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I've been programming for 10 years now and I've never understood the hype on the internet about vim/emacs. No one I've known at the university or in 5 different

I've been programming for 10 years now and I've never understood the hype on the internet about vim/emacs. No one I've known at the university or in 5 different software companies that I've worked at used vim/emacs as their primary code editor. Vi was used sometimes to change a config file or to inspect something while SSH-ed into a server, but IDEs have always been used as the primary ways to write source code. I've mainly worked with Java, JavaScript and Python. I started with NetBeans and Eclipse for Java at the uni, but soon moved to the JetBrains stack (IntelliJ IDEA, PyCharm, WebStorm). Everywhere I worked people have been using mostly IntelliJ, some of them VS Code recently. I tried learning vim properly, memorizing the shortcuts etc. I had several attempts at this throughout the years. Mostly because of articles like this one, hyping vim/emacs. But I always felt it slowed me down soooo much. Modern IDEs allow me to edit code, jump though files, classes, methods, variable usages, rename all usages of a class/method across the whole codebase sooo quickly! And almost everything works out of the box. I don't have to install plugins or configure anything to have syntax highlighting, git etc. I import a Gradle project and IntelliJ knows everything. I do get the argument from one of the comments that this isolates you from how javac/maven works under the hood, and that it can be bad. But throughout the years you'll learn those things eventually. And in the meantime you don't need to master them to be productive. I completely don't get the comments that you need to constantly Google things like "How to do X in Eclipse". Some of them you do need to Google, but most things are straightforward. Meanwhile when working with vim I kept constantly Googling things like "how to replace a word", "how to copy a line", "how to delete a line"... To sum up, I agree with one of the comments that said that it's the vocal minority that keeps talking about vim/emacs that makes it look so ubiquitous. In reality I feel like 95% of programmers use IDEs for most of their work, get their job done and don't talk about it. That's why it looks to be the other way on the internet.

hallgrim 6y ago
I actually think that you have to google a lot more for emacs. Lots of people in favor of command line editors also tell you that you should look at man pages etc rather than use a UI. They forget that if programming is not the only thing you ever do, the man page searching/googling never stops, because remembering where to click is this much easier than learning all the inconsistent keyboard shortcuts, command line flags etc.
achikin 6y ago
I do google "how to delete a line" for every new editor because they are different everywhere and work in different ways. Should I put a cursor at the start of a line to delete it or I can delete from any place? Etc.

hallgrim 6y ago

I actually think that you have to google a lot more for emacs. Lots of people in favor of command line editors also tell you that you should look at man pages etc rather than use a UI. They forget that if programming is not the only thing you ever do, the man page searching/googling never stops, because remembering where to click is this much easier than learning all the inconsistent keyboard shortcuts, command line flags etc.

achikin 6y ago

I do google "how to delete a line" for every new editor because they are different everywhere and work in different ways. Should I put a cursor at the start of a line to delete it or I can delete from any place? Etc.