3 ms·

In my Vim vs Gedit test, I was doing tasks from the beginning of the Vim tutorial using the exact commands the tutorial told me to use. It does seem possible t

In my Vim vs Gedit test, I was doing tasks from the beginning of the Vim tutorial using the exact commands the tutorial told me to use. It does seem possible to me that someone could become faster with Vim than a click-and-type editor, but I'd guess they'd never amortize the costs of their learning. (Of course, if you're already quite advanced then you've paid a good chunk of the cost and it may make sense to continue.)

DennisP 16y ago
The beginning of the tutorial doesn't necessarily have the most efficient way to accomplish a task. It just has the most basic way. For example: move up 10 lines with 10k. Move up 2 paragraphs with 2{. Move up to "what" with ?what, and if it stops somewhere else first, just hit n. Find the first letter T in a line with fT, and hit ; if you stopped at another one first. Etc. You can't put everything at the beginning of the tutorial but having a lot of these tricks in your bag speeds you up quite a bit. Then you start combining these movements with commands, repeating these combinations with just a period, recording them in macros with a couple keystrokes, applying them to every selected line with :norm, etc. It's the combination of all these things that makes it go fast. That said, if I've got a long distance to travel and there's no obvious movement command to get me there quickly, I'll still use the mouse occasionally. It does seem to break the flow though. The biggest improvement vim has made to my productivity isn't just the raw speed of editing, it's the fun of editing with it. That keeps me a lot more focused when the work itself gets a little mundane.