8 ms·

The "suffering" has honestly been overblown by jokes about not being able to quit on one side and the mythologizing of the leet ninja 10x programmer who is only

The "suffering" has honestly been overblown by jokes about not being able to quit on one side and the mythologizing of the leet ninja 10x programmer who is only bound by his typing speed and can't waste time reaching for the mouse, on the other side. It continues to surprise me why people have such strong opinions about someone else's editor choice. My current theory is vim users are like vegans/gluten free/paleo/etc, in that its a personal choice that some are public about, and people love to hate on it and "disprove" it for the same reason.

pampa 6y ago
I suffer every time a linux distro has nano as the default editor. Cant save a file, cant exit, have to read the two bottom rows and figure out those alien shortcuts. yuck
- lazyant 6y ago
  Those alien "shortcuts" are Emacs bindings, the same as in a Bash shell, or a Cisco router etc.
  - pampa 6y ago
    I did use emacs before i switched to vim 15 years ago. My memory is hazy, but i am pretty sure Ctrl-O to save a file and Ctrl-X to exit are not emacs bindings. I was as confused with nano when i used emacs as i am now.
    - lazyant 6y ago
      yes, some bindings may be different for meta-control like you are pointing out (the editing ones are Emacs)
dan00 6y ago
> It continues to surprise me why people have such strong opinions about someone else's editor choice. I think because people identify themselves too much with their editor, programming language or whatever else choice. Everyone wants to think of themselves as the smart ones, only making objective rational choices, so everyone else making other choices has to be stupid. If now someone criticises their choice or argues about other choices, then they feel personally attacked, and there the flamewars goes.
- apocolyps6 6y ago
  Yeah, I guess that is it. The existence of the vegan is a moral judgement of everyone else's food choices, so they get hate. The existence of the vim user reminds you of that one time you gave it a shot and it didn't stick, so it makes you feel attacked the same way.
  - monkeycantype 6y ago
    I want to say one thing in defence of vegans, you only know about the vegans who tell you they are vegans. These people are actually the people-who-like-to-tell-you-they-are-vegans. There a lot of vegans who don't eat animal products and just leave it at that. Like my partner who just cooked me an anchovy pizza. You never hear about the just-a-vegan-and-god-knows-why-you'd-want-to-tell-everyone, because they creep through the world, in absolute dread of being discovered by the like-to-tell-people-they-are-a-vegan people.
    - alblue 6y ago
      But anchovy is a fish ... how is that not eating animals?
      - lisper 6y ago
        You missed the point. The partner who made the pizza didn’t eat it.
      - MikeTheGreat 6y ago
        I had to stop and think about that, too :) I think what the poster meant was "My partner is a vegan (implication: they would never eat anchovies), but they just made me an anchovy pizza so that I can eat my non-vegan food happily." I.e., their partner doesn't eat animal products but the partner isn't judging their choice to eat animal products.
- eindiran 6y ago
  An alternative take, definitely worth a read: https://www.gwern.net/Holy-wars https://www.gwern.net/Holy-wars
pvg 6y ago
people have such strong opinions about someone else's editor choice. I want to reiterate that I'm merely pursuing an intellectually curious line of inquiry into whether modal editing enthusiasts are brainworm-infested cultists, not engaging in base mudwrestling about editors, which the guidelines forbid.
- goatinaboat 6y ago
  I want to reiterate that I'm merely pursuing an intellectually curious line of inquiry into whether modal editing enthusiasts are brainworm-infested cultists, not engaging in base mudwrestling about editors, which the guidelines forbid. Absolutely. I am not wedded to my editor, I happen to prefer Emacs, if it’s not installed I shrug and use cat and sed. The older more experienced people at my company tend to use vi or Emacs. The younger ones use VS Code, PyCharm, Sublime etc. And they spend an awful lot of time on chat asking “how do I do this simple thing in my editor??” that you simply don’t see from the Emacs/vi crowd.
  - swaranga 6y ago
    This is personal experience of course but I have not seen that to be the case in my company, irrespective of editors people have mostly the same type of questions. Out of curiosity, what kind of questions do the non Vim/Emacs folks keep asking?
    - goatinaboat 6y ago
      Out of curiosity, what kind of questions do the non Vim/Emacs folks keep asking? The most frequent questions are things like "how do I edit files remotely" or "how do I make it work with Git" or "how do I make this function a keyboard shortcut" and so on. Basic stuff. The rest is about which of a dozen competing plugins is better for something. They can't help each other because they are all using something different, but they would be incredibly indignant like their human rights had been infringed if they were ordered to use a company standard editor.
jayflux 6y ago
> The "suffering" has honestly been overblown by jokes about not being able to quit on one side and the mythologizing of the leet ninja 10x programmer who is only bound by his typing speed and can't waste time reaching for the mouse, on the other side. I don’t think it’s all overblown. With a GUI editor if you’re not efficient with it you can fall back to using a mouse until you know enough shortcuts. With vim if you don’t know enough of the controls for even basic navigation you can’t do much, the learning curve will always be steeper, and some people don’t want to go through that even if it pays off in the end.
gtsop 6y ago
> My current theory is vim users are like vegans/gluten free/paleo/etc, in that its a personal choice that some are public about. This is not a good theory. Surely, this effect appears wherever you've got conflicting choices about what is best, but there are always reasonable arguments on why you should do X over Y. And you know, there are always people who respect other's choices. I am a vim user and I 100% understand why others don't want to get into it. I don't bully them, I will explain only once why I think it is a better environment and then they are free to carry on with their lives and so am i. People who are extremely attached to their choices are (to me) unable to understand that every tool is for a job && different people have different needs. This shouldn't lead us to label a group of users and ignoring the pros and cons of smth
- greggman3 6y ago
  I am curious if any vim user has ever been able to see the benefits of other environments. I know I have never been able to see the benefits of vim. Part of me wants to give a try for 3-6 months just to prove to myself that it's all bullshit and that vim is just another editor. In any case. For a long time I was a fan of my editor of choice, slickedit. It definitely has a few features I use for which I don't know the analogs in most other editors. Features like versions backups. Undo of multi-file search and replace. Also once had someone show me IntelliJ for C++ and was fairly impressed with its refactoring features. Enough that I thought I should look more into it. I have yet to see a feature for vim that makes it clear win over any other major editor. I have read articles that make me understand why others might like it but seriously. I think you're all deluding yourselves. Just as an example, lately I mostly do JavaScript and a little typescript. I'm 100% sure that the VSCode experience there out of the box is superior to vim for the same purpose. VSCode is node aware, browser aware, npm aware, eslint aware, typescript aware out of the box. I have no idea how much configuration I'd have to do in vim to get it to match and I find all of that invaluable. I'm not saying vim can't do it but I am saying if I tried to start using vim today on the projects I'm working on the experience would be seriously inferior. I don't know what language I'd have to be using to change that.
  - alvarosevilla95 6y ago
alwillis 6y ago
My current theory is vim users are like vegans/gluten free/paleo/etc, in that its a personal choice that some are public about, and people love to hate on it and "disprove" it for the same reason. I think there's some truth to that. I've been vegan for 20 years and a Vim user for half of that time. Back in the day, I was questioned a lot about why I was vegan, being asked all the time where do you get your protein? Grateful those days are over. Vegans can tell you the worse people are the former vegans, who almost always had a bad experience of some kind being vegan and want to tell anyone who will listen. I think people who tried and didn't get Vim are often the ones wanting to disprove that Vim is any good. Because obviously if it didn't work for them, it can't be any good. The subtitle for Drew Neil’s Practical Vim book is Edit text at the speed of thought and that's kinda how it is when you start to get pretty good at Vim.
clankyclanker 6y ago
> The "suffering" has honestly been overblown by jokes about not being able to quit on one side and the mythologizing of the leet ninja 10x programmer who is only bound by his typing speed and can't waste time reaching for the mouse, on the other side. You're neglecting the folks who use keyboard editors (and fancy keyboards) to reduce the incidence of RSI. If I can accomplish the same tasks in four keystrokes (~1s) as it would take me in a dozen clicks and 15 seconds of mousing, then poorly designed programs forcing me to use the mouse to interact are causing an order of magnitude more strain than those designed for keyboard interaction. (This is less an issue in text-editors, and more an issue in everything else user-facing.)
- apocolyps6 6y ago
  I'm responding to a user who described having to learn a text editor as suffering. I'm not sure how your response relates to mine. I happen to be a person who uses a fancy keyboard (Kinesis Advantage2) and text editor (vim) to reduce RSI.

pampa 6y ago

I suffer every time a linux distro has nano as the default editor. Cant save a file, cant exit, have to read the two bottom rows and figure out those alien shortcuts. yuck

lazyant 6y ago
Those alien "shortcuts" are Emacs bindings, the same as in a Bash shell, or a Cisco router etc.
- pampa 6y ago
  I did use emacs before i switched to vim 15 years ago. My memory is hazy, but i am pretty sure Ctrl-O to save a file and Ctrl-X to exit are not emacs bindings. I was as confused with nano when i used emacs as i am now.
  - lazyant 6y ago
    yes, some bindings may be different for meta-control like you are pointing out (the editing ones are Emacs)

dan00 6y ago

> It continues to surprise me why people have such strong opinions about someone else's editor choice. I think because people identify themselves too much with their editor, programming language or whatever else choice. Everyone wants to think of themselves as the smart ones, only making objective rational choices, so everyone else making other choices has to be stupid. If now someone criticises their choice or argues about other choices, then they feel personally attacked, and there the flamewars goes.

apocolyps6 6y ago
Yeah, I guess that is it. The existence of the vegan is a moral judgement of everyone else's food choices, so they get hate. The existence of the vim user reminds you of that one time you gave it a shot and it didn't stick, so it makes you feel attacked the same way.
- monkeycantype 6y ago
  I want to say one thing in defence of vegans, you only know about the vegans who tell you they are vegans. These people are actually the people-who-like-to-tell-you-they-are-vegans. There a lot of vegans who don't eat animal products and just leave it at that. Like my partner who just cooked me an anchovy pizza. You never hear about the just-a-vegan-and-god-knows-why-you'd-want-to-tell-everyone, because they creep through the world, in absolute dread of being discovered by the like-to-tell-people-they-are-a-vegan people.
  - alblue 6y ago
    But anchovy is a fish ... how is that not eating animals?
    - lisper 6y ago
      You missed the point. The partner who made the pizza didn’t eat it.
    - MikeTheGreat 6y ago
      I had to stop and think about that, too :) I think what the poster meant was "My partner is a vegan (implication: they would never eat anchovies), but they just made me an anchovy pizza so that I can eat my non-vegan food happily." I.e., their partner doesn't eat animal products but the partner isn't judging their choice to eat animal products.
eindiran 6y ago
An alternative take, definitely worth a read: https://www.gwern.net/Holy-wars https://www.gwern.net/Holy-wars

pvg 6y ago

people have such strong opinions about someone else's editor choice. I want to reiterate that I'm merely pursuing an intellectually curious line of inquiry into whether modal editing enthusiasts are brainworm-infested cultists, not engaging in base mudwrestling about editors, which the guidelines forbid.

goatinaboat 6y ago
I want to reiterate that I'm merely pursuing an intellectually curious line of inquiry into whether modal editing enthusiasts are brainworm-infested cultists, not engaging in base mudwrestling about editors, which the guidelines forbid. Absolutely. I am not wedded to my editor, I happen to prefer Emacs, if it’s not installed I shrug and use cat and sed. The older more experienced people at my company tend to use vi or Emacs. The younger ones use VS Code, PyCharm, Sublime etc. And they spend an awful lot of time on chat asking “how do I do this simple thing in my editor??” that you simply don’t see from the Emacs/vi crowd.
- swaranga 6y ago
  This is personal experience of course but I have not seen that to be the case in my company, irrespective of editors people have mostly the same type of questions. Out of curiosity, what kind of questions do the non Vim/Emacs folks keep asking?
  - goatinaboat 6y ago
    Out of curiosity, what kind of questions do the non Vim/Emacs folks keep asking? The most frequent questions are things like "how do I edit files remotely" or "how do I make it work with Git" or "how do I make this function a keyboard shortcut" and so on. Basic stuff. The rest is about which of a dozen competing plugins is better for something. They can't help each other because they are all using something different, but they would be incredibly indignant like their human rights had been infringed if they were ordered to use a company standard editor.

jayflux 6y ago

> The "suffering" has honestly been overblown by jokes about not being able to quit on one side and the mythologizing of the leet ninja 10x programmer who is only bound by his typing speed and can't waste time reaching for the mouse, on the other side. I don’t think it’s all overblown. With a GUI editor if you’re not efficient with it you can fall back to using a mouse until you know enough shortcuts. With vim if you don’t know enough of the controls for even basic navigation you can’t do much, the learning curve will always be steeper, and some people don’t want to go through that even if it pays off in the end.

gtsop 6y ago

> My current theory is vim users are like vegans/gluten free/paleo/etc, in that its a personal choice that some are public about. This is not a good theory. Surely, this effect appears wherever you've got conflicting choices about what is best, but there are always reasonable arguments on why you should do X over Y. And you know, there are always people who respect other's choices. I am a vim user and I 100% understand why others don't want to get into it. I don't bully them, I will explain only once why I think it is a better environment and then they are free to carry on with their lives and so am i. People who are extremely attached to their choices are (to me) unable to understand that every tool is for a job && different people have different needs. This shouldn't lead us to label a group of users and ignoring the pros and cons of smth

greggman3 6y ago
I am curious if any vim user has ever been able to see the benefits of other environments. I know I have never been able to see the benefits of vim. Part of me wants to give a try for 3-6 months just to prove to myself that it's all bullshit and that vim is just another editor. In any case. For a long time I was a fan of my editor of choice, slickedit. It definitely has a few features I use for which I don't know the analogs in most other editors. Features like versions backups. Undo of multi-file search and replace. Also once had someone show me IntelliJ for C++ and was fairly impressed with its refactoring features. Enough that I thought I should look more into it. I have yet to see a feature for vim that makes it clear win over any other major editor. I have read articles that make me understand why others might like it but seriously. I think you're all deluding yourselves. Just as an example, lately I mostly do JavaScript and a little typescript. I'm 100% sure that the VSCode experience there out of the box is superior to vim for the same purpose. VSCode is node aware, browser aware, npm aware, eslint aware, typescript aware out of the box. I have no idea how much configuration I'd have to do in vim to get it to match and I find all of that invaluable. I'm not saying vim can't do it but I am saying if I tried to start using vim today on the projects I'm working on the experience would be seriously inferior. I don't know what language I'd have to be using to change that.
- alvarosevilla95 6y ago

alwillis 6y ago

My current theory is vim users are like vegans/gluten free/paleo/etc, in that its a personal choice that some are public about, and people love to hate on it and "disprove" it for the same reason. I think there's some truth to that. I've been vegan for 20 years and a Vim user for half of that time. Back in the day, I was questioned a lot about why I was vegan, being asked all the time where do you get your protein? Grateful those days are over. Vegans can tell you the worse people are the former vegans, who almost always had a bad experience of some kind being vegan and want to tell anyone who will listen. I think people who tried and didn't get Vim are often the ones wanting to disprove that Vim is any good. Because obviously if it didn't work for them, it can't be any good. The subtitle for Drew Neil’s Practical Vim book is Edit text at the speed of thought and that's kinda how it is when you start to get pretty good at Vim.

clankyclanker 6y ago

> The "suffering" has honestly been overblown by jokes about not being able to quit on one side and the mythologizing of the leet ninja 10x programmer who is only bound by his typing speed and can't waste time reaching for the mouse, on the other side. You're neglecting the folks who use keyboard editors (and fancy keyboards) to reduce the incidence of RSI. If I can accomplish the same tasks in four keystrokes (~1s) as it would take me in a dozen clicks and 15 seconds of mousing, then poorly designed programs forcing me to use the mouse to interact are causing an order of magnitude more strain than those designed for keyboard interaction. (This is less an issue in text-editors, and more an issue in everything else user-facing.)

apocolyps6 6y ago
I'm responding to a user who described having to learn a text editor as suffering. I'm not sure how your response relates to mine. I happen to be a person who uses a fancy keyboard (Kinesis Advantage2) and text editor (vim) to reduce RSI.