Inertia for one, ubiquity for another. Vim (or at least vi) is available everywhere that I want to do any kind of text editing: An ARM SBC, my old WinXP laptop, my newer Win7+Linux machines, the old HP-UX at work, all the Linux VMs that I ssh into, etc. After almost 15 years of use, there are certain things that feel like a missing limb if they aren't present in another program.
Atom's not attractive to me. It's a ~100MB near-IDE written and extended in web-oriented languages that I'm only lukewarm on learning, and which can't be used remotely, or on all the computers that I'll touch in a given month.
Sublime looks nice, but not so far ahead of vim that I want to take the time to learn it and pay for a license. I suppose that it's worth a trial, but I haven't gotten around to it.
> Sublime looks nice, but not so far ahead of vim that I want to take the time to learn it and pay for a license. I suppose that it's worth a trial, but I haven't gotten around to it.
I use vim these days, but to be fair to Sublime, the license isn't really required. Every so often (maybe every 10 times you close a file?) it asks if you'd like to buy a license, but there's no functional restrictions on an unlicensed copy and no consequence for perpetually ignoring the pop-up.
I wouldn't worry about getting around to it too soon. Sublime is great, and it has a plugin to support normal/insert modes and most vim bindings, but I've found that anything I can do in Sublime I can do in vim, and I can't run Sublime on remote hosts. It's an editor, it's always going to be subjective preference.
> but to be fair to Sublime, the license isn't really required.
I understand that, and that's great for trying it out and deciding if I'd like to stick with it or not. Eventually, I'd buy the license, if I liked it well enough. Either I'd spend a bunch of time and learn some concrete reasons for why I didn't want to use Sublime, or I'd find a new best friend, pay $70, and change my workflow to doing more work locally rather than on the remote machines.
It may be worthwhile, and it may not be, but there's a guarantee that I'll be spending a bunch of time finding out. In the end, I was just trying to give a concrete answer for why I was using vim rather than something newer and trendier.
Atom's not attractive to me. It's a ~100MB near-IDE written and extended in web-oriented languages that I'm only lukewarm on learning, and which can't be used remotely, or on all the computers that I'll touch in a given month.
Sublime looks nice, but not so far ahead of vim that I want to take the time to learn it and pay for a license. I suppose that it's worth a trial, but I haven't gotten around to it.