You think VIM is a niche? neovim + vim is used by over 38% of developers according StackExchange survey. That is more than 1 out of 3 developer, closer to 2 out of 5.
I am not sure what is going on with here recently, maybe I have overgrown the place, or maybe everyday a little by little this place is getting filled with people who shouldn't be talking about CS.
As someone who have only used Emacs and Vim in the past 10 years, I wish you are right. But according to my observation, 90% of those 38% of developers only use Vim in when they are sshing to the server to update few config files or make simple edits to the scripts. When they do proper programming (like hundreds lines of coding in a project), they switch to other IDEs like VSCode. So yes I personally still consider Vim and Emacs “niche” editors.
Yeah, even if that is true, what part of a tool used by close to 40% of developers is niche?
niche /niːʃ,nɪtʃ/ (adjective) denoting products, services, or interests that appeal to a small, specialized section of the population.
It's niche /for development work/. Being used by a developer doesn't make it used for development. Or the most used developing tool would be the toilet.
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It's not. I use vim on a daily basis, but all I do with it is writing commit messages. The rest I do with an IDE or different editor. I'm surely not alone with that.
Even I switch to VSCodium when I write Go, for example, because the Go extension is just so good. I use it for medium- and large-sized projects, when I have to navigate through multiple files. There are ways to do it in Vim (I configured it), and Emacs, but sometimes it really is just easier to click since I am already using the mouse for stuff. There are people who never use their mouse, in which case I can imagine they use Emacs or Vim only.
And writing commit messages are to development in the same class as using the restroom?
Judging by the quality of most commit messages - yes.
> Yeah, because I use vim to turn on the shower.
You say that as if it's ridiculous. Isn't there an M-x shower-on command somewhere in Emacs?
While not going to argue that vim is niche, I don’t think it is. StackExchange surveys are likely highly unrepresentative and lack external validity. I do not believe 40% of developers use vim based on such an unvalidated and likely biased study.
In rhr group if hundred plus programmers I work with, id estimate less than 5 percent use anything but emacs and vim.
The other tooling feels niche to me.
Worth noting that a lot of people use those IDEs with vim keys
I've been using vim for 10+ years. The only commands I know are for saving, quitting, enabling line numbers and syntax. I'm sure 90% of the people in your statistics are like me.
I have met people who said they use vim for programming and don't know how to use commands like `%s` and `G` to do those basic things. I don't think most people understand how to use vim, and for those cases it's about the same as using any other editor with a find, and arrow keys and delete. That is, about as much an editor as any textarea in a browser.
If you create a vimrc, even an empty one, I believe you don’t have to enable syntax highlighting manually.
(The existence of a Vim config file disables Vi compatibility mode.)
I believe rather my own eyes over a long career than these surveys. It's certainly well below 10% if you don't count being just used for the lack of any alternative (aka sshing)
Placing greater weight in our own anecdotes over randomized trials and researches is what gave us some of the worst experiences in recent years.
StackExchange surveys are not “randomized trials” and only qualifies as the lowest quality research.
The group of devs makes all the difference.
In my current role (contracting at a gov dept in a part that uses Rails and PostgreSQL) it's about 30% using vim or neovim.
In the rest of the department where it's .net and Microsoft all the way, the devs likely have never heard of vim.
Based on my eyes, viruses do not exist. I can't see them anywhere. A sample size of "what I see" is not the best foundation for any claims.
If only more people knew about tramp-mode.
> people who shouldn't be talking about CS.
Dijkstra said computer science is about computers as much as astronomy is about telescopes.
I am not sure I agree with that, but it's definitely not about text editor choice.
I have a .vimrc file with LSPs and whatnot. But it was from 3 years back. These days I use VSCode and IntelliJ (depending on language) because they do so many things out of the box. I would say the choice of editor is the least consequential thing in one's understanding of "CS" and programming methodologies. On the other hand, using debuggers, profilers, monitoring tooling can have a real impact on how you solve some problems.
> I am not sure I agree with that, but it's definitely not about text editor choice.
It's definitely possible but I genuinely don't understand how people work for decades and still move their hand all the way to the arrow keys just go move the cursor to another word. Especially when the solution for this inefficiency is so accessible, existed for decades and is widely available in almost every tool. It's something that goes against the spirit of the medium which is all about automation.
It’s not the bottleneck of true productivity. It doesn’t matter any more than how close the pedals are together would affect how long it takes me to drive somewhere.
I disagree, the older I get the more aware I am of how impactful even minor friction is. Having "pedals closer together" does in fact make you press the pedals more often especially when you do that thousands of times per day.
> These days I use VSCode and IntelliJ (depending on language) because they do so many things out of the box.
While I don't appreciate the weight of an IDE, the time commitment to create (and maintain!) a config for vim/nvim with LSP, agents, etc., loses out to the relative ease of adding vim-style modal editing to the IDE.
>Dijkstra said computer science is about computers as much as astronomy is about telescopes.
He said many stupid things when it was outside of his domain of mathematics and algorithms.
According to StackExchange, Emacs is not even a code editor
It's an operating system
Most "regular" developers don't actively engage with StackExchange.. I would not believe that statistic at all. And I'm a 7+ years vim user.
Of course it is niche, that survey is quite skewed, and "using" doesn't mean doing development work there, rather than occasionally having to use it when using remote terminals.
I know only one person from my dozens of developer friends and colleagues who is using neovim.
> with people who shouldn't be talking about CS
Your argument is that calling Vim niche should exclude someone from being able to talk about CS. Please rethink your stance and your tone and consider if you’re helping the discussion.
This is a much more hostile and unproductive comment than the one you're replying to
Not only that but many new editors straigh up ship vim mode now like Zed, Obsidian etc. The main vscode neovim plugin¹ is very big too with over 500k unique installs. Clearly VIM is still widely popular and not going away anytime soon.
1 - https://github.com/vscode-neovim/vscode-neovim
Well, in a survey, I‘d say that I’m using it - but mainly for quick configuration file edits on servers where nothing else is installed.