11 ms·

Let's be honest though; vim saves you hours of work if you're already good at vim. If you're not then it'll just slow you down. It takes practice and daily use

Let's be honest though; vim saves you hours of work if you're already good at vim. If you're not then it'll just slow you down. It takes practice and daily use to learn. I love vim but let's not sugar coat it.

giancarlostoro 8y ago
Indeed. JetBrains IDE's save me hours of work because I'm comfortable working with their IDE's. I am also more comfortable with Emacs than I currently am with VIM, but I use either one depending on circumstances. To be fair op did write how it saves them hours.
- emsy 8y ago
  Vim plugins are available for most IDEs. I almost never use vim (except for the shell), but I use vim-style editing in all the IDEs I use.
  - polyterative 8y ago
    Is that a viable way to learn vim? As an advanced jetbrains poweruser
    - qqqwww 8y ago
      Absolutely - I first learned "vim" using a visual studio plugin. Since then I used it in 5 other editors, but I barely used vim itself. The main downside is that you don't learn things like window managing, file exploration, etc - mostly because other editors are already good at that, and it's not something plugins focus on.
      - polyterative 8y ago
        Is it worth it? I am already pretty fluent using my custom-ish shortcuts for all navigation, will vim speed me up at this point?
    - emsy 8y ago
      I've learned vim in the standard vim editor at the time, so I can only guess but it should probably work. 99% of my work with vim is navigating and editing text. The rest is macros and substitute, all of which is available in IntelliJ. The things you miss out on are (I think) colorschemes and vim specific plugins (which you mostly don't need because you have a fully fledged IDE).
    - alpaca128 8y ago
      Doing it that way will at least prevent you from being disappointed due to missing features. Vim plugins are nice and I definitely prefer them over basic input, but almost all of them don't even cover the basics.
    - neurotrace 8y ago
      That's how I learned it. I got the extension for VS Code and just started playing with it. If I got frustrated, I would slap "i" and go back to my normal way of doing things. The frustrations went down and now I use vim bindings all the time. I'd also recommend getting a Vim plugin for the browser (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/vimium-ff/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/vimium-ff/). Totally optional but it really helped click in the j and k movements.
mikece 8y ago
Ditto the Dvorak keyboard enthusiasts...
- hopler 8y ago
  Dvorak doesn't save time, it's not faster than qwerty given equal practice
  - chrisfinazzo 8y ago
    But given Vim's quirks, is that layout more amenable to working quickly? Given how people gripe about it in QWERTY setups, that's certainly a possibility.
- CydeWeys 8y ago
  Even less so. Unless you're doing transcription, typing speed is not even close to being the primary limitation on how quickly you work. Thinking of the words is. The difference between a typist who can hit 100 wpm using QWERTY and 110 wpm using DVORAK will only be exposed when playing TypeRacer. Otherwise there's no functional difference. You have to get down to hunt-and-peck until you see typing ability actually affect productivity (and I have seen those people). If you can touch type using any keyboard layout, though, then typing speed won't be a meaningful limitation for you.
  - bunderbunder 8y ago
    I broke my wrist a few years ago, and had to spend a while typing with one hand on a half-qwerty keyboard setup. I took a huge hit to my typing speed, but the rate at which I was getting work done didn't really change.
    - lfowles 8y ago
      Noticed the same when I switched to an Alphagrip and could only maintain 50-60wpm.
  - simias 8y ago
segmondy 8y ago
That's the wrong way to look at it. Anything you're not good at it is going to slow you down. The question is that even tho you might be slow, if you put in the effort, learn it then get good, will the savings and speed up make up for the initial slow down? I'm a vim fan and won't try to convince others. But I personally believe that the answer is yes. One of the secret to being successful with vi is that of mindset. You need to have a positive mindset that it's worth learning, you need to commit to learning it. I learned vi when network speed was very slow and systems didn't have enough memory. It was faster than any other editor. So I had the mindset that I needed to learn it. if I was starting out today, it probably would be hard when you have editors like vscode. I have typed and used computers everyday for 25 years non stop and I have no issue with my fingers and I believe a major part of it is using vim and my fingers not having to travel and move out to find a mouse or hitting Ctrl+ keys.
- amelius 8y ago
  Another way to look at it is: what fraction of the time are you typing versus thinking? If it's less than 20%, then a faster editor will probably not speed you up by a significant amount.
  - megous 8y ago
    Typing and thinking are almost the same thing to me. I'm either writing code, or bullet lists with things to do, concerns to take into account, things I've learned, etc. Text file is an extension of my memory, and a place to distill, manipulate, and organize my thoughts.
  - TeMPOraL 8y ago
    Vim won't speed up your typing. It'll speed up your editing. Adding/discarding/modifying large blocks of text, or spread-out blocks of text. It'll let you think in terms of moving this block there, replacing these words, duplicating these patterns, etc. The efficiency increase comes, in large part, from allowing you to make steps that are closer to how you think. And even if we're talking about 20% of your time, improving that 2-10x is nothing to shake a stick at. 20% of 10 hours is 2 hours, if Vim makes you edit 2x faster, that's 1h saved, per day. And that's without accounting for other work you could move to your suddenly more efficient plaintext mode, and the work you don't even consider doing because your editing experience is too painful (it sometimes work the other way too; there are things I won't do in Emacs, but I will in IntelliJ, where project-wide, language-aware refactors can be done with two clicks in full confidence that nothing will break).
emsy 8y ago
What's your argument here? I don't try to be snarky, but learning a new skill is always slow in the beginning. If anything we should encourage people to learn these skills as early as possible so they can reap the benefits longer. I admit vim's learning curve is pretty steep, and I'm glad I learned it during my bachelor's thesis where I had a lot of time to do so.
- tiuPapa 8y ago
  Not OP, but I think the argument is that Vim isn't a magic editor that would make you fast out of the box. And if you just want to get work done without concentrating on learning a new skill, maybe you should look at other options?
  - emsy 8y ago
    I can only speak for myself, but I've used vim plugins on almost every IDE I've ever used. Unlike editor shortcuts, which are often exclusive to a certain IDE, vim is transferable and that's how it has one of the best cost/benefit ratios for me.
    - SketchySeaBeast 8y ago
      > Unlike editor shortcuts, which are often exclusive to a certain IDE, vim is transferable and that's how it has one of the best cost/benefit ratios for me. Doesn't that just mean you've selected VIM's syntax for all your IDE's? Most IDE's seem to have plugins for other popular editors.
      - NegativeLatency 8y ago
        Seems like it’s the difference between him being supported in many IDEs and say visual studio shortcuts being supported in some thing like Atom. (Support May exist for this, IDK)
        SketchySeaBeast 8y ago
benawad 8y ago
short term vim slows you down, long term vim speeds you up
brootstrap 8y ago
Valid point. I have to give some updoots for VIM, (or emacs too i guess). The visual editing gives you such an advantage, i'm talking just about coding. Most of my co-workers come from science background and think VI is a joke from that crazy professor in college. I forced myself to really learn VI one summer in 2013. Since then i've been flying around my text editor. I'm not lying, co-workers think you are a god damn wizard. I try not to be a doosh, but I have one co-worker who loves VIM but doesnt really use it (insert mode ftw). Whenever I can i try to subtly drop hints. "Instead of hitting the arrows keys over and then backspacing, you can type cw to change the word" Just little things like that. Once you realize that vim is modular and chainable, you really start to take off!
sametmax 8y ago
Even if you are very good at vim, it's still debatable. The thing is, vim forces you to do a lot of stuff that the machine could do for you. E.G: you need to remember states and how to transition between those states. Plus the human mind sucks at context switching. All in all, this adds up, and there is a limit to the cognitive load you can accumulate. You only have one brain and you need to share it between all tasks, including solving the problem at hand and using tools to do so. Half of my income comes from training professionals on site. Experience taugh me that every time somebody uses vim, 4 things will happen: - the person will be one of the best of the team - the person will have some weird bug/config problem/compat issue at some point and will waste time fixing it at least once during the training, swearing it never happens (also the person with vim usually has a very custom setup so this compounds) - at the end of each day, the person will be one of the most exhausted, and will make way more mistakes than the others compare to the morning baseline - at equal technical level, the person with vscode/sublime/jetbrain will be faster on average. Maybe not the first hour. But it will come. So, yes. Vim may be fun. It may suit your workflow and ecosystem, and even your sense of aesthetic. But I don't buy the productivity boost.
- appleiigs 8y ago
  Do you have examples of the bug/config/compat issues? I get those problems with an IDE, not Vim. IDE is always trying to lint, debug, run stuff... mix that with virtual environments and what a mess. With vim being on every system, i don't really carry much baggage around. I have my vim settings file in cloud storage. And maybe one pluggin (NERDTree) on my main machine.
  - sametmax 8y ago
    No, I never, ever look at the source of the problem nor the solution. I've used vim for 15 years, but I don't have time for this, so I don't customize anything, and if somebody has a problem, the person is responsible for fixing it. I'm not even waiting on people with Vim problems anymore during the lectures. I just go on, they will catch up.
- nickjj 8y ago
pletnes 8y ago
Programming is much worse. In the beginning, I spent just a few hours a week programming. Today, it’s a sizeable fraction of my work week. Programming is thus a complete waste of time.
manifestsilence 8y ago
For the first couple years I used vim, I spent half the time just hitting "i" and using it like a normal editor. And if I was in the mood to learn something, I would hit <esc> and try not to wreck my document. It's not that big a barrier if you start gently rather than going with a purist mentality that the arrow keys are evil and should be pried off the keyboard. :) This approach is especially nice when there are great vim keybindings for things like Visual Studio. The only thing you have to learn to start using vim is to always pay attention to if the cursor is a block or not, and if it is, remember to hit "i" before you mash keys if that's not what you want.
- Izkata 8y ago
  I don't think I ever did that, but I do have another suggestion that I did for a long while, along the same "start gently" mentality: Use gvim It not only has menus, but the shortcuts on the right side of each menu item aren't special - the they're the same commands you'd just type into vim normally. I picked up a bunch from those, but in particular I remember folding being one I didn't even know existed in vim until using it in one of the menus.
porpoisely 8y ago
Agreed. I use vim daily and really the only text processor I use. But the learning curve is pretty steep.
mettamage 8y ago
I'm sorry: learning the basics of vim isn't hard, and it never will be, provided you have the right education (I suppose that's true for anything but in this case it's a platitude that I viscerally experience to be true). The right education is: vimtutor (type it in your CLI and within 30 minutes you're done). I deleted my rant but I dare anyone to take my challenge: do vimtutor for 30 minutes and then answer the following question twice (before vimtutor and after it) in a comment. I perceive vim to be difficult: (1) strongly disagree, (2) disagree, (3) agree, (4) strongly agree. Once you know the basics of vim, then it won't slow you donw.
- johnmarcus 8y ago
  Um...hate to point out, but he didn’t say it was difficult. He said unless your practiced in it, it won’t be particularly more efficient in it. I’m sur vim tutor teaches all the things, but until they are muscle memories in, you will see no time advantage. A 30 minute tutorial will not muscle memory all the things in, that takes time and practice. Also, while not hard (I use vim constantly as a sys admin) I don’t personally think it compares to what I can get done in Atom and it’s never going to be my editor of choice, no matter how familiar.
  - mettamage 8y ago
    Vimtutor doesn't muscle memory everything in. But it does muscle memory in basic things such as deleting, moving around and going to beginning of lines, enf of lines etc. That's what it did on my first run. It indeed wasn't perfect, but there were already a couple of tricks that I've learned that I really liked and that's what you get out of it. I'm not saying you work faster, I'm saying after vimtutor you won't work slower. I suppose you still work slower if you compare it to your favorite text editor, I'm not very strongly proficient in any text editor, which is why I'm not noticing slow downs.
- kerbalspacepro 8y ago
  >The right education is: vimtutor (type it in your CLI). Well I just discovered a new thing to do over the next 25-30 minutes
darkpuma 8y ago
Running through vimtutor a few times one weekend does wonders. And compared to other trades, a few hours of training on a tool is pretty damn quick.
philwelch 8y ago
Obviously the best option is to learn vim as early as possible to maximize your return on time invested.

giancarlostoro 8y ago

Indeed. JetBrains IDE's save me hours of work because I'm comfortable working with their IDE's. I am also more comfortable with Emacs than I currently am with VIM, but I use either one depending on circumstances. To be fair op did write how it saves them hours.

emsy 8y ago
Vim plugins are available for most IDEs. I almost never use vim (except for the shell), but I use vim-style editing in all the IDEs I use.
- polyterative 8y ago
  Is that a viable way to learn vim? As an advanced jetbrains poweruser
  - qqqwww 8y ago
    Absolutely - I first learned "vim" using a visual studio plugin. Since then I used it in 5 other editors, but I barely used vim itself. The main downside is that you don't learn things like window managing, file exploration, etc - mostly because other editors are already good at that, and it's not something plugins focus on.
    - polyterative 8y ago
      Is it worth it? I am already pretty fluent using my custom-ish shortcuts for all navigation, will vim speed me up at this point?
  - emsy 8y ago
    I've learned vim in the standard vim editor at the time, so I can only guess but it should probably work. 99% of my work with vim is navigating and editing text. The rest is macros and substitute, all of which is available in IntelliJ. The things you miss out on are (I think) colorschemes and vim specific plugins (which you mostly don't need because you have a fully fledged IDE).
  - alpaca128 8y ago
    Doing it that way will at least prevent you from being disappointed due to missing features. Vim plugins are nice and I definitely prefer them over basic input, but almost all of them don't even cover the basics.
  - neurotrace 8y ago
    That's how I learned it. I got the extension for VS Code and just started playing with it. If I got frustrated, I would slap "i" and go back to my normal way of doing things. The frustrations went down and now I use vim bindings all the time. I'd also recommend getting a Vim plugin for the browser (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/vimium-ff/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/vimium-ff/). Totally optional but it really helped click in the j and k movements.

mikece 8y ago

Ditto the Dvorak keyboard enthusiasts...

hopler 8y ago
Dvorak doesn't save time, it's not faster than qwerty given equal practice
- chrisfinazzo 8y ago
  But given Vim's quirks, is that layout more amenable to working quickly? Given how people gripe about it in QWERTY setups, that's certainly a possibility.
CydeWeys 8y ago
Even less so. Unless you're doing transcription, typing speed is not even close to being the primary limitation on how quickly you work. Thinking of the words is. The difference between a typist who can hit 100 wpm using QWERTY and 110 wpm using DVORAK will only be exposed when playing TypeRacer. Otherwise there's no functional difference. You have to get down to hunt-and-peck until you see typing ability actually affect productivity (and I have seen those people). If you can touch type using any keyboard layout, though, then typing speed won't be a meaningful limitation for you.
- bunderbunder 8y ago
  I broke my wrist a few years ago, and had to spend a while typing with one hand on a half-qwerty keyboard setup. I took a huge hit to my typing speed, but the rate at which I was getting work done didn't really change.
  - lfowles 8y ago
    Noticed the same when I switched to an Alphagrip and could only maintain 50-60wpm.
- simias 8y ago

segmondy 8y ago

That's the wrong way to look at it. Anything you're not good at it is going to slow you down. The question is that even tho you might be slow, if you put in the effort, learn it then get good, will the savings and speed up make up for the initial slow down? I'm a vim fan and won't try to convince others. But I personally believe that the answer is yes. One of the secret to being successful with vi is that of mindset. You need to have a positive mindset that it's worth learning, you need to commit to learning it. I learned vi when network speed was very slow and systems didn't have enough memory. It was faster than any other editor. So I had the mindset that I needed to learn it. if I was starting out today, it probably would be hard when you have editors like vscode. I have typed and used computers everyday for 25 years non stop and I have no issue with my fingers and I believe a major part of it is using vim and my fingers not having to travel and move out to find a mouse or hitting Ctrl+ keys.

amelius 8y ago
Another way to look at it is: what fraction of the time are you typing versus thinking? If it's less than 20%, then a faster editor will probably not speed you up by a significant amount.
- megous 8y ago
  Typing and thinking are almost the same thing to me. I'm either writing code, or bullet lists with things to do, concerns to take into account, things I've learned, etc. Text file is an extension of my memory, and a place to distill, manipulate, and organize my thoughts.
- TeMPOraL 8y ago
  Vim won't speed up your typing. It'll speed up your editing. Adding/discarding/modifying large blocks of text, or spread-out blocks of text. It'll let you think in terms of moving this block there, replacing these words, duplicating these patterns, etc. The efficiency increase comes, in large part, from allowing you to make steps that are closer to how you think. And even if we're talking about 20% of your time, improving that 2-10x is nothing to shake a stick at. 20% of 10 hours is 2 hours, if Vim makes you edit 2x faster, that's 1h saved, per day. And that's without accounting for other work you could move to your suddenly more efficient plaintext mode, and the work you don't even consider doing because your editing experience is too painful (it sometimes work the other way too; there are things I won't do in Emacs, but I will in IntelliJ, where project-wide, language-aware refactors can be done with two clicks in full confidence that nothing will break).

emsy 8y ago

What's your argument here? I don't try to be snarky, but learning a new skill is always slow in the beginning. If anything we should encourage people to learn these skills as early as possible so they can reap the benefits longer. I admit vim's learning curve is pretty steep, and I'm glad I learned it during my bachelor's thesis where I had a lot of time to do so.

tiuPapa 8y ago
Not OP, but I think the argument is that Vim isn't a magic editor that would make you fast out of the box. And if you just want to get work done without concentrating on learning a new skill, maybe you should look at other options?
- emsy 8y ago
  I can only speak for myself, but I've used vim plugins on almost every IDE I've ever used. Unlike editor shortcuts, which are often exclusive to a certain IDE, vim is transferable and that's how it has one of the best cost/benefit ratios for me.
  - SketchySeaBeast 8y ago
    > Unlike editor shortcuts, which are often exclusive to a certain IDE, vim is transferable and that's how it has one of the best cost/benefit ratios for me. Doesn't that just mean you've selected VIM's syntax for all your IDE's? Most IDE's seem to have plugins for other popular editors.
    - NegativeLatency 8y ago
      Seems like it’s the difference between him being supported in many IDEs and say visual studio shortcuts being supported in some thing like Atom. (Support May exist for this, IDK)
      - SketchySeaBeast 8y ago

benawad 8y ago

short term vim slows you down, long term vim speeds you up

brootstrap 8y ago

Valid point. I have to give some updoots for VIM, (or emacs too i guess). The visual editing gives you such an advantage, i'm talking just about coding. Most of my co-workers come from science background and think VI is a joke from that crazy professor in college. I forced myself to really learn VI one summer in 2013. Since then i've been flying around my text editor. I'm not lying, co-workers think you are a god damn wizard. I try not to be a doosh, but I have one co-worker who loves VIM but doesnt really use it (insert mode ftw). Whenever I can i try to subtly drop hints. "Instead of hitting the arrows keys over and then backspacing, you can type cw to change the word" Just little things like that. Once you realize that vim is modular and chainable, you really start to take off!

sametmax 8y ago

Even if you are very good at vim, it's still debatable. The thing is, vim forces you to do a lot of stuff that the machine could do for you. E.G: you need to remember states and how to transition between those states. Plus the human mind sucks at context switching. All in all, this adds up, and there is a limit to the cognitive load you can accumulate. You only have one brain and you need to share it between all tasks, including solving the problem at hand and using tools to do so. Half of my income comes from training professionals on site. Experience taugh me that every time somebody uses vim, 4 things will happen: - the person will be one of the best of the team - the person will have some weird bug/config problem/compat issue at some point and will waste time fixing it at least once during the training, swearing it never happens (also the person with vim usually has a very custom setup so this compounds) - at the end of each day, the person will be one of the most exhausted, and will make way more mistakes than the others compare to the morning baseline - at equal technical level, the person with vscode/sublime/jetbrain will be faster on average. Maybe not the first hour. But it will come. So, yes. Vim may be fun. It may suit your workflow and ecosystem, and even your sense of aesthetic. But I don't buy the productivity boost.

appleiigs 8y ago
Do you have examples of the bug/config/compat issues? I get those problems with an IDE, not Vim. IDE is always trying to lint, debug, run stuff... mix that with virtual environments and what a mess. With vim being on every system, i don't really carry much baggage around. I have my vim settings file in cloud storage. And maybe one pluggin (NERDTree) on my main machine.
- sametmax 8y ago
  No, I never, ever look at the source of the problem nor the solution. I've used vim for 15 years, but I don't have time for this, so I don't customize anything, and if somebody has a problem, the person is responsible for fixing it. I'm not even waiting on people with Vim problems anymore during the lectures. I just go on, they will catch up.
nickjj 8y ago

pletnes 8y ago

Programming is much worse. In the beginning, I spent just a few hours a week programming. Today, it’s a sizeable fraction of my work week. Programming is thus a complete waste of time.

manifestsilence 8y ago

For the first couple years I used vim, I spent half the time just hitting "i" and using it like a normal editor. And if I was in the mood to learn something, I would hit <esc> and try not to wreck my document. It's not that big a barrier if you start gently rather than going with a purist mentality that the arrow keys are evil and should be pried off the keyboard. :) This approach is especially nice when there are great vim keybindings for things like Visual Studio. The only thing you have to learn to start using vim is to always pay attention to if the cursor is a block or not, and if it is, remember to hit "i" before you mash keys if that's not what you want.

Izkata 8y ago
I don't think I ever did that, but I do have another suggestion that I did for a long while, along the same "start gently" mentality: Use gvim It not only has menus, but the shortcuts on the right side of each menu item aren't special - the they're the same commands you'd just type into vim normally. I picked up a bunch from those, but in particular I remember folding being one I didn't even know existed in vim until using it in one of the menus.

porpoisely 8y ago

Agreed. I use vim daily and really the only text processor I use. But the learning curve is pretty steep.

mettamage 8y ago

I'm sorry: learning the basics of vim isn't hard, and it never will be, provided you have the right education (I suppose that's true for anything but in this case it's a platitude that I viscerally experience to be true). The right education is: vimtutor (type it in your CLI and within 30 minutes you're done). I deleted my rant but I dare anyone to take my challenge: do vimtutor for 30 minutes and then answer the following question twice (before vimtutor and after it) in a comment. I perceive vim to be difficult: (1) strongly disagree, (2) disagree, (3) agree, (4) strongly agree. Once you know the basics of vim, then it won't slow you donw.

johnmarcus 8y ago
Um...hate to point out, but he didn’t say it was difficult. He said unless your practiced in it, it won’t be particularly more efficient in it. I’m sur vim tutor teaches all the things, but until they are muscle memories in, you will see no time advantage. A 30 minute tutorial will not muscle memory all the things in, that takes time and practice. Also, while not hard (I use vim constantly as a sys admin) I don’t personally think it compares to what I can get done in Atom and it’s never going to be my editor of choice, no matter how familiar.
- mettamage 8y ago
  Vimtutor doesn't muscle memory everything in. But it does muscle memory in basic things such as deleting, moving around and going to beginning of lines, enf of lines etc. That's what it did on my first run. It indeed wasn't perfect, but there were already a couple of tricks that I've learned that I really liked and that's what you get out of it. I'm not saying you work faster, I'm saying after vimtutor you won't work slower. I suppose you still work slower if you compare it to your favorite text editor, I'm not very strongly proficient in any text editor, which is why I'm not noticing slow downs.
kerbalspacepro 8y ago
>The right education is: vimtutor (type it in your CLI). Well I just discovered a new thing to do over the next 25-30 minutes

darkpuma 8y ago

Running through vimtutor a few times one weekend does wonders. And compared to other trades, a few hours of training on a tool is pretty damn quick.

philwelch 8y ago

Obviously the best option is to learn vim as early as possible to maximize your return on time invested.