Why I Still Use Vim
And no, it’s not because I can’t figure out how to close it.
I often get asked about why I use Vim as my primary editor, there is no particular reason for this, except that I ended up learning it when I moved over to Linux full time many years ago. I ended up liking it because I could edit my small source files on my quad-core machine without needing to wait forever for the file to open.
Sure Vim isn’t a bad editor, it’s highly extensible, it’s easy to shell out to the, err well shell, its everywhere so when you ssh into some obscure server you can just type vim (or vi) and you’re good to go.
But this isn’t a pitch about Vim being a great editor, that’s a matter of subjective taste. I’ve primarily stuck with it because it’s an extensible editor that doesn’t hog all the resources and kill my machines. Using Atom or Code I experience frequent freezes for several minutes when just typing a single character.
How much memory would you expect an editor needs to open the following C file?
#include <stdio.h>int main() {
printf("Hello, world!\n");
}
Memory Usage
The answer is… crazy.
