From Newsgroup: comp.editors

Disclaimer: This is not intended to start an Editor War, just curiosity
about the Google search result statement and interest to understand it,
where it comes from.

About the editor Learning Curves I got this result:
Notepad++ (Flat) << Vim (Steep) << Emacs (Extremely Steep/Spiral).

Two things I'm curious about that here...
First I'm wondering that Emacs is considered more difficult to get into
than Vim; the story I usually have heard the past decades was that Vi/m
is much more difficult to get into (and Emacs more "simple/intuitive").
Has the valuation of difficulty commonly changed recently?
Then, what has that "spiral" to mean when talking about learning curves?
(I have the graph of functions in mind where you see the proficiency of learning plotted over time, and I have a problem imagining how a spiral
would look like in a 2D-graph.)

Janis
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From Newsgroup: comp.editors

In article <10qqnkv$in2o$1@dont-email.me>,
Janis Papanagnou <janis_papanagnou+ng@hotmail.com> wrote:
...

About the editor Learning Curves I got this result:
Notepad++ (Flat) << Vim (Steep) << Emacs (Extremely Steep/Spiral).

Two things I'm curious about that here...
First I'm wondering that Emacs is considered more difficult to get into
than Vim; the story I usually have heard the past decades was that Vi/m
is much more difficult to get into (and Emacs more "simple/intuitive").
Has the valuation of difficulty commonly changed recently?
Then, what has that "spiral" to mean when talking about learning curves?
(I have the graph of functions in mind where you see the proficiency of >learning plotted over time, and I have a problem imagining how a spiral
would look like in a 2D-graph.)

I put "emacs learning curve spiral" into DuckDuckGo, and got a few results. Here is some text from one of the Stacks thingies:

URL: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/10942008/what-does-emacs-learning-curve-actually-look-like

--- Cut Here ---
It's a good joke, with some definite truth to it.

I always assumed the author meant it as an indication that the more you
learn about Emacs, the more possibilities for further learning open up to
you. Hence the infinite spiral.

Or to put it another way, the more you know, the more you realise what you don't know :)

--phils
--- Cut Here ---

I don't know any more than that, probably because I've never had an
interest at all in learning emacs.
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From Newsgroup: comp.editors

with <10qqnkv$in2o$1@dont-email.me> Janis Papanagnou wrote:

Disclaimer: This is not intended to start an Editor War, just
curiosity about the Google search result statement and interest to
understand it, where it comes from.

Correction(?), I guess. What follows isn't "Google search result" per
se. That G-Bot (whatever its name, not a user) is translating observed
vibes into grammatically correct sentences.

About the editor Learning Curves I got this result:
Notepad++ (Flat) << Vim (Steep) << Emacs (Extremely Steep/Spiral).
Two things I'm curious about that here... First I'm wondering that
Emacs is considered more difficult to get into than Vim; the story I
usually have heard the past decades was that Vi/m is much more
difficult to get into (and Emacs more "simple/intuitive"). Has the
valuation of difficulty commonly changed recently?

Here comes reconstruction. Certain (dominating?) demographics maintains distinction between IDEs and editors; then dumb editors and feature
editors; and then, ta-da, feature editors and those-two-editors-gray-beards-cant-stop-fighting-about.

Now, true story to explain the latter. I was once (~15y ago) confronted
by not-greybeard who was *proud* to be into 'nano'. I understand he was
trying to be friendly. I asked if that's possible to script that 'nano'
thing. He didn't get the question -- there was silence and no sign of
attempt to find an answer.

And about perceived curves. When certain demographics discover that
under-hood scripting they are confronted with ex, that is kinda shellish
(thus more familiar), and lisp that isn't unlike shell at all. I
speculate that this mysterious spiral is into lisp but emacs.

*CUT* [ 4 lines 1 level deep] # no wars

p.s. I've been told on multiple occasions that neovim is all the rage
now. Except it's not written in rust, that might be a show stopper
here.
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Stallman's goal for GNU is even simpler: Freedom
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From Newsgroup: comp.editors

On Sun, 05 Apr 2026 15:39:39 +0000, Eric Pozharski wrote:

p.s. I've been told on multiple occasions that neovim is all the
rage now.

Is that the one that uses Lua as its extension language?
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From Newsgroup: comp.editors

In article <10qul9q$1n0m9$3@dont-email.me>,
Lawrence DOliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> wrote:

On Sun, 05 Apr 2026 15:39:39 +0000, Eric Pozharski wrote:

p.s. I've been told on multiple occasions that neovim is all the
rage now.

Is that the one that uses Lua as its extension language?

I would imagine that reading the Wikipedia page on "neovim" would answer
most of your questions. I won't bother to replay it here.

But, yes, it looks like supporting Lua as an extension language (and the primary one going forward) is a large part of the deal. It says that
support for "old" VimScript (pre-V9) is there, but V9 is not supported,
which is OK with me since I never saw the point in VimScript9.

Until this moment, I was basically uninterested in neovim, since I saw no claims implying that it was actually *better* than vim, and as vim seems to
do everything I need it to do, there didn't seem to be an reason to be interested in neovim. It always seemed like their main claim to fame was
that the code base was "better" and that the VIM source code base had
become "old". Well, as a user, I don't care about any of that. I mean, I
can understand why the developers might care, but as a user, it is
irrelevant to me.

But this thread has gotten me interested to the point where I might
actually try snagging the source code and building it. According to the Wikipedia page, there was a release 7 days ago (3/29/26).
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From Newsgroup: comp.editors

On 2026-04-06 00:18, Kenny McCormack wrote:

Until this moment, I was basically uninterested in neovim, since I saw no claims implying that it was actually *better* than vim, and as vim seems to do everything I need it to do, there didn't seem to be an reason to be interested in neovim. It always seemed like their main claim to fame was that the code base was "better" and that the VIM source code base had
become "old". Well, as a user, I don't care about any of that. I mean, I can understand why the developers might care, but as a user, it is
irrelevant to me.

A friend not long ago made positive comment about Neovim. So I
inspected its "features" (or notable differences) list just to
recognize that it provides nothing at all new and relevant for
me as an editor user.

I seem to recall that some folks wanted features in Vim that
Bram had rejected, and so they decided to create an own variant
of Vi.

The same effect you see if someone is enthusiastic by some own
idea and decides to create an own completely new variant of some
product. This focus-splitting behavior for own satisfaction I
generally consider not to be the best decision for the community.

Janis

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From Newsgroup: comp.editors

In article <10r0g8n$in2o$3@dont-email.me>,
Janis Papanagnou <janis_papanagnou+ng@hotmail.com> wrote:
...

A friend not long ago made positive comment about Neovim. So I
inspected its "features" (or notable differences) list just to
recognize that it provides nothing at all new and relevant for
me as an editor user.

I seem to recall that some folks wanted features in Vim that
Bram had rejected, and so they decided to create an own variant
of Vi.

The same effect you see if someone is enthusiastic by some own
idea and decides to create an own completely new variant of some
product. This focus-splitting behavior for own satisfaction I
generally consider not to be the best decision for the community.

Very interesting. Thanks for posting.

I agree with what you wrote.

Note, BTW, that I've made lots of changes to both bash and GAWK at the
source code level for my own purposes, but I've never felt an urge to
create any kind of official fork.
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Conservatives live in a fantasy world where businessmen are good people.
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