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Carmack would be far more convincing if he could have said something like "I was once a power user of vim/emacs but I went back to programming in nano because I
by pmoriarty 6y ago
Carmack would be far more convincing if he could have said something like "I was once a power user of vim/emacs but I went back to programming in nano because I didn't need all those features."
Somehow I never hear anybody say that.
As a long time user of both vim and emacs, I find it intensely painful to watch some seasoned programmers tediously mouse their way through mountains of text.
I often think to myself, "ok, you've just taken half an hour to do what I could have done in less than a minute."
Honestly, I have better things to do with my time than edit text, and when I do edit text I want to get the maximum accomplished in the minimum amount of time so I can get on to the thousands of other things I want to do with my life.
Using a crippled editor or not taking advantage of editor features that could save you massive amounts of time, errors, and headaches runs directly contrary to that intention.
It's great that Carmack is satisfied with his own setup but in my case you'd have to pry my vim and emacs from my cold, dead fingers.
- mcv 6y agoWell, I was once a power user of vim, but nowadays I'm happy to use whatever editor my favourite IDE offers. It may not offer all the vi features, but it has what I need, and has more features specifically tuned for the language I'm using. (I'm a big fan of ctrl+/ to comment out selected lines.) I'm no John Carmack, though.
- OneGuy123 6y agoGive example of this "half an hour that could be done in less than a minute" thingy, because as a programmer in 12 years and NOT being a power user I agree with Carmack: typing and using basic text editor functionality of Visual Studio never was a bottleneck in programming. Slowdowns are ALWAYS programming related, never text editor related.
- em-bee 6y agoif you are doing refactoring then good editor assistance can save you a lot of effort
- TinkersW 6y agoYou don't need power editing for refactoring.. VS has perfectly capable refactoring abilities(especially with plugins like VAX).
- em-bee 6y agobut that is power editing. so VS may have some of it builtin, but then installing a plugin is no different then installing an extension in vim. but all that is what we mean by configuring the editor for more powerful editing.
- daemin 6y agoYep, why bother doing a lot of things to save some minutes per day when the build itself takes 15-45 minutes to run. You're better off optimising the build so it takes less time than any fiddling you do with a text editor.
- em-bee 6y agoHonestly, I have better things to do with my time than edit text honestly, i have better things to do with my time than to configure my apps. i would sooner switch to apps with better defaults than take the effort to configure one i have. editing text or code is the bulk of my work. i don't have better things to do than editing text, so that better be efficient. but if the default setup of an editor doesn't already provide that efficiency then i am not really interested. this doesn't mean i am not willing to learn shortcuts that already exist, but i won't create new shortcuts. i don't use shell aliases or functions either (unless a task is complex enough to write a script)
- 59nadir 6y ago> I often think to myself, "ok, you've just taken half an hour to do what I could have done in less than a minute." As a power user myself, this feels like a major exaggeration and mostly like a brag. A good IDE is way more powerful than any basic editor set up is going to ever be for productivity with regards to changing and understanding code. For working on an actually interesting problem no amount of editing prowess is going to matter at all.