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> I have way more stuff to keep in my head than I have room for and I can't afford to expend more than about 0.0001% of context on a text editor.

I can't say I agree. To me this is equivalent to saying "I have way more music in my head than I have room for and I can't afford to expend more than about 0.0001% of context on a piano". The tool you use for 8+ hours a day is extremely important and even small gains will pay dividends over the long run. The more efficiently the text editor allows you to do tasks, the more time you have to think about other tasks.

I think that it's wrong to assume that vi is the only route to deep muscle memory. Heavy mouse users develop blindingly fast Fitts’ Law targeting. And if you need essential simplicity, they have far fewer commands.

Bill Joy, the original author of vi, saw the vi commands as a problem, not a solution [1]:

    The fundamental problem with vi is that it doesn't have a mouse and therefore you've got all these commands. In some sense, its backwards from the kind of thing you'd get from a mouse-oriented thing.

Yeah; I have a minimal vimrc with cursorline, wrap, line number, some other option to make arrow keys jump to next line from end. I set a different colorscheme on each machine when I have to deal with multiple machines. That's it.

I functionned this way for a very long time, plain vim with 5-6 options in .vimrc, no plugin (aside for the very occasionnal syntax highlighting like jinja.vim iirc). I kept this setup for more than 10 years mainly to stay compatible with multiple systems (in my case Solaris/Illumos, Linux, MacOS and even Windows).

But I made the switch to nvim / LazyVim. And it is actually pretty good. I had in mind those endless hours of config and lua scripting. At the end of the day all I needed actually was to remove a plugin (folke, which messes with my 's' key) and learn to use the package manager to setup the languages I wanted.

Having things like GrugFAR or lazygit at the tip of my finger is actually a quality of life improvement. I could do without those for sure but they fit my workflow and muscle memory well.

Still wish there was something better for ansible ; I should have gone with pyinfra with my current job's project but I only learned about it after writing 12k LoCs of ansible :'(

I never edited the default config much.

But then I discovered https://www.lazyvim.org/. Turns your copy of NeoVim into an IDE.

I still haven't edited the default config much, actually. But now I'm probably 2x to 3x as productive in vim (nvim, now) as before.

P.S. If you decide to check out the LazyVim config, I highly recommend reading https://lazyvim-ambitious-devs.phillips.codes/ all the way through. There's a lot of new keybindings to learn, but Dusty Phillips's book gives you a gentle on-ramp to learning most of them.

> that muscle memory

Once in a while I will mistakenly dump a string of keystrokes into insert mode or another application. That literal output always amazes me because the construction of those strings is so far removed from my brain's "main thread".

The inverse is if I try to write a helper function or explain to someone else how I did something they observed and I need to methodically document each action. It's like trying to describe how to walk or something.

Likewise, I'm also not very demanding of my text editor. I used vi on any *nix systems and Notepad (the original one, not the new bloated monstrosity) on Windows for most of my work. Navigation, basic editing, and searching are probably all I need.

Same. I barely edit default configs. I also mostly use emulators provided by whatever ide I use.

This is interesting to me. vim was my main editor since the start of my career and I was very fast with it, much faster than my peers with an editor. at the outset of llm’s, I ended up using a plugin that would utilize bindings to help me edit faster. with claude code, and how fast it is making changes across many files, I almost never use vim anymore, or vi, unless I need to inspect files in a container/server.

Funny, because the only reason I fire up VSCode is to chat up the bots because we are AI-compliant now and the customers pay for it.

I tried nvim integration but it was half-baked and I can't even use nvim as an editor because they removed cscope support. nvi back in the day also dropped support for cscope because it wasn't vi enough. Hell, there is barely a working source repository for it. Only vim supports it out of the box. Am I the only person using cscope in 2026?

As of current day, I only use vim with no plugins to edit source code.

Yes indeed, same here!

> The comments about LLM contributed code seems like a specific axe to grind that otherwise detracts from a nice history lesson.

The existence of vim classic would be hard to explain without reference to LLMs.

I started learning vi around the same time, but in my case (since I was expecting to work on Unix systems for decades, which has proven true) it was "because it'll always be there." I.e. if you're SSHing into a server to fix a problem, it's possible that /usr/bin/emacs won't be there (perhaps the problem you're fixing is that /usr isn't mounting), but you can nearly always count on /bin/vi being available: if you can access the server at all, you will be able to access vi, so at least learn its basic keystrokes, our prof told us.

That advice was not entirely accurate (sometimes vi is in /usr/bin/vi, for example), and the merging of /bin with /usr/bin has made it kind of a moot point. (EDIT to add: Though the fact that busybox includes a basic vi implementation has kind of un-mooted the point, actually). But I first started learning vi because I figured I would need it professionally, and when the modal-editing workflow "clicked" for me, I figured out that I had just learned the editor I would want to stick with for years.

And although vim replaced vi and nvim replaced vim in my finger-macros, that has remained true to this day.

The inclusion of comments about LLM generated code don't bother me and will probably be quite revealing (for better or worse) when people read this post in the future.

Also, I have not been following the d2d development of vim closely after Bram's passing but I can't help but wonder what he'd have thought about this approach to development of vim.

The comments about LLM contributed code seems like a specific axe to grind that otherwise detracts from a nice history lesson.

Seems like an interesting fact for those who don't follow the development of vim/neovim.

Yes, it almost feels like inserting politics to an otherwise apolitical discussion. Just unnecessarily charges the discussion and makes one not want to engage with the article.

Jokes aside, I don't really see the appeal of a demake of helix; it only really makes sense to me as "vim but far more concepts integrated as first-class features rather than addons"; take that away and you have vi with less muscle memory. So, kakuone with the serial numbers filed off.

I, for one, am happy that every terminal I've ever used still supports Emacs shortcuts. Useful, for instance, to cut a whole line and paste it later on (ctrl+k, ctrl+y).

Simple tool? Visual text editor is probably the most complicated piece of software in coreutils.

Neovim supports the mouse by the way.

I'm a GUI user too but using helix-mode (like vim-mode but IMO more intuitive) in my GUI editor, zed, gives me the benefits of both.

...and presumably quit vi once you're done!

And he doesn’t use any config it seems. No syntax highlighting, no line numbers, plain white text on dark background.

Totally agree, Vis really hits an spot between modern feel without losing what made vi great. The structural regex is a game-changer.

Bram is a glaring omission in the vi family tree, too. Though, they'd have to draw the line somewhere (i.e. include nvim creator?) and maybe it's better leave individual people out.

Interesting. Besides the navigation commands and the most basic of shortcuts, I've never been able to learn vi keybindings, even when I was actively trying. Half the time I still can't remember whether j or k is up.

I actually learned VI using DOS and the Watcom C/C++ compiler and 32 bit dos extender, as it included a vi clone.

Maybe it should be included in the list. It can still be downloaded from the openwatcom project, https://openwatcom.org/ftp/manuals/1.5/vi.pdf

Helix's selection-action feels way more natural to me than vi/vim's action-selection.

I really want to use Helix, it clicks with me so much more. But I do not want to learn how to use Helix for development. I want to be able to continue using VSCode. And last I checked, the VSCode extension was not very good. I also use Vim keybindings in Obsidian.

The moment VSCode and Obsidian support improves, I am switching immediately.

Early tractors were attempted in 1800s but most farmers ignored them as they were complex, expensive and occasionally exploded[1].

Sounds familiar.

[1]: “However, even though steam-powered tractors provided an alternative to draft animals, the size, mechanical complexity and risk of explosion rendered these tractors unusable for most farms.” https://www.volocars.com/blog/history-of-tractors-in-agricul...

Pretty well if you consider the "bio" label, which is a set of practices not using all of the tech. They can ask for and usually get higher prices for the products.

Granted, it's more about chemicals than tractors, but still quite close to the spirit of the comments. Bio approach sacrifices some tech advances.

I'm more in the vim camp, but I will say emacs has one of the best GUIs out there. Everything that works in the terminal still works (great keyboard accessibility), plus you get additional benefits, like proper window separation that isn't just a text character drawing an imaginary line (so copying lines of text with the mouse when you have a bunch of splits is easier). There's also image support, you can connect to a server with TRAMP, open up dired, and view remote images right in emacs. I always thought that was cool.

Vim on the other hand never felt like it benefited much from a GUI, or like it had a very good one available. I just use neovim in a terminal.

I expect the vast majority of Emacs users to use the GUI rather than the TUI. In fact, the way I learned Emacs was by clicking on 'Help' in the menu bar and then on 'Emacs Tutorial'.

With vim/nvim/gvim etc, you can use both.

Granted, the UI is still TUI, so items like panes, tabs, nerdtree, quickfix, :help windows etc are rendered with characters, but you can drag borders, mouse-select text, click files, focus panes by clicking, scroll-wheel, etc.

Being able to choose is a good thing. Use what works for you. I prefer the terminal, but not as hard core as switching to a TTY and never see a GUI again...

I think you are wrong. Luddites don’t seem to exist any more, at least not on this board. Luddites had the courage to smash machines. People on this board might have complaints about LLM but then they will say well what can I do, protesting these developments is not on the Story Board.

Of course this is a total digression.

vi was never progressive, it was "the Ancients knew it better, the present sucks, these kids have terrible taste, return to the one true Past"