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I’ve tried to force myself to pick up vim a few times but after getting a bit older I realized that I don’t want to become one with my machine as a fighter pilo

I’ve tried to force myself to pick up vim a few times but after getting a bit older I realized that I don’t want to become one with my machine as a fighter pilot might be with their plane. I like the distance the mouse move and click provides me. I do more thinking and reading than typing anyways

ztjio 6y ago
The reason to pick up vim is ubiquity, not efficiency. And you REALLY don't need to know much. Maybe half of what's in the vimtutor tutorial is enough. Personally, I'd also suggest at least learning how to do search/search & replace with regex which is easy too (and bonus, has high affinity with sed.) That seems like the most any modern developer/*nix user should need to concern themselves with vim and wholly for the reason I mention above: it's the most likely text editor to be there on unix-like systems.
- closeparen 6y ago
  Editing text on servers by hand is not necessarily a practice you want to invest in. Even if you are not on the immutable infrastructure / containers / cloud bandwagon... Puppet is 15 years old now. CFEngine is 27.
- nso95 6y ago
  I've yet to encounter a Linux system without nano
- bitwize 6y ago
  It's 2020, dude. No one sysadmins individual boxes anymore, it's all infrastructure-as-code. Which means if you have a problem with your server infrastructure, you shoot those cattle and provision new cattle with the CFT you wrote in Visual Studio Code.
cgriswald 6y ago
I picked up vim decades ago and I’m glad I did. I don’t feel “one with the machine” any more than I feel “one with the paper” when I use a nice pen. I feel like the machine is getting out of the way.
fatbird 6y ago
In a strange way, Vim might be for you then. I've used it steadily for the last decade as my IDE, and I have a minimal set of plugins and an unimpressive .vimrc. I've put most effort into setting up very limited, low-key syntax colouring schemes; and linting. To me now, Vim (well, neovim) feels like the bare tool with a few ornaments I keep around, and little more; switching to VS Code occasionally feels like going into a circus. Vim is effectively my distraction free coding environment.

ztjio 6y ago

The reason to pick up vim is ubiquity, not efficiency. And you REALLY don't need to know much. Maybe half of what's in the vimtutor tutorial is enough. Personally, I'd also suggest at least learning how to do search/search & replace with regex which is easy too (and bonus, has high affinity with sed.) That seems like the most any modern developer/*nix user should need to concern themselves with vim and wholly for the reason I mention above: it's the most likely text editor to be there on unix-like systems.

closeparen 6y ago
Editing text on servers by hand is not necessarily a practice you want to invest in. Even if you are not on the immutable infrastructure / containers / cloud bandwagon... Puppet is 15 years old now. CFEngine is 27.
nso95 6y ago
I've yet to encounter a Linux system without nano
bitwize 6y ago
It's 2020, dude. No one sysadmins individual boxes anymore, it's all infrastructure-as-code. Which means if you have a problem with your server infrastructure, you shoot those cattle and provision new cattle with the CFT you wrote in Visual Studio Code.

cgriswald 6y ago

I picked up vim decades ago and I’m glad I did. I don’t feel “one with the machine” any more than I feel “one with the paper” when I use a nice pen. I feel like the machine is getting out of the way.

fatbird 6y ago

In a strange way, Vim might be for you then. I've used it steadily for the last decade as my IDE, and I have a minimal set of plugins and an unimpressive .vimrc. I've put most effort into setting up very limited, low-key syntax colouring schemes; and linting. To me now, Vim (well, neovim) feels like the bare tool with a few ornaments I keep around, and little more; switching to VS Code occasionally feels like going into a circus. Vim is effectively my distraction free coding environment.