Hacker News Reader

Comment by gbog | Hacker News Reader

Sorry, but Vim is not beautiful nor "simple". It is, certainly, beautifully crafted, but this is another meaning of the word.

In fact, this reminds me French painter Braque being shown a fake Braque, he said: "this is not my work, it is beautiful". What I mean is that "beautiful" in the common sense, the one that applies to clothes, girls, gadgets (including Apple's), commercial movies, 3D games, etc., this superficial aesthetic quality not important.

In this sense, Vim, with it's fixed width font, black background, pure-text help, etc. is certainly not beautiful, and therefore a bit of a stranger on a Mac where, apparently, so much money and neuronal activity has been spent to beautify its OS, its casing, its font aliasing, every single icon and even its boxing.

Gosh, look at the Vim logo and tell me by which miracle it can have so much sex-appeal in a Mac environment? (Or has it? dasil003 says no in an uncle comment, maybe he is right.)

View on HN

Again, I think you are missing the point.

Notice how I said it 'can be'. Out of the box, Vim is not very attractive, but with a bit of work it actually looks rather nice (yes, I did modify the application icon, but that's not really what I want to get at here).

Some of this beauty is subjective due to the syntax highlighting used, configuration of invisibles, etc, but that's configurable and therefore can be customized to your liking.

There are clean and elegant fixed with fonts, which again, you can choose whichever you prefer.

What I meant by simple was the complexity (or lack thereof) of the UI. It only shows you some basic information that is readily important, everything else is hidden away in various keyboard shortcuts. This makes it more complex to use, but it also means the beauty of your work, the code, is at the forefront with little distractions. Hell, I even turn off scrollbars.

At the risk of starting a discussion of opinions over my choice of syntax highlighting, here's a screenshot of my vim setup:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/18782/macvim.png

I don't really understand how you can call this ugly, unless you're referring to my taste in syntax highlighting.

You can add all the make-up you wish on Vim's face, it will still be Vim, like your screenshot show plentifully. And Vim was not designed with aesthetics in mind. It is not the product of a designer or a "industrial design is kind" company. On the contrary, I would say. Vim is a very nice piece of software done by a hacker for mostly hackers, and the highest concern was probably extensibility, consistency of the commands, orthogonality, etc. (The doc was obviously a primary concern too.)

So, my first point still hold, where Textmate is a ease, Vim is a kind of an intruder in a Mac / Ruby / Designer-first set-up.

Are we talking about the same thing here? We are talking about a TEXT EDITOR. The INTENTION is to EDIT TEXT.

Vim does EXACTLY that. It doesn't add silly buttons that require you to remove your hands from the keyboard to the mouse to interact with. It doesn't add silly gradients that get in the way of showing you text. Aesthetically it's incredibly simple, and interactively it's incredibly complex, but IN A GOOD WAY. Not everything, especially tools, should be easy to use and learn. A well designed application knows its target and exploits it. Vim does exactly that. It doesn't mean it's a catch all tool for everyone, generally those kinds of tools end up half assed.

And for the record, I am actually a designer, I used to use TextMate, I now mostly use Vim. The UIs are similar in their sparseness. The 2 small beefs I have with Vim is the title bar text being overly verbose and and the rounded corners added by Lion on the bottom are rendered a bit glitchy.

TextMate on the other hand, while a decent text editor, has perhaps the most hideous project drawer around. Wait, actually, TextMate was never 'designed' as you describe it either. It just uses built using Mac OS libraries. I would think that if you were going to harp on design so much you would at least bring up the more 'designed' text editors, like Coda and Espresso, not TextMate.

I don't see where Textmate and Vim differ in an aesthetic sense when it comes to working with the editor. The chrome on the two may differ, but when you use the same font and syntax highlighting colors, they are going to look the same

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/9380/VimVsTextmate.png

Reply on news.ycombinator.com