That meme clearly comes from an emacs fanboy.
emacs
I actually don’t know what emacs means. I only remember having struggles in understanding anyone who likes vim, because it mostly just confused me. But Probably its just what you are used to. The Meme is still funny, though.
Don’t discount the possibility that some people that use vim, are old enough to remember using vi, over a modem connection. When you know the keyboard shortcuts it can be a lot quicker too even now.
Vi is incredibly snappy when it came to commands.
Want to save? :w
Want to quit? :q
Want to save and quit? :wq
Very elegant. GUI WYSIWYG doesn’t come close when it comes to commands.
vim is a little hard to get into, but from there its benefits pay off with lots of features. On the other hand there is emacs, with an even steeper learning curve (*cough* long inconvenient button combos!), but it’s considered so powerful, some say it’s a separate operating system.
They say Emacs is an amazing OS, with the best calendar, to-do list, email client, etc. Just missing a good text editor.
emacs has a steeper learning curve? You can M-x <type stuff> tab to figure out how to do stuff, which is easier than Vim for learning IMO
What’s even more crazy is when you’ve used vim exclusively for 30 years to the point where you sit down at someone else’s computer and you try to use their editor and you are completely lost. You fumble around like you’re an elderly person who doesn’t know what a computer is, type random letters all over. You look senile.
But then you show them on your computer how you can record a macro of your key commands and then use a regex to match different blocks of similar text and apply the same commands all at once. And because you used navigation based on words and lines rather than characters it all just works.
I think that’s true of all editors, though. I ended up on the intellij side of things, and it means I’m clueless about VSCode’s key patterns. I’ve only picked up ctrl-p so far, and keep having to remind myself “this is shift-shift in Microsoft”
It comes from the words “Eight Megs And Constantly Swapping”.
Yeah, the name hasn’t aged well…
It’s about 80MB on my machine right now… What is an absurd amount of memory for an empty editor, but I had to sort top by process name because there are some 10 pages of stuff that reserve no memory at all, 2 where it goes from non-zero to 100MB, and a fucking lot of pages of stuff using more than 100MB.
WTF is my computer doing with all that?
For my vim journey it was the draw of being able to quickly navigate and manipulate text without ever needing my hands to move away from the home row on the keyboard, and being willing to put in the time and effort to push past the learning curve.
:q! this meme, man
The editor so good people never learn to leave it.
Out of curiosity, I wondered what the original meme was. Found them and thought I’d share them:
Here’s the original: https://i.imgur.com/kERuZkW.jpg
And here’s the one that this is based off (slightly different): https://i.imgur.com/HFwENsd.png
BTW, just in case you didn’t know, you can put images directly in your comment with this:
vim is so last year. have you people heard of GitHub’s new ‘Atom’ IDE? I think it’ll be the next big thing 😊
