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My thoughts after coding for 15 years now... I still can’t be bothered to learn emacs or vim. I’ve tried and it just never sticks. I remember fewer commands in

My thoughts after coding for 15 years now... I still can’t be bothered to learn emacs or vim. I’ve tried and it just never sticks. I remember fewer commands in vim than I knew 10 years ago. I really like smart IDE’s like IntelliJ and pycharm. I’m doing a typescript project in VSCode and the refactoring and code understanding is just... not enough. I agree with James Gosling’s opinion of heavy IDE’s. They help me. I’m not out to prove any my manliness Also, I feel like I do more reading code and debugging than writing nowadays, and I am not bothered by my speed at writing code.

mdoms 6y ago
I'm 10 years in and I'm the same. My editor is never, ever my bottleneck. Especially not to the degree that I'm going to sink dozens of hours into learning one. It has never gotten in my way and I just don't care. I have given Vim a couple of hours, realised I was learning solutions to problems I never had, and I moved on. Life's too short for that noise.
- mantap 6y ago
  The important lesson with vim is that you should be able to edit faster than you can think. It doesn't matter whether you use vim keybindings or emacs keybindings, or whatever, just that you have replacements for the functionality so that your brain can be free to think about the problem at hand rather than the nifty-gritty of editing text.
  - jeffbee 6y ago
    > edit faster than you can think ^^^ The explanation for absolutely every failure of our industry right there in six words.
    - mark254 6y ago
      I guess what was meant is "reduce cognitive overhead for editing, so that the brain can keep the actual programming task in short-term memory".
kaesar14 6y ago
It’s always seemed silly to me not to use tools that make your job easier. JetBrains products are the most powerful software I have to get my work done.
- mixmastamyk 6y ago
  Those things are often huge, slow, and take a long time to learn—not all sunshine and roses. When the control panel has search you know you're in one. All a tradeoff of course.
  - YZF 6y ago
    Huge but not really slow. They automate a lot of common tasks, super fast searches/navigation, refactoring etc. Code analysis is just there. Often my fellow non-IDE users struggle to find the piece of code when we're chatting whereas for me navigating or finding things anywhere in a really large code base is pretty much instant. I stopped pointing it out unless it's a good friend I just want to rib a little.
    - sodapopcan 6y ago
      Most non-IDE users I meet IRL don't take the time to beef up their tool and actually learn how to properly use it. There are also those who flat out refuse to install any plugins, for example, plugins that could make searching large codebases very fast. I don't understand these people, but to each their own! <3 Of course, the whole reason many people chose an editor over an IDE is because they don't want to learn an IDE so, not much you can do there. I've worked with plenty of people who use an IDE and barely using any of its features.
      - mixmastamyk 6y ago
        Searching can be handled with ag or ripgrep and used anywhere with any text files, with only a terminal.
        6y ago
chadcmulligan 6y ago
I used to teach a vi course, and you're not missing anything imho. I use JetBrains now.
wander_homer 6y ago
> I still can’t be bothered to learn emacs or vim. I’ve tried and it just never sticks. I remember fewer commands in vim than I knew 10 years ago. It's kind of the opposite for me. One day I read an interesting comment about vim and took the vimtutor out of curiosity and it immediately clicked. I always hated learning keyboard shortcuts in other applications and I always forgot them shortly after, but with vim it feels like having learned a tiny foreign language. There's a small grammar and a small vocabulary, which means you don't have to remember each keyboard shortcut, just like you I don't have to remember every sentence of the English language. And the best thing is, every single tiny addition to your vocabulary allows to form a plethora of new sentences, so it always felt amazing learning a new motion or text object in vim. > Also, I feel like I do more reading code and debugging than writing nowadays, and I am not bothered by my speed at writing code. I am neither. But I feel editing text with vim needs less thinking on my part, i.e. I can translate my intend easily to vims language without getting interrupted too much.
jhanschoo 6y ago
I use vim bindings whenever I can, though I never use vim. I don't know most of the commands beyond navigation and basic editing, but using h, j, k, l and deleting, yanking, pasting entire lines with dd, yy, C, p, etc. are far less tedious the using the mouse and arrow keys.
agumonkey 6y ago
It's funny how people can differ. I despise IDE so much .. sometimes with good arguments (non ergonomic, non helpful, bloated, non customizable, configuration hidden somewhere..). I found vim edition natural, emacs programmability very natural. But it's true there was a holier than thou at first.
- ketzo 6y ago
  Totally unrelated, but I don’t think I’ve ever actually seen “edition” used in that way, as the noun form of “to edit.” Neat.
  - agumonkey 6y ago
    good point, I shall edit that mistake
  - pritambaral 6y ago
    That's because it's wrong. The correct noun is 'editing'.
spfzero 6y ago
Coding for many more than 15 years, use vim. Would never tell others to use it, its individual. For me, the speed, power, and omnipresence of it, makes it worth spending the time to master it. My workflow makes it important to be editing a file within a second of realizing I want to. Launching an IDE is way too much friction.
Donckele 6y ago
> Also, I feel like I do more reading code and debugging than writing nowadays, and I am not bothered by my speed at writing code. Well, I write more code so my experiences are not the same as yours.
- lostmsu 6y ago
  I have been mostly writing and refactoring new code in last 3 years. Writing is easy. Can't imagine doing refactoring in vim with 1/10 efficiency of ReSharper.
wayneftw 6y ago
> I’m doing a typescript project in VSCode and the refactoring and code understanding is just... not enough. What's your exact complaint? Find and Replace or repeatedly hitting Ctrl+D covers 90% of my refactoring needs and I work on mostly TypeScript / JavaScript code. The other 10% is covered by "Extract to function" which I rarely use because it's easy enough to cut and paste. Renaming a file is a very easy 2 step process. 1) Rename the file. 2) Find and replace `/filename"` with `/new-filename"`. I almost exclusively use named exports, so renaming a symbol is a simple find and replace. What else could you possibly need that wouldn't be more complicated than just typing? Also, have you explored extensions for this? Here's one now - https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=cancerberosgx.vscode-typescript-refactors https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=cancerbe...

mdoms 6y ago

I'm 10 years in and I'm the same. My editor is never, ever my bottleneck. Especially not to the degree that I'm going to sink dozens of hours into learning one. It has never gotten in my way and I just don't care. I have given Vim a couple of hours, realised I was learning solutions to problems I never had, and I moved on. Life's too short for that noise.

mantap 6y ago
The important lesson with vim is that you should be able to edit faster than you can think. It doesn't matter whether you use vim keybindings or emacs keybindings, or whatever, just that you have replacements for the functionality so that your brain can be free to think about the problem at hand rather than the nifty-gritty of editing text.
- jeffbee 6y ago
  > edit faster than you can think ^^^ The explanation for absolutely every failure of our industry right there in six words.
  - mark254 6y ago
    I guess what was meant is "reduce cognitive overhead for editing, so that the brain can keep the actual programming task in short-term memory".

kaesar14 6y ago

It’s always seemed silly to me not to use tools that make your job easier. JetBrains products are the most powerful software I have to get my work done.

mixmastamyk 6y ago
Those things are often huge, slow, and take a long time to learn—not all sunshine and roses. When the control panel has search you know you're in one. All a tradeoff of course.
- YZF 6y ago
  Huge but not really slow. They automate a lot of common tasks, super fast searches/navigation, refactoring etc. Code analysis is just there. Often my fellow non-IDE users struggle to find the piece of code when we're chatting whereas for me navigating or finding things anywhere in a really large code base is pretty much instant. I stopped pointing it out unless it's a good friend I just want to rib a little.
  - sodapopcan 6y ago
    Most non-IDE users I meet IRL don't take the time to beef up their tool and actually learn how to properly use it. There are also those who flat out refuse to install any plugins, for example, plugins that could make searching large codebases very fast. I don't understand these people, but to each their own! <3 Of course, the whole reason many people chose an editor over an IDE is because they don't want to learn an IDE so, not much you can do there. I've worked with plenty of people who use an IDE and barely using any of its features.
    - mixmastamyk 6y ago
      Searching can be handled with ag or ripgrep and used anywhere with any text files, with only a terminal.
      - 6y ago

chadcmulligan 6y ago

I used to teach a vi course, and you're not missing anything imho. I use JetBrains now.

wander_homer 6y ago

> I still can’t be bothered to learn emacs or vim. I’ve tried and it just never sticks. I remember fewer commands in vim than I knew 10 years ago. It's kind of the opposite for me. One day I read an interesting comment about vim and took the vimtutor out of curiosity and it immediately clicked. I always hated learning keyboard shortcuts in other applications and I always forgot them shortly after, but with vim it feels like having learned a tiny foreign language. There's a small grammar and a small vocabulary, which means you don't have to remember each keyboard shortcut, just like you I don't have to remember every sentence of the English language. And the best thing is, every single tiny addition to your vocabulary allows to form a plethora of new sentences, so it always felt amazing learning a new motion or text object in vim. > Also, I feel like I do more reading code and debugging than writing nowadays, and I am not bothered by my speed at writing code. I am neither. But I feel editing text with vim needs less thinking on my part, i.e. I can translate my intend easily to vims language without getting interrupted too much.

jhanschoo 6y ago

I use vim bindings whenever I can, though I never use vim. I don't know most of the commands beyond navigation and basic editing, but using h, j, k, l and deleting, yanking, pasting entire lines with dd, yy, C, p, etc. are far less tedious the using the mouse and arrow keys.

agumonkey 6y ago

It's funny how people can differ. I despise IDE so much .. sometimes with good arguments (non ergonomic, non helpful, bloated, non customizable, configuration hidden somewhere..). I found vim edition natural, emacs programmability very natural. But it's true there was a holier than thou at first.

ketzo 6y ago
Totally unrelated, but I don’t think I’ve ever actually seen “edition” used in that way, as the noun form of “to edit.” Neat.
- agumonkey 6y ago
  good point, I shall edit that mistake
- pritambaral 6y ago
  That's because it's wrong. The correct noun is 'editing'.

spfzero 6y ago

Coding for many more than 15 years, use vim. Would never tell others to use it, its individual. For me, the speed, power, and omnipresence of it, makes it worth spending the time to master it. My workflow makes it important to be editing a file within a second of realizing I want to. Launching an IDE is way too much friction.

Donckele 6y ago

> Also, I feel like I do more reading code and debugging than writing nowadays, and I am not bothered by my speed at writing code. Well, I write more code so my experiences are not the same as yours.

lostmsu 6y ago
I have been mostly writing and refactoring new code in last 3 years. Writing is easy. Can't imagine doing refactoring in vim with 1/10 efficiency of ReSharper.

wayneftw 6y ago

> I’m doing a typescript project in VSCode and the refactoring and code understanding is just... not enough. What's your exact complaint? Find and Replace or repeatedly hitting Ctrl+D covers 90% of my refactoring needs and I work on mostly TypeScript / JavaScript code. The other 10% is covered by "Extract to function" which I rarely use because it's easy enough to cut and paste. Renaming a file is a very easy 2 step process. 1) Rename the file. 2) Find and replace `/filename"` with `/new-filename"`. I almost exclusively use named exports, so renaming a symbol is a simple find and replace. What else could you possibly need that wouldn't be more complicated than just typing? Also, have you explored extensions for this? Here's one now - https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=cancerberosgx.vscode-typescript-refactors https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=cancerbe...