To be the devil’s advocate here, I think Vim needs less backwards compatibility, not more. In the sanctifying of “muscle memory” it completely stopped innovation, to the point of slowly drifting to obscurity.

Of the over a hundred students I taught when I helped out in uni, basically no one wanted to learn it, despite my enthusiasm.

And I sympathise. As I get older, I slowly grow more and more distaste for software that does not respect my time enough to give me properly-crafted defaults. Vim, in the age of modern editors, cannot compete. Not without 20 plugins with conflicting shortcuts and its self-imposed cliff of a learning curve.

And I’m saying this from a place of love; I’ve been using Vim (at least as a VSCode extension) every day for the last 10 years. But it never really grew up to the promise that the “Vim Creep” essay [1] gave me.

[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20190227031109/https://www.norfo...

:wq

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mahboi an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Vim is always going to be obscure because it's not obvious from looking at it how you use it. Muscle memory is the entire point. You don't need to change any keybinds, and I don't. I did feel discouraged to learn it at first because the people introducing it to me were doing pointlessly fancy things in it, some combination of custom keybinds and scripts to mass edit files.

As for default plugins, it'd be neat if they curated a set of optional ones, but nothing should be preinstalled.

	▲	jurf an hour ago \| parent [-]
		I dream of a Vim that would embrace colours and Unicode and can better communicate modes and context. I dream of a Vim that wóuld guide and teach me how to use it, so that it does not scare away people because they can’t close it. I dream of a Vim that embraces the needs of editing contemporary programming languages and fills in its UX gaps correspondingly (changes single to double quotes, anyone? Function argument order?). I dream of a Vim with native Git gutters. I dream of a Vim with sane default leader commands. I dream of a Vim where I see line numbers by default. I dream of a Vim where “Y” is consistent with other commands. I dream of a Vim that detects correct indentation by default. And that can visualise whitespace. I dream of a Vim where Ctrl+V does not have an assigned action that looks like it blocks input. I dream of a Vim that experiments with keyboard ergonomics, not just mnemonics. I dream of a Vim where quintuple-tapping Escape is not a habit I subconsciously form why learning it. I dream of a Vim I stumble on people discovering and exploring, and not have to persuade people for months just to try it.

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0xbadcafebee an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

The simpler and less contentious way to adopt innovations is to make a new tool with the innovation. For example, you might like https://helix-editor.com/

	▲	jurf 42 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Oh my, I will, thank you.