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Comment by archy_ | Hacker News Reader

I see these Vim-enhancment posts a lot. If you need to install a mountain of plugins just to make it usable, why not use a more modern editor? Seems like nostalgia for the Unix greybeard era, possibly some eletism for when someone who isn't intimately familiar with their config has to ask for help to use their machine.

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Vim is activly developed, with major new features like a terminal emulator and async arriving in the latests versions. You need to better define “modern”.

can't speak for everyone, but as a software engineer, it's about getting as close to my ideal editing workflow as possible. with vim i get to stay in my terminal, and my fingers rarely leave home row. it's just quicker to do things and hard to go back once muscle memory sets in.

and since i write code for a living, the time spent hacking vim to work just how i want it to is definitely worth it. with a "modern editor" i'd probably spend a similar amount of time configuring it to be vim-like, so might as well use the real thing :) i use neovim tho lol

Exactly. I use a modern editor whenever I'm working on one of my main computers, and the only time I use vim is when I'm working on a remote server and can't mount the drive remotely (or where mounting would just be a pain). Because of that, I don't want any plugins when I use vim as I'll probably be using it on a new machine every time, and setting up my environment would be a waste of time.

Setting up your vim environment is as cloning a git repository that contains your .vim files. Takes me about ~60 seconds to have vim up and running with all my favorite plugins. That's faster than you can download and install any other text editor. It's what I've been doing on just about every machine I've used for the past 5 years.

There are situations where git is not installed or I can't download those files for security reasons set by administrators, but those situations have been pretty rare for me.

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