What a strange comment, as if everyone wants or needs to use vi...
Believe it or not, most people don't like or use modal editing and vi-style keybindings. Yes, Vim is extremely popular, but it's still a minority of people who are typing text into computers. The vast majority of people out there are working in editors with "traditional" direct, modeless, editing and some variation of "standard" (aka Windows/Mac) or Emacs-ish keybindings. (Hell, even bash/zsh/readline -- effectively a single line text editor -- ships with a sub-variation of emacs keybindings by default.)
Personally, I use emacs -- when it's available. But something like this looks good for lower footprint systems.
Anyways, what a strange comment. Nano/Pico, etc. have been around since the super early days, I remember using Pico on a 486 back in 1993. Used to be the default editor on most systems that had the 'pine' email client installed, too, which was very common all over the place.
Seriously, the fetish people have for vim and for pushing a modal editor on people who didn’t learn on such programs is downright weird. Vim is definitely an insane default editor for anyone who’s not already a skilled fan of it. Micro even has mouse support, making the incredibly common task of “put something at a certain place in this config file” trivial, versus vim where you only need to memorize 12 random key bindings to become more efficient at keyboard cursor control than what a 7-year-old can do with a mouse.
I classify vim usage more as a religion than anything else. That doesn’t mean I don’t respect how effective that 0.5% of developers can be with it, but nearly no one I’ve met is as efficient in it as they’d be in VSCode, and about 95% are so unskilled in Vim that they get tripped up by just the basic mode switch and remembering :wq. They should not even be bothering with it. But sadly it seems 80% of people think it’s mandatory to use it to edit random files on servers, and as the editor for things like git.
Absolutely it feels disrespectful maybe in the context of Bram Moolenaar's recent passing, but... To me the vim thing is kind of cultish?
I have encountered many gatekeeping-elitists out there who act like this is some kind of entrance exam for competence in our profession or something. It's disturbing.
Early on I went with the emacs religion instead of the vi religion. That merely came down to the fact that my favourite MUD/MOO client was in emacs (it was amazing, BTW). And because emacs was on the HP-UX systems I was playing on. And because the modal editing in vi seemed crude and slow to me.... but in the intervening years I'd never thought of telling anybody around me that they should be using emacs or judged them for not using it?
But I've now encountered several people in the last 20 years who said things like "I wouldn't hire somebody who relies on an IDE to write code" always along with an aggressive promotion of vim.
Anyways, I think vim is neat. I respect it. But I won't use it... Don't Mode Me In.
Believe it or not, most people don't like or use modal editing and vi-style keybindings. Yes, Vim is extremely popular, but it's still a minority of people who are typing text into computers. The vast majority of people out there are working in editors with "traditional" direct, modeless, editing and some variation of "standard" (aka Windows/Mac) or Emacs-ish keybindings. (Hell, even bash/zsh/readline -- effectively a single line text editor -- ships with a sub-variation of emacs keybindings by default.)
Personally, I use emacs -- when it's available. But something like this looks good for lower footprint systems.
Anyways, what a strange comment. Nano/Pico, etc. have been around since the super early days, I remember using Pico on a 486 back in 1993. Used to be the default editor on most systems that had the 'pine' email client installed, too, which was very common all over the place.