Jul 04, 2020 21:00:00

History of almighty text editor 'Vim' and the reason why it spread widely to developers

While many text editors that work with GUI, such as Microsoft's

Visual Studio Code and Sublime Text , are being released, the command line-based text editor ' Vim ' is still used by many developers about 30 years after its release. It has been. Software engineer Nikola Đuza explains on the blog why Vim has become so popular with developers, along with the history of Vim.

How Did Vim Become So Popular | Pragmatic Pineapple ????
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Đuza describes Vim as 'almighty' and also describes it as 'a place where people sometimes get caught'. Certainly, there are distinctive features, such as proper use of the normal mode and the input mode in Vim, people who do not know only text editor of the desktop app is confused is the point. However, a 2019 Stack Overflow study found that Vim is in the 5th place in the environment rankings used by developers and is used by many developers.

To understand why Vim became so popular, it's best to go back to the beginning of Vim's history, Đuza. The earliest programming was to punch holes in the punch cards and then run the program by having the punch cards loaded into the computer in the correct order. The image is a punch card with 62,500 sheets, but the size of the program recorded on this punch card is 4.5 MB.

As computer processing power and storage increased and programming evolved, punch cards became a little inefficient. Then line editors such as ' ed ' appeared. ed can also be used on the latest Linux and macOS. If you type 'ed' in the terminal and press enter, you will move to the text input screen.

You can enter text by typing 'a' and pressing Enter to enter insert mode. If you want to end the insert mode, enter '.' and press the Enter key.

You can save the text to a file by typing the file name where you want to write the text after 'w' and pressing Enter.

To exit ed, type 'q' and press Enter. Đuza said that this series of operations in ed is similar to Vim.

ed was followed by 'em', which is 'editor for mortals', and in 1976, it was 'extended ed', which was based on em, ' ex ' Will be developed. In addition to the function of em, ex also has a 'visual' mode that displays the entire file on the screen. This was the beginning of ' vi ', and in 1979, vi was introduced as a command in the OS.

Even now, Vim can use the command system of ex. If you open Vim and enter ':', you can edit text with the same operation system as ed that was the source of ex, such as entering text after 'a' and ending with '.'.

Displaying the entire text of a file on a computer at the time was very difficult, and some people thought it was a waste of resources. However, Đuza says that the benefits outweigh the dissent and it becomes common to open the contents of the file on the screen while editing.

A few years after vi appeared, many clones of vi appeared. One of them is 'Vi Improved', that is, 'Vim'. Vim developer

Bram Mulliner said that when he tried using 'STEVIE' which is a clone of vi, he found that many of vi's commands could not be used. 'Vi Imitation' was released by Mouliner while adding compatibility while maintaining compatibility with vi, and is later renamed as 'Vi Improved'. Đuza says that the vim command appeared in version 2.0 of Vi Improved and is still in use today.

by

Rob Collier

Đuza says Vim gained fame today because of 'a lot of great features' and 'high compatibility'. Đuza says that the efforts to maintain backward compatibility have led to the accumulation of good ideas that have been adopted by many systems and made available everywhere.

'I'm not saying I should switch to the Vim editor, but learning and trying to configure Vim will help improve my skills and abilities,' Đuza said. 'Which is important? It's not what you use, what you do with it.'

In addition, 'h' 'j' 'k' 'l' is used to move the cursor of Vim, because there is no dedicated key for moving on the keyboard used by vi developer Bill Joy at that time This is because the cursor movement was assigned to 'h', 'j', 'k', and 'l'.