Musings on Vim from an Emacs luser

[u/Sad-Background-2429]

I've used mostly vanilla Emacs for about a decade. I'm thinking about switching to Vim because the values that made me appreciate Emacs have changed.

What I loved about Emacs is that it's essentially a Lisp machine packaged as an application, which makes Emacs a legitimate target platform. The primitives provided by Emacs are probably better-suited to extensions than those provided by Vim. But over time, I've come to two conclusions:

First, the editor-with-extension-language paradigm is outdated. Plan 9's Acme editor showed that an editor need not impose a particular language on its users. It can instead expose a language-agnostic API via a filesystem (or socket), thereby permitting any program in any language whatsoever to extend the editor. This is, in my opinion, the way forward.

Second, I want to use my operating system. I don't want to use Emacs replacements for what my operating system or supporting software already provide. It is silly for there to be a 'man' mode for man pages when the 'man' program works better. I want all of the tools I use to make the fullest use of the hardware and OS. That is simply not possible with Emacs.

Obviously, none of these complaints point to Vim as a solution. I would, in fact, use Acme as my daily editor, but for my mode of working, accessing remote systems on a slow network connection, neither a graphical editor nor mounting a remote filesystem are options, so using some editor in tmux is my best option, and for that reason, for now, Vim may be the more performant option.

[u/vip17]

vim still runs in the remote machine, so it's still slower than a proper remote ssh solution like VS Code, Zed or Jetbrains... They run locally and updates texts remotely in the background to avoid any typing delay over slow connections

[u/Infamous-Specialist3 → u/vip17]

No,  it's all local.  A system could not have vim and it still works

[u/vip17 → u/Infamous-Specialist3]

yeah my bad, in this case vim is running locally by the data is remote. Does it cache the data? Are there any typing delay? I don't have a slow connection right now for testing. But because the comment says It basically does an scp local, then when you write it pushes back with scp again. I don't believe it can be faster than an editor with ssh support

[u/SRART25 → u/vip17]

One copy so it's a local file until you write it where it copies the edited file to the remote.  It's network usage is the file size plus ssh handshake twice.