And they’ve lost. Everyone and their cousin uses Electron editors while showing up to FOSDEM on their MacBooks to discuss kernel development.
It’s already long over. We’re just starting to notice. The EFF is baffled - why do they yell in a void now, when just a decade ago they stopped SOPA/PIPA with dramatic effect?
The free internet and the communities that support it have lost their voice and their cultural support. Interesting. It couldn’t possibly be because they stepped beyond common sense and became an echo chamber amongst themselves… right?
(There are many things popular on HN, heresy to question, that even I as a participant emphatically do not support, and I’m sure I’m not alone. I’ve learned hinting at these views gets downvotes and bad faith feedback… so it’s hard to cry at the growing irrelevance. It’s deserved.)
Vim and emacs have definitely lost the main mindshare, but development on those projects is still very strong. Their main focus has never been on mass adoption, so how can you really compete with projects whose main goal is to eat the world?
There was a well attended talk "We lost the war" at the CCC congress twenty years ago. There are many reasons one can come up with why. It was always an uphill battle. You seem to delight in the current state of affairs due to other political concerns.
The most recent Stack Overflow survey have vim at 25% and neovim at 14% for the question "Which development environments and AI-enabled code editing tools did you use regularly over the past year, and which do you want to work with over the next year?" Even more interesting is that for the 2023 survey Vim and Neovim were at 22.3% and 11.8% respectively.
If the goal is to get more than 50% usage statistics then yeah, you can say they lost, but are dev tools only valid/useful/viable if they have a majority of developers using them? I say they've had tremendous success being able to provide viable tools with literally zero corporate support and a much smaller user base.
Across the world the balance between conformism and dissent is getting heavily tipped toward the conformism. Subcultures that are dissent from the mainstream cultures are thus getting toned down.
This is actually really exciting - it means in somewhere in the next 5-10 years we'll inevitably (well, hopefully if the cycles of history are anything to go by) see a bunch of new dissenters rise up with their associated subcultures - and the mass diffusion of the Internet will help them find their people regardless of which country they live.
I was just thinking the other day, I haven't read a vim vs emacs flame-war in years.
The vim and emacs guys had to join forces to flame the greater evil - Electron-based editors.
A noble fight if ever there was one.
And they’ve lost. Everyone and their cousin uses Electron editors while showing up to FOSDEM on their MacBooks to discuss kernel development.
It’s already long over. We’re just starting to notice. The EFF is baffled - why do they yell in a void now, when just a decade ago they stopped SOPA/PIPA with dramatic effect?
The free internet and the communities that support it have lost their voice and their cultural support. Interesting. It couldn’t possibly be because they stepped beyond common sense and became an echo chamber amongst themselves… right?
(There are many things popular on HN, heresy to question, that even I as a participant emphatically do not support, and I’m sure I’m not alone. I’ve learned hinting at these views gets downvotes and bad faith feedback… so it’s hard to cry at the growing irrelevance. It’s deserved.)
Vim and emacs have definitely lost the main mindshare, but development on those projects is still very strong. Their main focus has never been on mass adoption, so how can you really compete with projects whose main goal is to eat the world?
neovim community is very active.
There was a well attended talk "We lost the war" at the CCC congress twenty years ago. There are many reasons one can come up with why. It was always an uphill battle. You seem to delight in the current state of affairs due to other political concerns.
Big tech no longer cares about appearing to be revolutionaries fighting for good and ppl are disillusioned
The most recent Stack Overflow survey have vim at 25% and neovim at 14% for the question "Which development environments and AI-enabled code editing tools did you use regularly over the past year, and which do you want to work with over the next year?" Even more interesting is that for the 2023 survey Vim and Neovim were at 22.3% and 11.8% respectively.
If the goal is to get more than 50% usage statistics then yeah, you can say they lost, but are dev tools only valid/useful/viable if they have a majority of developers using them? I say they've had tremendous success being able to provide viable tools with literally zero corporate support and a much smaller user base.
Now it’s flamewars over AI agents.
It's thought leaserships over AI agents.
Aren't they progressed to Windows vs Mac and further up along timeline, to Claude vs ChatGPT?
It's because Neovim just crushed both...
Across the world the balance between conformism and dissent is getting heavily tipped toward the conformism. Subcultures that are dissent from the mainstream cultures are thus getting toned down.
This is actually really exciting - it means in somewhere in the next 5-10 years we'll inevitably (well, hopefully if the cycles of history are anything to go by) see a bunch of new dissenters rise up with their associated subcultures - and the mass diffusion of the Internet will help them find their people regardless of which country they live.
[flagged]
Indeed, and they used to be almost unified. Not so much anymore.
What's EFF?
Electronic Frontier Foundation, a non-profit championing the hacker ethic.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation
https://www.eff.org/