Hacker News Reader

Comment by cicero | Hacker News Reader

I don't see anything shameful about using old software if it works well and suits your needs. Yes, new editors like SublimeText have advantages, and if you prefer them over Vim, use them. However, I've seen many projects undergo a rewrite in order to move to new technology, but they never matched the utility of the old technology they were trying to replace. I'm not saying it can't happen, but that it often doesn't.

I don't use Vim much now because I work a lot in Windows, and Vim got me into the habit of hitting escape when I was through entering text, but escape cancels the input in a lot of programs. However, I still use it in the shell or when I need to make certain global edits.

I wish Neovim great success, and I might use it someday if it meets my needs, but not just because it's new technology.

View on HN

Sorry, I didn't mean you should be ashamed about using old software. What I meant was that we should be ashamed that other people are using old software.

I am helping my girlfriend to learn Javascript, and it hurts inside that every once in a while she gets confused with something I have to explain her it's because the author of the language made rookie mistakes/dumb decisions 20 years ago.

You may know this, but the author of Javascript was under severe time pressure, and wanted to just implement Scheme but got overruled by management.

Yeah, it's unfair of me to point the blame at mr Eich with the 'the author'. Javascript definitely was no small feat and has withstood the test of time very well. My point lies more in the '20 years' part of the argument, that in all that time we couldn't get these wrinkles ironed out.

>My point lies more in the '20 years' part of the argument, that in all that time we couldn't get these wrinkles ironed out.

Javascript has the requirement of backwards compatibility. The limitation is not technical. It's disingenuous to suggest it's so simple to replace these things or it's extremely naive.

Look at the recent HTTP redirect article for example. Something as simple as redirects have been implemented incorrectly for a long time. Browser vendors are well aware of it, but they cannot change the behavior because it will break every existing site that expects the broken behavior.

You should be more impressed with the things that last 20 years, not embarrassed. It means they were actually engineered well enough to be a good general solution.

I don't see tinco saying it is simple to replace these things. Where do you see that? I suspect you're unconsciously framing tinco's position this way...

Another possible way to interpret the 'ashamed' statement is that tinco is simply saying we should be trying harder to move forward when we are using such old technologies with such warts. Why can't we get rid of the warts? We should try harder. Perhaps this is what tinco is saying? I think at least equally plausible to the naive position you're projecting onto tinco...that it's 'simple' to replace these things.

Kudos to Neovim for making the effort! It is certainly appreciated.

Or maybe eich was a terrible programmer and it shows. Serious my some of the is stuff are major blunders. No amount of time pressure can be used as an excuse for such poor design.

> Vim got me into the habit of hitting escape when I was through entering text, but escape cancels the input in a lot of programs.

Does ^[ cancel input in any programs ? AFAIK vim understands the ^[, not the "escape key". the key labeled "ESC" creating a ^[ is a convention used in terminal emulators.

Not that it's going to help you now, but if you had trained your fingers to hit ^[ rather than the escape key (or even ^C but that has other semantics in windows whereas I don't think ^[ does), I wonder if you would be having the same problem now..

^[ just generates ASCII character 0x1B, aka Escape.

Vim understands "escape" to be 0x1B, pressed by itself (not as part of a longer escape sequence).

Not practical. ^[ is a two-key combination, so more RSI-inducing. And you need escape a lot, especially in plain vi.

And the ESC key has been generating ASCII 27 on keyboards for a long time. It's definitely not just terminal emulators.

>I don't use Vim much now because I work a lot in Windows, and Vim got me into the habit of hitting escape when I was through entering text, but escape cancels the input in a lot of programs. However, I still use it in the shell or when I need to make certain global edits.

some people discourage the use of the Esc key and prefer to use Ctrl-c instead. I'd recommend to disable it and force to use the Ctrl-c combo. I did it and completely forgot about the Esc key(actually I find it more comfortable)

I have a habit of typing 'jkjk...' in command mode when I'm thinking, and eventually I got sick of stretching my fingers to escape into command mode so I just used 'jk' as my escape sequence.

    imap jk <Esc>

Of course now in non-vim editors I sometimes have to undo the occasional jk sequence... But my point is that the escape key can be whatever people want it to be.

Use ctrl-c only if you never want to be able to use a count with an insert command, e.g. 10a=<Esc> .

Reply on news.ycombinator.com