On Mon, 17 Oct 2011, Donald Allen wrote:
I believe strongly in The Principle of Least Surprise.
I agree that significant surprises should be avoided, but we all have
different ideas of what constitutes a "significant" surprise, and
these expectations are usually based mostly on our previous
experience.
Since Vim /is/ so powerful, surprises to at least some people are
unavoidable.
Vim is not the only application I use regularly that saves the search
history (if a vimrc exists which does not explicitly set the 'viminfo'
option to a value that turns it back off), and it is definitely not
the first to enable this feature by default.
I realize that "just because others are doing it" is not a good enough
excuse for Vim to do it, but Bram has taken the position--rightfully,
in my opinion--that certain features of Vim should be enabled by
default when a vimrc exists, for multiple reasons.
Some of these reasons, from my perspective:
* People often use Vim for its power, and having to enable each of the
commonly used extensions is a burden that can, and arguably should
be avoided, because...
* ...The expectations of many who use Vim are that since it has a lot
of powerful enhancements over Vi, those features will be available
by default.
* It reduces the number of "how do I..." support requests to the Vim
Users' list (as well as other unofficial support forums for Vim).
* In a bizarre way, it can reduce the number of a certain type of bug
report.
To me, it would be a significant surprise if Vim /did not/ enable most
of its "baseline" enhancements by default. The unfortunately reality
is that this is never going to make everybody happy; people will
always disagree about what Vim's defaults should be.
Originally some feature enhancements of Vim were not enabled by
default, even with the presence of a vimrc, but Bram turned them on
after discussion on this list about whether they should be, including
the possible drawbacks. This same process is usually applied when new
features are added. My point is that Bram is not capriciously
enabling his personally preferred feature set.
- Christian
--
Paper clips are the larval stage of coat hangers.
Christian J. Robinson <[email protected]> http://christianrobinson.name/
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