Top all-time · #19335
Greg Alexander
Personal blog · galexander.orgprogrammingculture
Greg Alexander writes Radiolab from WNYC, a personal blog at galexander.org about programming and culture. Since 2013, 4 different Hacker News readers have linked it 4 times. The last post was in 2013, but the archive is still widely read.
Too few sampled comments (3) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Greg Alexander's Vim critique as a source for the claim that Vim's text insertion is slow, exponential in cost. Commenters cite it while comparing vi, nvi and Vim.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 3 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- /vim_sucks.html2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2013-05-21
What Hacker News says?
Algorithms matter. Do you know how Vim inserts text? It's exponential. It's worse than a shell loop spawning a new echo process every iteration. http://www.galexander.org/vim_sucks.html
Comment linking /vim_sucks.html
on “Do you know how much your computer can do in a second?”Submitted C Ain't Dead (2020) as a story · 3 points
HN discussionA step up from ed but a step below vim is nvi. I've always preferred nvi over vim because: 1) there's no lag when I scroll up or down through a file line-by-line, 2) it shows a list of matching files by default when using tab completion in command mode (same as bash), vs picking the first matching filename, and 3) it uses fewer resources when you screw up ( http://galexander.org/vim_sucks.html ) I used to think that…
Comment linking /vim_sucks.html
on “Syntax Highlighting Off”vi defaults to vim on some of my machines, to nvi on others. I like to have access to both. vim pros: syntax highlighting is often nice (though when I really care about highlighting, I usually use Emacs), vim's :help is very nice, vim is usually installed nvi pros: the small TCB I prefer when I'm root (`find /usr/share/vim -name \*.vim | wc -l` just gave me 1103 results, including hundreds of scripts that might be r…
Comment linking /vim_sucks.html
on “Poll: Which is your primary text editor?”