Are we talking about the same thing here? We are talking about a TEXT EDITOR. The INTENTION is to EDIT TEXT.
Vim does EXACTLY that. It doesn't add silly buttons that require you to remove your hands from the keyboard to the mouse to interact with. It doesn't add silly gradients that get in the way of showing you text. Aesthetically it's incredibly simple, and interactively it's incredibly complex, but IN A GOOD WAY. Not everything, especially tools, should be easy to use and learn. A well designed application knows its target and exploits it. Vim does exactly that. It doesn't mean it's a catch all tool for everyone, generally those kinds of tools end up half assed.
And for the record, I am actually a designer, I used to use TextMate, I now mostly use Vim. The UIs are similar in their sparseness. The 2 small beefs I have with Vim is the title bar text being overly verbose and and the rounded corners added by Lion on the bottom are rendered a bit glitchy.
TextMate on the other hand, while a decent text editor, has perhaps the most hideous project drawer around. Wait, actually, TextMate was never 'designed' as you describe it either. It just uses built using Mac OS libraries. I would think that if you were going to harp on design so much you would at least bring up the more 'designed' text editors, like Coda and Espresso, not TextMate.
Vim does EXACTLY that. It doesn't add silly buttons that require you to remove your hands from the keyboard to the mouse to interact with. It doesn't add silly gradients that get in the way of showing you text. Aesthetically it's incredibly simple, and interactively it's incredibly complex, but IN A GOOD WAY. Not everything, especially tools, should be easy to use and learn. A well designed application knows its target and exploits it. Vim does exactly that. It doesn't mean it's a catch all tool for everyone, generally those kinds of tools end up half assed.
And for the record, I am actually a designer, I used to use TextMate, I now mostly use Vim. The UIs are similar in their sparseness. The 2 small beefs I have with Vim is the title bar text being overly verbose and and the rounded corners added by Lion on the bottom are rendered a bit glitchy.
TextMate on the other hand, while a decent text editor, has perhaps the most hideous project drawer around. Wait, actually, TextMate was never 'designed' as you describe it either. It just uses built using Mac OS libraries. I would think that if you were going to harp on design so much you would at least bring up the more 'designed' text editors, like Coda and Espresso, not TextMate.