New comment by pippoit in "The vi family"

pippoit — Wed, 13 May 2026 07:49:55 +0000

The first work i had to use vi and screen on a terminal, it were in 90s . I was used to dos editors ( edit, turbo C ... ) and windows . It was a pain. copy and paste at first was a nightmare. Copy from one file to another ,with named register and # was an hell ( it was vi not vim so only 2 files a time ,the actual edited and the prior ones ). I hated that place, that work, those tool for a while . I got so used to vi, to modify columns with regular expression or macro that now, more than 30 years after , vi/vim is the first thing I install on a PC and when i have to modify a file, or to do something complex, the first and last resort for doing it without python or perl, is always vi . But the beginning at 25 years old was very hard because it was a kind of editing even at those time completely out of my usual way to work . Now it is the only editor that i open and use without thinking . VSCode is great, tons of features, but when i see all those menu, if i can, i use vi . I would add a point. for a while i went behind vim features, try to learn them and use them but they are too many and i often work on different machine so i can not move my setup everywhere. Learning the "old vi way" of doing things (motion, regexp,registers, macros ) can seem "limiting", but at the end you can do quite everything with the same tool .

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New comment by pippoit in "The vi family"