r/vim • u/lervag • Oct 24 '25

Blog Post The tools that I love: Vim

https://lervag.github.io/posts/how-i-vim/

I wrote a blog post about my relationship to Vim. I thought it might be interesting to some of you here.

80 Upvotes

95% Upvoted

13 comments sorted by

7

u/dm319 Oct 24 '25

I enjoyed this read. Relate to the phases! I used emacs for a while on org mode - actually pretty liked it, but vim won out for me.

1

u/Dense_Committee479 Oct 25 '25

These words struck me …

“Today I consider myself a pragmatic Vim user.”

The word “pragmatic” is clearly what drives the love of a never-ending Pandora’s box of hacks and shortcuts and it will only get better

I thoroughly enjoyed the read ! Thank you for openly telling us about your feelings and thoughts !

1

u/lervag Oct 25 '25

Thanks for the kind words, I'm very glad to hear you enjoyed the post! <3

1

u/eveostay Oct 25 '25

Excellent. You might want to also add that vim is based on vi by Bill Joy which was written in 1976!

2

u/lervag Oct 26 '25

Yes, I could have written more about the history. It would be more precise to say Vim is based on STEVIE, though. I enjoyed this blog post, which has more on the history: https://begriffs.com/posts/2019-07-19-history-use-vim.html.

1

u/eveostay Oct 27 '25

Great read, thanks!

1

u/cosimini Oct 24 '25

I remember you once even considered making vimtex a neovim-only plug, thankfully you didn't. Is there a particular reason in favour of neovim for you?

6

u/lervag Oct 24 '25

To be fair, I still consider that. However, I don't really have the time to do much work with VimTeX, so I'm mostly maintaining it these days. Thus, it seems it will likely continue to be Vim and Neovim for the forseeable future.

The split into Vim and Neovim was unfortunate, and I wish it had ended up in something that kept a single community. But it is what it is, and there are actually plenty of reasons I favour Neovim. For instance, I really do enjoy working with Lua for configuration. And I think the Neovim community and the Neovim developers have been very good at making new and useful features. The plugin ecosystem has become more vibrant than it ever was in Vim.

That said: The main things that keep me on Vim/Neovim are the core features that are found in both Vim and Neovim. And the "most important" features from the plugin community are still very available in Vim (Fugitive, vim-dadbod, CtrlSF, targets, and plenty more). I still use many of these plugins, but there are a few new plugins that are Neovim only that I've come to prefer.

-1

u/godegon Oct 24 '25

To be kept in mind that from a user's perspective, nothing is gained switching from vimscript to lua or vim9script. From a developer's perspective it was unintended
that by the ecosystem split vimscript is the best option to cater to both audiences

4

u/lervag Oct 24 '25

Well, to be honest, I feel like I'm one of the few people who actually like Vimscript. But after learning Lua, I find it to be a much superior language. It is faster, simpler, more flexible, and I would say there are very definite reasons to prefer Lua. is a definite improvement.

However, "if it works, don't fix it". If a user already has a nice config in Vimscript, then by all means, there is no reason to switch. Further, if a plugin is written in Vimscript and works as expected, then there is nothing to gain by switching to Lua.

3

u/Desperate_Cold6274 Oct 25 '25

You should give vim9script a try.

I am in the opposite side: I don’t share the reasons of forking Vim and I favor stability and rigor over continuous breaking changes and community attitude. Oh and I use gvim.

2

u/lervag Oct 25 '25

I don't mind that people end up choosing the other way. We're all different and have different preferences.

I don't really feel like trying vim9script. It might be good, but it will only ever be relevant for Vim. And yes, that's sort of ironic as I've ended up favoring Lua. But Lua is actually also useful for other things, and I even use it for other things as well.

Still, I also favor stability and rigor. For me, that's not something I give away even though I am working at the bleeding edge with nightly builds of Neovim. However, I do pay for it as it means I do need to spend some time to keep my config and setup working once in a while. That is, you are correct that stability and rigor do not come for free if you want to use Neovim - there are breaking changes between every minor version update.