2 ms·

Vim makes writing and editing text faster, that's true. But writing and editing text is a small portion of the time of a programmer. Planning what to write take

Vim makes writing and editing text faster, that's true. But writing and editing text is a small portion of the time of a programmer. Planning what to write takes up far more time. I suppose it depends on language though: I tend towards low-level (VHDL, ASM, C) and so tend to need to think things out in more detail just to get working code. But even high-level programming should have plenty of planning, otherwise it tends to become bug-ridden very quickly. Worrying about the time spent editing text is premature optimization in the vast majority of cases. I still like vim, I just don't think that argument is very convincing.

flukus 9y ago
It may differ for you but coding is (sadly) not where the majority of my time is spent. A lot of it is in data files, logs, sql scripts, etc. For a lot of those tasks fast editing makes a big difference. Sql in particular is verbose and repetative yet fairly unstructured, a vim macro is a great way to do bulk updates. Another would be something like adding a parameter to a function called in many places, the repeat command is a fantastic way to apply it everywhere.