[dmortin]

I wonder how long vim and emacs can stay vibrant. I've used emacs in the last 20 years, so I stick with it, but new generations who are trained on vscode and such are less likely to use such "old fashioned" tools.

Surely, there will still be emacs and vim users 50 years from now, but the user numbers and the community power will diminish as the graybeards gradually leave this plane.

[Ferret7446]

You can't really compare vim and emacs beyond a superficial level.

Emacs is fundamentally an interactive shell, like Bash. It has a text editor, also like Bash. It is of course generally more powerful and featureful than Bash.

Hence, people sometimes live in Emacs, because it's a shell like Bash or Gnome or KDE.

I use Emacs and VSCode. VSCode for some code repos, and Emacs for general computer usage.

Meanwhile, Vim is a text editor. It is neither a shell nor an IDE, although it can be adapted somewhat into an IDE.

I also use vi (alongside Emacs and VSCode). vi is for editing some text if I am not in Emacs for some reason or if I temporarily borked my Emacs config.

(I also use ed, for when I'm in a dumb terminal or I don't want to lose screen context.)

Vim or Emacs "dying" is not really an issue, although Vim or Emacs losing enough mindshare to keep them up to date as competitive IDE options, maybe that might happen.

[qazxcvbnm]

Just for the other side of the picture, I live in vim and use it as my terminal multiplexer. Vim’s my shell. I have thousands of buffers in vim and practically never leave it. I’ve used terminal multiplexers for years before I switched to vim in that capacity and never looked back. The integration it’s allowed between all my buffers and commands and shells is difficult to match in my opinion.

[abraxas]

Lots of editors and IDEs came and went while Emacs/Vim persisted. Through my three decade career I recall the ascents and downfalls of tools like BRIEF, CodeWright, NEdit, JEdit, TextPad, Notepad++, Visual Studio, JBuilder, Eclipse, Sublime and a few others so the cemetary (or hospice in some of those cases) is large.

[the__alchemist]

Sublime, nor Visual Studio are in the cemetery.

[ookdatnog]

I'm sticking with emacs for now because it is the only editor I have encountered that actually works well in conjunction with a tiling window manager; by which I mean: it works well as a single process accessed through multiple windows (here I mean "windows" as in OS windows -- internally Emacs calls this "frames") although it has features for managing panes internally, it doesn't insist that you use them and each windows is very lightweight (no thick sidebars, embedded terminal, etc that are hard or impossible to remove). Vim offers the second feature but not the first (each window is a separate process), most other editors I've encountered do not offer the second feature.

[sevensor]

Kakoune does this too, and it’s amazing with a tiling window manager. On a big monitor, I can get 4-5 terminal emulators across, and in any of them, at any time, I can attach a kakoune client, copy and paste between buffers in different windows, edit the same file in two places at the same time, close all the clients and reattach later, and so on. Emacs is the only other editor that does this, as far as I know.

[rob74]

To put it into perspective: vi was already 15 years old when Bram decided to write vim for the Amiga, which had a GUI - so vim already looked out of place on the Amiga too! - but it was still successful, of course (I think) mostly because of being ported to Linux pretty much at the same time as Linux got started.

[anthk]

Amiga by default had an Emacs clone on every install.

[joelthelion]

To me, vscode is unbearably slow. I think that alone is enough to keep vim alive.

Also, I don't really miss anything from more advanced ides when in vim. There are great packages for almost anything.

[atorodius]

I use VIM bindings in VS Code. Always assumed many do but might be wrong

[xarope]

Ditto.

I went from vim to neovim, but the LSPs for python/go(lang) for large files (not that large, maybe 10k loc) seem to really bog it down (back then, no idea if it's better now), whereas with VS Code it was still performant enough. So I ended up using VS Code with Vim bindings.

And yes, with ad hoc work, I still end up using system vim when just doing simple edits (e.g. adding a line to README.md or somesuch)

[flohofwoe]

Me too (there doesn't seem to be plugin that's completely free of issues unfortunately). Vi/Vim is basically the universal text input model which allows me to transcend text editors and platforms. Also I quite often find myself starting a vim instance inside the VSCode terminal for quick text edits.

[orlp]

I use the "VSCode Neovim" extension which lets me use a real Neovim instance inside VS Code, including my personalized vimrc and a lot of plugins. Not all plugins work but if they're just textual good chance they do.

[wyclif]

Do the Vim bindings work in VSCodium as well?

[hnfong]

This google trends graph is very illustrative: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=emacs,vi...

emacs is surely on a decline, but it’s not obvious that Vim is on the same trend.

This matches “theory” and anecdotal evidence: the people who chose emacs probably didn’t like modal editing, and when “better” IDEs came along they just switched. But there’s nothing like Vim (except editors specifically inspired by Vim), and those haven’t gotten any traction if only because every one of us Vim users have hjkl muscle memory burned into our brains.

[jiscariot]

Google translate says vim = 'I came' in portuguese, so I guess that explains Brazil.

[Cthulhu_]

I've never been able to use vim productively, at best I use it to write commits, do interactive rebases and some remote server configuration (cheap VPS for a website); I never really "grew up" with it and stuck with Notepad++ and Eclipse when I started out in software development nearly 20 years ago.

I will concede that VS Code is the default for many, but I just can't get productive in it anymore. I mainly use intellij, which has its own issues. But I can't say I've ever mastered any editor, the closest was sublime text, and that mastery mainly came from being able to use cmd+p and global search effectively.

[skydhash]

You probably have a good reason for not doing it, but mastering your editor is a great power up. Especially when the task can be ruled based and repetitive. Like a loop of find-select-transform action.

[makeitshine]

Vim may die, but vim-mode will definitely be around.

[PreHistoricPunk]

Speaking for myself, I only used Neovim because of its modularity and the keybindings. Imho, everyone should give the basic Vim keybindings a chance at least once and see if they like it.

At this point, however, I do not really use Neovim anymore. I switched to Zed, the Vim emulation is pretty good and customizable and most functionality I want is already there along with incoming support for Jupyter Notebooks. VSCode also has these features.

It is fun to use Vim/Neovim but unless I need to use it, I doubt I will return to it.

[arp242]

Some time in the 80s (or maybe even 90s?) Bill Joy said he just uses ed, even though he's the original author of vi. That worked for him. I believe Linus still uses that 1980s Emacs-y clone that he kind of maintains for himself. jwz uses some flavour of Lucid Emacs/XEmacs from who-knows-when instead of "standard" GNU Emacs.

In the end, it doesn't really matter what other people are using. If Vim (or Emacs) works for you, then you can basically keep using it until the end of time since code are just text files, and these things don't really change all that much (outside of encodings, which is the biggest problem with older editors – but I don't see UTF-8 replaced any time soon, if ever).

I don't really know what the kids these days are up to, but I don't think it really matters. I guess there's still few Bill Joys around using ed, but the existence of vi, Vim, VSCode, or anything else doesn't really take away anything for them.

[mmooss]

Emacs and Vim have remained popular through several generations. What do developer surveys say? Vim was near the top a few years ago, iirc.

[krykp]

With nvim, there has been quite the resurgence of Vim. Good software tends to be resilient. I believe both emacs and vim will see many, many more years.

[eviks]

https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2024/technology#1-other-tool...

emacs is 4% vs VSCode 73%, so it's not popular, though vim still is

[mordae]

One of the kids in my computer club found himself to be an avid Helix user. I guess once the dust settles around nvim's approach to LSP and stuff, give or take 5 years, it will build itself quite a following, including young people. I think the hackability is attractive.

[runevault]

I think Neovim helps with this, though last time I was using it (via... bootstrap? One of the prebuilt addon packs) at some point a Mason update broke my LSPs for multiple languages and i went back to VS Code on my Linux laptop because I didn't want to fight with it.

[mobilemidget]

I ran screaming from VS when I noticed how much resources it used and what software it copies on remote servers in case you want to work remote. Did this improve at all in the last year+?