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I think the biggest win for primarily using a terminal based environment isn't because Vim or other terminal editors lets you write or edit code that much faste
by nickjj 8y ago
I think the biggest win for primarily using a terminal based environment isn't because Vim or other terminal editors lets you write or edit code that much faster.
Using command line tools and writing little scripts that you can easily integrate into Vim or another terminal editor really helps you solve your own problems that help make you faster at doing what you're doing. It really opens you up to thinking about how to solve problems in new ways.
Things that might require writing a custom VSCode plugin where you simply default to "fuck that" become chaining together 5 Unix commands and setting up a Vim key bind to solve the problem in 15 minutes to do something that will benefit the next 5 years of editing code or whatever you're writing.
- wvenable 8y agoOf course, you can bind terminal commands to keys in VSCode (or virtually any other environment) just as easily. Personally I think these terminal vs. IDE discussions always revolve around straw man arguments and mythical divides. I can chain 5 unix commands together and use my IDE to navigate through code with my mouse. I don't have to choose one or the other and then feel superior about excluding a whole branch of technology.
- nickjj 8y ago> Of course, you can bind terminal commands to keys in VSCode (or virtually any other environment) just as easily. But what if those terminal commands need to interact with your editor? How would you set up a simple VSCode key bind to take the currently selected text, run a shell script using the selected text as input and then replace your selected text with the output of the shell script? With Vim, this kind of mentality is baked into how you work with the editor. Even as someone who is very new to Vim (about a month) it only took a minute of Googling to figure it out. After having used Sublime Text for about half a decade, followed by VSCode for a year I never even thought to do something like that either. I just took the easy way out of thinking "yeah I'm not going to make a custom plugin for this, I'll just settle for some worse implementation that someone else wrote that does 75% of what I want". But just weeks after using Vim, I'm finding myself adding all of these little customizations that are specific to things I do every day. It feels like my editor is working for me, not the other way around. > I can chain 5 unix commands together and use my IDE to navigate through code with my mouse I use the mouse in terminal Vim too. I don't really care about what purists have to say. For certain things I find using the mouse easier, so I use it.
- wvenable 8y agoThis is what I mean about straw men and mythical divides. Yes, there is a plugin to VSCode to do exactly that. But it doesn't matter. Different software has different features and all features are possible depending on what you care about. Vim is Vim. Vim doesn't have features because of some GUI vs. command line distinction -- it just has different features because it's a different product. Nothing stops a GUI IDE like VSCode from having those same features. And nothing stops you from using GUI windows and mouse in a desktop version of Vim.