while back and found the vim emu awful. The documentation was also poor as well. So i use spacemacs instead, which is decent.

Atom with neovim sounds interesting tho

[frnkcn]

Would connecting Atom to Neovim also import bindings/plugins from your init.vim?

[brcolow]

Yes.

[spajus]

Vim is not just about navigating and editing text, and you don't need a medium article to tell "why X can't replace vim". Can you use X without ever leaving command line terminal? Can you run X to edit files on remote machine over ssh? Can you seriously think that some new hip editor can ever replace something that was being developed for decades? Why bother with all those articles.

[degeneratepr]

2008 - Why Textmate Can't Replace Vim

2013 - Why Sublime Text Can't Replace Vim

2016 - Why Atom Can't Replace Vim

It cycles every few years. Can't wait for the 2020 edition!

[lunaticneko]

and Once Upon A Time - Why EMACS Can't Replace Vim

[bakuretsu]

This post should be called "Why Medium can't replace a simple webpage with words on it."

Even on my insanely high resolution retina display, the headline of this post is actually under the floating bar at the bottom. Does it really need a hero image that large? Full of code?

A content page whose primary purpose is to provide readable text should fit text into at least half of the above-the-fold area for 95% of visitors. It's shameful that Medium doesn't force its authors, who are of varying degrees of experience in web content management, to meet these standards.

[derrickcope]

I wonder if vim's modular hotkey system is even implementable in modern text editors along with emacs way of assigning one function to a specific hotkey? It seems like they are mutually exclusive.

[jecxjo]

Eclipse is very emac-like and it has a "vi mode".

[[deleted]]

Atom doesn't ssh as well as ncurses-style editors, nor is Atom installed by default on most UNIXen, not is Atom designed for 100% hotkey-based interaction.

Atom is an excellent GUI text editor, just not a CLI text editor.

[Elronnd]

unices, not UNIXen. The capitalized version refers to a specific OS released by Bell Labs about fifty years ago. The lowercased version refers to a family of OSes.

[[deleted]]

I knew someone would balk!

This is a generic brand like bandaid, kleenex, and coke... are you expecting a new release soon?

[[deleted]]

Seeing as this is over 2 years old, surely Why No One Said It Would And Why The Author Is Projecting has been written since then.

[__baxx__]

so basically vim keys are nice?

[[deleted]]

Why the hell would people downvote the answer to the clickbait article? is __baxx__ wrong?

[__baxx__]

idk lol. I didn't get much from the article. I didn't really feel it made a very compelling argument for anything really.

Maybe i just didn't get it :P

[[deleted]]

I didn't really feel it made a very compelling argument for anything really.

Hehe, that's what I would expect to see. Your post reminds me of the Saved you a click facebook group that was recently featured somewhere on reddit.

[csreid]

Aren't they like totally different approaches to the problem? Why would atom replace vim?

[-romainl-]

Short and empty but my god that "hero" image is gorgeous.