VIM Normalization

Linux users–including the ones at the Hackaday underground bunker–tend to fall into two groups: those that use vi and those that use emacs. We aren’t going to open that debate up again, but we couldn’t help but notice a new item on GitHub that potentially negates one of the biggest complaints non-vi users have, at least for vim which is the most common variant of vi in use on most modern systems. The vim keybinding makes vim behave like a “normal” editor (and to forestall flames, that’s a quote from the project page).

Normally vi starts out in a command mode that it calls normal mode. Pressing a key will execute an editing command, unlike most other modern editors which just insert characters into the open file. For example, pressing x will delete a character. This surprises most people who aren’t familiar with vi. In all fairness, there are other older editors that work this way, but they usually were not screen-oriented.

We keep waiting for the emacs/vi holy war to die off as the old guard retires or forgets how to use computers. You’d think more people would be using kate, atom, or some other really modern editor. But it doesn’t seem to die down–at least not around here.

We suspect the author is going to get threatening e-mails and won’t be able to go shopping without a disguise as the vi faithful will surely find this an abomination. Of course, emacs has several vi emulation modes, and no one has had any more than a car keying over that, that we know of.

We won’t revisit the editor war because we already have covered both sides of it. We’ll just try to get along, at least here in the bunker.

Filed under: linux hacks

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