Vim and the future of editors

As is evident from the image below, something about my last post clearly struck a chord with a lot of people.

Traffic spike

Traffic spike

I don’t know if it was “vim” or it was “sexy”, but somehow this post landed up on Reddit. This is the closest I’ve come to being slashdotted — for that one day, Reddit drove nearly 95% of the traffic to my site. Also, before you start jumping to conclusions from the graph above, let me put some numbers out there. On average, my site gets anywhere between 200 to 400 visitors daily. On April 18th, my site got 7000+ visitors, an order of magnitude more than I normally get. That is the spike you see, and now the traffic is back to normal, thank you very much.

Since a lot of people seem to be interested in Vim hopefully, I want to discuss the space of text editors (in particular, editors for programming) and where I think we are headed.

The first observation is that both of the giants on the editing world — Vim and Emacs — are ancient by any standards. Depending o how you look at it, I think it is fair to say that neither editor has evolved significantly in terms of the underlying code, architecture and usage model in the past two decades, if not more.

The second observation is that despite the large number of editors out there, IMHO few have any significant mind and market share other than Vim and Emacs. Obviously there is Eclipse, Visual Studio, IntelliJ etc.

And so I wonder, what would the text editor landscape look 5-10 years down the line? There are many who would say if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. However, I’m a big believer in change, and I think over time, change is inevitable. However, at this point I don’t know what, if any, substantial change is happening in the text-editor arena. No new editors with fundamentally new ways of manipulating text or amazingly compelling features are emerging. I actually don’t mind reinventions of the wheel either, as long as the reinvention delivers a much better wheel. For instance, the Vim source code is not the most modular, extensible or maintainable. And it is in C — not that there is anything wrong with it, but I think an object oriented language is better for a complex piece of software like Vim.

The only recent buzz has been about Textmate and the many clones it has since inspired. I’m really looking forward to Yzis reach a usable milestone. What are other promising editors out there that you are excited about?

Posted in Software, Technology, Tools | 3 Comments

Vim is still sexy!

NOTE: This post is not about the editor war — so please don’t try to start one either.

I use vim as my editor of choice. As I note above, to each his own editor.

However, Vim is not what one would call a “sexy editor”. After all, it has been around (in some shape or form) since before I was born. It does not generate as much buzz in the blogosphere and is not the darling of all the new kids on the block, as some of the other editors out there. Not many Ruby on Rails developers, for instance, seem to be using Vim for coding (actually, saying that a lot of RoR developers seem to be using Textmate is probably more accurate, but you get the point). It is written in C and does not use git for hosting. The Vim website leaves much to be desired. In the social networking world, Vim barely has a presence.

Vim attitude

But, I contend that Vim still has a lot to offer. Here are few of the things you can check out to spruce up your Vim usage:

I’m also very happy to see the number of Vim related repositories on github. Bottomline: don’t give up on Vim. Vim is still sexy baby, you just need to look in the right places :)

Update: I’m including a screenshot of Xoria below.

xoria, GUI, C

Posted in Tips and Tricks, Tools | Tagged | 20 Comments

Gillette: the best a man can get?

I think it is fair to say that shaving, as an activity, is critical to humans, as a species. And as we have all been conditioned to believe, Gillette is the best a man can get to address this most pressing of problems.

Gillette

I beg to differ.

Allow me to bring to your attention the series of innovations Gillette has “pioneered” in the past three decades or so (courtesy Wikipedia):

  • Double-blade razor: 1971
  • Triple-blade razor: 1998
  • Battery powered razors: 2004
  • Razor with five blades: 2007
  • Razor with rear trim blade (for a total of six blades!): 2007

Notice a trend? Going from two to three blades took nearly three decades. Going from three to five blades only took three years. Thats an exponential growth! If the trend continues, I predict that we will see a new razor from Gillette later this year that will have 6 blades or more.

No seriously, think about this for a second: the only real innovation shaving products have seen in the past 50 years is increasing the number of blades. And somehow we should believe that this is the best we can get? And this company is actually making money?

I’ve been using Gillette for more than a decade now and I can tell you that my shaving experience has not gotten one bit better. For a long time, I used the two blade Sensor Excel and I was very happy with it. Until Gillette executed what is known as planned obsolescence. I could not find blades for my razors anywhere. I was hence forced to “upgrade”, and I went with the latest Gillette Fusion. Even with 5+1 blades and the satisfaction of a tiny AAA battery buzzing the razor, shaving has not gotten any better.

I did use a Shick Quattro one time and I actually think their blades are a lot better and long lasting. As soon as I have used up all of my Fusion blades, I am going to give the Quattro another try. This is an industry that could use some serious innovation.

Posted in Humor | 9 Comments

Web services I wouldn’t mind paying for

Here are some web service I wouldn’t mind paying for, simply because of the value they add to my day-to-day life. Note that some of them already have paid plans, it is just that I haven’t reached a stage where I actually need to upgrade. All I’m saying is that these websites have enough real value add for me to be worth for real money.

mint.com

Having all my financial data pulled in a single place is fantastic. Previously, I used to have to go and log into 5 different websites to check on all my bank accounts and credit cards. Add to that the ability to examine spending trends, watch your investment grow (or crash, as is the case with the current economy) over time, alerts for fee, low balance and over-budgets etc, and you’ve got a killer service in your hands. Of course, Mint is not without its problems, but the benefits far outweigh the snags.

passpack

Passpack has been a real time saver for me. I have written about web based password managers before, and so far Passpack has been just fantastic! I just wish they would bring back search-as-you-type…

RTM

I’m a big believer in using the right tools you help you work smarter. RTM is a great way to offload your todo list from your brain. It has all the key elements of a good web service good — a great UI, keyboard shortcuts, the ability to email tasks, integration with services like IMified, a nice API (so you can use desktop apps such as Gnome DO or Quicksilver to interact with RTM without ever leaving your desktop).

Posted in Software, Tools, internet | Tagged , , | 8 Comments

Where is CS curriculum at top schools headed?

The blogosphere was abuzz today with news of a course on developing iPhone applications in Stanford being available for free. I didn’t understand what the big fuss was about. In fact, if anything, this news has me worried.

Image courtesy: flickr.com

Stanford is undoubtedly one of the top most engineering schools in the world. In my mind, a computer science curriculum at such top schools should do just that — teach computer science. Courses that cover computer architecture, software design, operating systems, networking, graphics, theory, databases, algorithms etc all make sense to me. But a course to teach students how to use the API on a commercial SDK? I think other organizations (vocational institutes, community colleges etc) are better suited for such courses. What is so great about such courses being taught at Stanford or MIT or Berkeley? I personally think those resources could be used better elsewhere.

It seems this is part of a larger trend. More and more schools are designing courses that are aligned with the hot buzz-words in the industry, perhaps in order to attract applications. For instance, you can learn how to provide Software as a Service (SaaS) using Ruby on Rails (RoR) at Berkeley. Stanford has another class on building Facebook applications.

I would much rather see a class on say “building scalable web services” and have Facebook, Twitter as case studies in the class.

Posted in Technology | Tagged , , | 4 Comments