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It's highly likely that OP simply stumbled upon it, or someone recommended it, and now he learned it and is used to it and knows how productive it can be. Thin

It's highly likely that OP simply stumbled upon it, or someone recommended it, and now he learned it and is used to it and knows how productive it can be. Thing is, same is true for any other good IDE, of which there are plenty. Personally, it always blows my mind that people don't use VIM :) if they actually spent 5-20hours learning VIM correctly they would not touch these inferior pretty looking UIs

dheera 9y ago
Agree! I do almost everything in VIM for file-efficient languages and environments (NodeJS projects, Python projects, HTML, C++ ROS packages, most things that promote DRY coding, etc.) For file-inefficient environments (e.g. Java/Android -- 79 files for a "hello world" Android app!) I have to grudgingly use an IDE because I have no idea how to update the 78 other manifest/gradle/workspace/resource/etc. files based on the 1 file I change and the IDE takes care of the magic, as much as I hate that way of working.
deleted 9y ago
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cletus 9y ago
Whereas I view vim as simply a necessary evil and I mean "necessary" in the sense that I want to edit something over ssh. Bret Viktor's oft-quoted "Inventing on Principle" talk touches on this subject where a lot of research has shown that bimodal editors are worse. While I can't argue for how true that statement is, it's certainly been my experience. I always find it jarring to think I'm in command mode but I'm actually in edit mode or vice versa. Any vim user has had the experience of pasting text in command mode. I just absolutely hate bimodal editors. Additionally, staunch vim (and emacs) users I know seem to spend an inordinate amount of time screwing around with plugins to get some pale version of behaviour you get out the box on any halfway decent IDE or even text editor. I feel the same way about learning yet another series of keyboard shortcuts for, say, tmux/screen. You could argue the mouse is slower. I'm not sure if this actually holds up to empirical measurement (or at least not to the degree that's claimed) but the point is, the barrier for entry is so much lower. You can just click around and find things. If you find yourself doing something a lot, you can find out what the keyboard shortcut is. Thus you don't need to spend 50 hours upfront on a GUI editor.
- mrkgnao 9y ago
  From the point of view of "onboarding" (aka barriers to entry), as you say, point-and-click is miles ahead of the unfriendly-at-first-glance Vim. But I'd like to say that I cannot honestly recall an instance where I was in normal mode and ended up pasting something -- I assume you mean Ctrl-V-ing and having the paste interpreted as commands? -- once I got used to it after leaving Sublime Text, which I'd say took me a couple of weeks of hating myself. It's a matter of how much effort one thinks it makes sense to put into learning the editor, but IME there is a significant payoff, even if it is hard-won. I'm not sure if it's harder for some people to internalize (which is by no means a value judgment; it's why Emacs/ST/Atom/whatever exist and are powerful) but once that is done, one never gets confused about what mode you're in simply because one is almost never in insert mode! "Probabilistically" speaking, you are in insert mode for 0 time. ;) In any case, I don't hate non-bimodal editors, just hope that the subset of those using them who have not seen Vim for what it is yet do so quickly. (And, of course, there are those who are genuinely repulsed by modal editing, and that's fine!) I can't speak to "inordinate amount of time screwing around with plugins": I have a plugin for each language I use, and perhaps four or five others. The rest of my init.vim (I use Neovim) is about ... 30 lines long? It's my experience that most (Neo)vi(m) users use little of the power of plain vi -- I know that because I myself was like that for almost three or four years after I started using Vim. (This is ignoring, e.g. large Java projects, where IDE-style code navigation is basically a requirement if you want to get anything done.) But there is definitely a culture where a customized-to-the-hilt editor is seen as something to be proud of, and why shouldn't it? It's what you "live in", isn't it? :)
- bowmessage 9y ago
  You don't know the right vim / emacs users then :)
- colecut 9y ago
  It's possible to go overkill with learning tons of unnecessary shortcuts, but in my opinion all you really need for tmux is attach, detach, split horizontal, split vertical, fullscreen. 5 shortcuts is a paltry investment for a pretty sweet gain. And unlike an IDE, this can be readily available on any machine you SSH into. Which is also what makes VIM so handy.
nucleardog 9y ago
You can have your cake and eat it too. There are some really great vim plugins for Sublime Text, including one that uses NeoVim. For me, Sublime Text is basically Vim with an nice UI and some IDE features built in. And Goto Anything. I wouldn't want to live without Goto Anything.
- bowmessage 9y ago
  They're always inferior editing experiences, these vim bolt-on plugins. Missing key features like 'jk' mash escaping and other remapping support.
  - nucleardog 9y ago
    { "keys": ["j", "k"], "args": {"key": "<esc>"}, "context": [{ "key": "setting.actual_intercept", "operand": true }], "command": "actual_keypress" }, That, in your Sublime keymap, should map jk to escape if you're using the ActualVim plugin. On the backend, it's using NeoVim... So it's literally just vim. You can even use vim plugins. There really shouldn't be any missing features.
    - bowmessage 9y ago
      Oh! Didn't know this. Thanks.
- Lio 9y ago
  I don't want to put anyone off they're favourite editor but you can have all of that cake (well maybe not all the eye candy) in Vim/NeoVim. e.g. Goto anything you can use the Ctrl-P plugin.
xapata 9y ago
Counter-example: I used vim for years, then switched to Sublime.

dheera 9y ago

Agree! I do almost everything in VIM for file-efficient languages and environments (NodeJS projects, Python projects, HTML, C++ ROS packages, most things that promote DRY coding, etc.) For file-inefficient environments (e.g. Java/Android -- 79 files for a "hello world" Android app!) I have to grudgingly use an IDE because I have no idea how to update the 78 other manifest/gradle/workspace/resource/etc. files based on the 1 file I change and the IDE takes care of the magic, as much as I hate that way of working.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

cletus 9y ago

Whereas I view vim as simply a necessary evil and I mean "necessary" in the sense that I want to edit something over ssh. Bret Viktor's oft-quoted "Inventing on Principle" talk touches on this subject where a lot of research has shown that bimodal editors are worse. While I can't argue for how true that statement is, it's certainly been my experience. I always find it jarring to think I'm in command mode but I'm actually in edit mode or vice versa. Any vim user has had the experience of pasting text in command mode. I just absolutely hate bimodal editors. Additionally, staunch vim (and emacs) users I know seem to spend an inordinate amount of time screwing around with plugins to get some pale version of behaviour you get out the box on any halfway decent IDE or even text editor. I feel the same way about learning yet another series of keyboard shortcuts for, say, tmux/screen. You could argue the mouse is slower. I'm not sure if this actually holds up to empirical measurement (or at least not to the degree that's claimed) but the point is, the barrier for entry is so much lower. You can just click around and find things. If you find yourself doing something a lot, you can find out what the keyboard shortcut is. Thus you don't need to spend 50 hours upfront on a GUI editor.

mrkgnao 9y ago
From the point of view of "onboarding" (aka barriers to entry), as you say, point-and-click is miles ahead of the unfriendly-at-first-glance Vim. But I'd like to say that I cannot honestly recall an instance where I was in normal mode and ended up pasting something -- I assume you mean Ctrl-V-ing and having the paste interpreted as commands? -- once I got used to it after leaving Sublime Text, which I'd say took me a couple of weeks of hating myself. It's a matter of how much effort one thinks it makes sense to put into learning the editor, but IME there is a significant payoff, even if it is hard-won. I'm not sure if it's harder for some people to internalize (which is by no means a value judgment; it's why Emacs/ST/Atom/whatever exist and are powerful) but once that is done, one never gets confused about what mode you're in simply because one is almost never in insert mode! "Probabilistically" speaking, you are in insert mode for 0 time. ;) In any case, I don't hate non-bimodal editors, just hope that the subset of those using them who have not seen Vim for what it is yet do so quickly. (And, of course, there are those who are genuinely repulsed by modal editing, and that's fine!) I can't speak to "inordinate amount of time screwing around with plugins": I have a plugin for each language I use, and perhaps four or five others. The rest of my init.vim (I use Neovim) is about ... 30 lines long? It's my experience that most (Neo)vi(m) users use little of the power of plain vi -- I know that because I myself was like that for almost three or four years after I started using Vim. (This is ignoring, e.g. large Java projects, where IDE-style code navigation is basically a requirement if you want to get anything done.) But there is definitely a culture where a customized-to-the-hilt editor is seen as something to be proud of, and why shouldn't it? It's what you "live in", isn't it? :)
bowmessage 9y ago
You don't know the right vim / emacs users then :)
colecut 9y ago
It's possible to go overkill with learning tons of unnecessary shortcuts, but in my opinion all you really need for tmux is attach, detach, split horizontal, split vertical, fullscreen. 5 shortcuts is a paltry investment for a pretty sweet gain. And unlike an IDE, this can be readily available on any machine you SSH into. Which is also what makes VIM so handy.

nucleardog 9y ago

You can have your cake and eat it too. There are some really great vim plugins for Sublime Text, including one that uses NeoVim. For me, Sublime Text is basically Vim with an nice UI and some IDE features built in. And Goto Anything. I wouldn't want to live without Goto Anything.

bowmessage 9y ago
They're always inferior editing experiences, these vim bolt-on plugins. Missing key features like 'jk' mash escaping and other remapping support.
- nucleardog 9y ago
  { "keys": ["j", "k"], "args": {"key": "<esc>"}, "context": [{ "key": "setting.actual_intercept", "operand": true }], "command": "actual_keypress" }, That, in your Sublime keymap, should map jk to escape if you're using the ActualVim plugin. On the backend, it's using NeoVim... So it's literally just vim. You can even use vim plugins. There really shouldn't be any missing features.
  - bowmessage 9y ago
    Oh! Didn't know this. Thanks.
Lio 9y ago
I don't want to put anyone off they're favourite editor but you can have all of that cake (well maybe not all the eye candy) in Vim/NeoVim. e.g. Goto anything you can use the Ctrl-P plugin.

xapata 9y ago

Counter-example: I used vim for years, then switched to Sublime.