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> It is a similar pitfall that developers step into when they optimize their code before profiling where the bottlenecks are at. Author here. For reference I'v
by nickjj 8y ago
> It is a similar pitfall that developers step into when they optimize their code before profiling where the bottlenecks are at.
Author here. For reference I've made 5 courses over the last 4 years and have written over a million words. I also have 200+ blog posts and have hundreds of thousands of lines of code written across a bunch of projects.
In other words, I hope I know what my bottlenecks are with my environment. It's not specifically editing text, but it is managing a shit load of words across many hundreds of files and also switching between projects.
With no real prior Vim knowledge (I looked at it once many years ago) it took a solid weekend, and when I say solid, I mean I spent 10 hours both days researching Vim features, watching tutorials, following along with tutorials and slowly introducing a couple of plugins I knew I wanted (based on exact problems I had).
That got me to the point where I had the environment mostly working with a decent enough config file. Then I spent days floundering around like an idiot while I hardcore failed to even do simple things like "move to the 2nd to last word in a sentence and then wrap the last 2 words to a new line". Doing that without arrow keys and no mouse almost killed me initially.
After about a week of immersing myself I got to the point where I didn't feel like I was completely destroyed by a foreign environment. During this week I wrote about 10,000 words and worked on a couple of freelance programming gigs.
In my opinion, it was worth the 20 hours of set up + 20ish hours of not being as productive to set me up for the next 5+ years.
Plus as you mentioned, a side effect is it happens to be a fun too. That's a win win!
- asdkhadsj 8y ago> In other words, I hope I know what my bottlenecks are with my environment. It's not specifically editing text, but it is managing a shit load of words across many hundreds of files and also switching between projects. I think another way to look at it is that humans are terrible at perceiving reality over time. Our understanding of what problems are most pressing are often only accurate to criteria that we aren't aware of judging. Ie, psychological biases built around your world view can have material impact on what you perceive as the most pressing problems - especially when trying to boil down thousands of hours of data points. That's not to dismiss your findings - it's simply to say I distrust human perception, benchmarks are needed. Hah :)
- ejstronge 8y agoYou may enjoy Vimwiki, which will offer you some of the benefits you already have with markdown, but also offer structure in the form of hypertext links, when needed. https://github.com/vimwiki/vimwiki https://github.com/vimwiki/vimwiki Also, consider checking out this blog post that describes a somewhat similar journey to incorporating vim (and vimwiki) in one's workflows: http://www.stochasticgeometry.ie/2012/11/23/vimwiki/ http://www.stochasticgeometry.ie/2012/11/23/vimwiki/
- 3pt14159 8y agoNick I started doing the same thing a year ago and I was very nervous about getting too abstract with all the tooling and code and writing. It's challenging—and I definitely take breaks to really feel the difference—but it is so, so worth it. I do it more with emacs and self-made CLIs, but I think the person choosing the path is the right way. It melds it perfectly to your tasks and mind.
- nickjj 8y agoGlad to hear it's working out for you. I'm pretty content with this current set up but I'm always learning, so I have to ask, what made you choose Emacs in the end? Was it org mode exclusively, a general disinterest in Vim keybindings or something else?
- flocial 8y agoNot the poster above but emacs' evil mode has really good vim emulation but the yak shaving rabbit hole goes much deeper. Emacs isn't stellar when it comes to large files and long lines although that's mainly for code and not plain text.