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Ah I see your point. What I was trying to say is that learning Vim is a separate commitment. If you are not prepared to make that commitment, Vim will slow you

Ah I see your point. What I was trying to say is that learning Vim is a separate commitment. If you are not prepared to make that commitment, Vim will slow you down instead of speeding you up.

TeMPOraL 8y ago
That's true. And if you really believe you won't be needing vim - or won't be solving the class of problems vim is good for - very often, it may not be worth it to explicitly sit down and learn it. The calculus is correct, but the actual values that go into the equation matter a lot. My wife has used SublimeText and Notepad++ for total of maybe 10 hours in her entire life. I'm not suggesting her to learn Vim (or Emacs), because the kinds of tasks she does with computers don't benefit that much from a proper text editor. However, most developers spent inordinate amount of time editing plain text files, and a lot of tasks they do in other tools - like task management, time tracking, documentation writing, drawing diagrams, commenting on StackOverflow - could receive stupidly huge efficiency improvements by being done in plain text too. Vim and Emacs are the two tools that are dedicated for precisely this class of problems. In my opinion, the couple dozen hours one has to invest over the course of a month to get some basic proficiency in them is worth the across-the-board payoff in work speed and comfort. -- One trick I've learned is being explicit and deliberate about learning. To things like learning a new piece of software, recursive Pareto rule applies - 20% of time gives you 80% of value. 4% of time gives you 64% of value. So, say you're willing to entertain the thought of learning a little bit of Vim. Allocate a single pomodoro to it right now, and fire up vimtutor. 25 minutes, full focus. You'll notice it only takes a few minutes to break through your own habits and learn the basics of a new interface. You'll be impressed by how much you've learned in just 25 minutes[0]. Next step: commit to 5 hours over a week. 10 pomodoros. Find some introductory tutorials, and work through them this way. Personally, I did above trick a couple of times to learn new Emacs features. Getting comfortable with multiple cursors, or with paredit, are things that turned out to take 1 or 2 pomodoros, and have been improving my editing speed and comfort for the past couple years. -- WRT. mindset, a proper one can smooth out the learning curve quite well. The most basic trick that I see even developers not recognizing is this: every time you click on a button in your program, figure out if there's a keyboard shortcut for it. If there is, try to use it instead. Soon, you'll find yourself working much faster and comfortable than before. -- [0] - though you'll lose half of it in a day. Committing new skills to long-term memory takes more time and exposure; muscle memory takes even more. Good news is, this happens pretty much by itself, as you apply the new skills to the tasks you're doing.
- kamaal 8y ago
  There is bad trend going on in the Industry for a while now. It's basically that people want things designed to be good for newbies and no body else. This makes tools easy to pick up, but it makes it very hard to solve complicated tasks with it. Most people don't want to put in anything more than 40 hour work week these days. Which also means no time to learn and upgrade your skill set. That is for doing their everyday tasks. Now selling vim or emacs to this set of people would never work for one reason. They just can't get themselves to spend that time. That's also a big reason why people hate Nerds. These people spend to get better at things in a way we don't want to.

Ah I see your point. What I was trying to say is that learning Vim is a separate commitment. If you are not prepared to make that commitment, Vim will slow you down instead of speeding you up.

TeMPOraL 8y ago

That's true. And if you really believe you won't be needing vim - or won't be solving the class of problems vim is good for - very often, it may not be worth it to explicitly sit down and learn it. The calculus is correct, but the actual values that go into the equation matter a lot. My wife has used SublimeText and Notepad++ for total of maybe 10 hours in her entire life. I'm not suggesting her to learn Vim (or Emacs), because the kinds of tasks she does with computers don't benefit that much from a proper text editor. However, most developers spent inordinate amount of time editing plain text files, and a lot of tasks they do in other tools - like task management, time tracking, documentation writing, drawing diagrams, commenting on StackOverflow - could receive stupidly huge efficiency improvements by being done in plain text too. Vim and Emacs are the two tools that are dedicated for precisely this class of problems. In my opinion, the couple dozen hours one has to invest over the course of a month to get some basic proficiency in them is worth the across-the-board payoff in work speed and comfort. -- One trick I've learned is being explicit and deliberate about learning. To things like learning a new piece of software, recursive Pareto rule applies - 20% of time gives you 80% of value. 4% of time gives you 64% of value. So, say you're willing to entertain the thought of learning a little bit of Vim. Allocate a single pomodoro to it right now, and fire up vimtutor. 25 minutes, full focus. You'll notice it only takes a few minutes to break through your own habits and learn the basics of a new interface. You'll be impressed by how much you've learned in just 25 minutes[0]. Next step: commit to 5 hours over a week. 10 pomodoros. Find some introductory tutorials, and work through them this way. Personally, I did above trick a couple of times to learn new Emacs features. Getting comfortable with multiple cursors, or with paredit, are things that turned out to take 1 or 2 pomodoros, and have been improving my editing speed and comfort for the past couple years. -- WRT. mindset, a proper one can smooth out the learning curve quite well. The most basic trick that I see even developers not recognizing is this: every time you click on a button in your program, figure out if there's a keyboard shortcut for it. If there is, try to use it instead. Soon, you'll find yourself working much faster and comfortable than before. -- [0] - though you'll lose half of it in a day. Committing new skills to long-term memory takes more time and exposure; muscle memory takes even more. Good news is, this happens pretty much by itself, as you apply the new skills to the tasks you're doing.

kamaal 8y ago
There is bad trend going on in the Industry for a while now. It's basically that people want things designed to be good for newbies and no body else. This makes tools easy to pick up, but it makes it very hard to solve complicated tasks with it. Most people don't want to put in anything more than 40 hour work week these days. Which also means no time to learn and upgrade your skill set. That is for doing their everyday tasks. Now selling vim or emacs to this set of people would never work for one reason. They just can't get themselves to spend that time. That's also a big reason why people hate Nerds. These people spend to get better at things in a way we don't want to.