It’s powerful, lightweight, and ubiquitous. If you do sysadmin work, remote into a random machine, and need to update a config file, it probably has vi installed already. It’s also extensible enough to use as a full IDE.
Personally, I like it because of how fast it feels and because I can do everything while keeping my hands on the home row of the keyboard.
I only recently switched from vim to VSCode and I refuse to use any editor without vim emulation.
Regular expressions for quick and efficient and precise search and replace, modal editing which allows me to type di" to ‘delete inside current double quotes’ (needs vim-surround plugin), typing 123gg to go to line 123, press % to switch between any pair of marching braces, brackets or parentheses, and all sorts of such efficient goodies.
It’s not only efficient, vi has a whole concept, a philosophy how you can build quick editing commands. It’s not like remembering random shortcuts like Ctrl-C Ctrl-V. Once you understand the language, it becomes second nature and you can translate something you want to do into 5 key strokes which would need 100 otherwise or would involve the mouse and clicking and selecting etc.
I’m not even that good at vim, I’m just using the surface features.
It has very good reasons why every notable editor provides some form of vi editing emulation.
It’s powerful, lightweight, and ubiquitous. If you do sysadmin work, remote into a random machine, and need to update a config file, it probably has vi installed already. It’s also extensible enough to use as a full IDE.
Personally, I like it because of how fast it feels and because I can do everything while keeping my hands on the home row of the keyboard.
Software developer here.
I only recently switched from vim to VSCode and I refuse to use any editor without vim emulation.
Regular expressions for quick and efficient and precise search and replace, modal editing which allows me to type di" to ‘delete inside current double quotes’ (needs vim-surround plugin), typing 123gg to go to line 123, press % to switch between any pair of marching braces, brackets or parentheses, and all sorts of such efficient goodies.
It’s not only efficient, vi has a whole concept, a philosophy how you can build quick editing commands. It’s not like remembering random shortcuts like Ctrl-C Ctrl-V. Once you understand the language, it becomes second nature and you can translate something you want to do into 5 key strokes which would need 100 otherwise or would involve the mouse and clicking and selecting etc.
I’m not even that good at vim, I’m just using the surface features.
It has very good reasons why every notable editor provides some form of vi editing emulation.