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Comment by digitalzombie | Hacker News Reader

> How did Vim become so successful?

I recall the early days of RoR crowd were pushing for Vim too. It was hipster in term of adopting new and awesome things and RoR crowd really push some new things. This was when the editors war was still a thing.

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In the early days of Ruby on Rails Textmate was the recommended editor. DHH used it in the original blog screen-cast showing off features such as snippets and fuzzy file finding that weren't commonly supported in Vim in 2005/2006

Tim Pope's plugins came later.

I’m assuming RoR is Ruby on Rails here? If so, this seems extremely odd considering the age of the two things.

I don't get your statement. But to clarify I was talking about how the crowd in RoR have a high uptick on vim editors. I was reminiscing on the old days of RoR that may have contribute to some more people adopt Vim.

A casual google shows this including a poll in 2014: https://www.sitepoint.com/editor-rubyists-use/

There's even a quora question too: https://www.quora.com/Why-do-so-many-Rubyists-use-VI-M

And a plausible answer "Why rubyists went with vim over emacs could stem from the popular rails.vim plugin from Tim Pope."

I don’t understand why pushing vim around that time would be considered pushing “new” things is all

Simple. My muscle seems to like vim.

One reason I switched from Emacs was because it took longer to launch

I've launched Emacs once in the last 3 weeks (and it's still running). :)

I don't see this gets mentioned much but this is one of the larger reason I never use emacs. When quick editing files on remote servers, snappiness is really nice, even with bunch of plugins activated.

You use it wrong. You're supposed to keep your local emacs running and use tramp to login to the remote server. That way you still have your emacs config with you and don't have to load it again.

What vim users don't seem to understand is: I never restart emacs. Mine stays running for weeks, even months at a time. When I change my emacs config I just run the code. I don't restart emacs.

> You use it wrong

Self-deprecating humor ?

https://www.engadget.com/2010/06/24/apple-responds-over-ipho...

No. We're talking about highly specialised tools for professional engineers, not some dumb electronics made for children and old people. You're using the tool wrong. Emacs is not vi.

You understate how great tramp is. It is what allows me to simply not care whether a file system is local or remote. They all behave like local file systems under tramp.

Describing Emacs using English is necessarily an understatement. It can only be properly described using Lisp.

If a program cannot be described by a human language then the logic is flawed.

Besides what the others said, a well written config with autoloads and idle timers should start very quickly.

You can run emacs as a daemon and run emacsclient -c to open a new emacs window connected to the existing instance.

This is instant no matter how complicated your config. You can also edit remote files via tramp so you never have to leave your local emacs instance.

This means that the proper comparison is instant access to your customized instance with your plugins vs instant access to whatever environment you can sync with all machines you intend to access.

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