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I generally find that whenever someone points out that a feature that a plugin implements is already present in vim, the vim native feature has atrocious UX. It

I generally find that whenever someone points out that a feature that a plugin implements is already present in vim, the vim native feature has atrocious UX. It feels like a personality thing, it just seems like a lot of vim users don't care very much about decent UX.

kerkeslager 7y ago
Ehh, UX is a pretty vague term. If you're talking about traditional UX values like intuitiveness, sure, vim UX is terrible. But vim features tend to do very simple things, which are composable into very powerful mini programs in a lot of contexts. There's a sort of "discoverability" to them as well, in that if a key does something in one mode, it likely does something intuitively similar in another mode. All this adds up over time. I've got about 9 years using vim every day now, and the combined learning over that time has added up in a way that disposable learning like "how to use the X flavor-of-the-week plugin" would not have. Another thing here is that the UX improvement of most plugins is only surface-level. vim features tend to be very simple, which means that when you understand it, you understand it. But vim users with a lot of plugins rarely understand what is actually going on when they use a plugin feature, because the features do too much. This means that they can't really use those features in, for example, macros, which loses you a lot of the editor's power.