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> [Optimization is often beneficial.] Your point is indisputable. Fortunately, it's not inconsistent with my own: >> [Optimization is sometimes harmful.] Opt

> [Optimization is often beneficial.] Your point is indisputable. Fortunately, it's not inconsistent with my own: >> [Optimization is sometimes harmful.] Optimization pays the greatest dividends to tasks which: (1) could be brief, (2) but are quite long and (3) frequently necessary. As to vim: On (1), brevity, Vim is powerfully so. On (2), length, I don't recall any of my meta editing tasks involving "100 keystrokes and a mouse movement." Customizable shortcuts can trim down the outliers. On (3), frequency, this surely depends on the person and task. I rarely delete every third occurrence of x between the seventh and ninth y... but if I used vim, I would make a point to. So, I would turn to vim if there were several meta-editing tasks I routinely performed, each requiring a large number of keystrokes, each of which vim could reduce. And hey, maybe this is the case. I'd love to see a plugin that analyzed my editing style and made suggestions to make me more efficient. But originally I was just noting that efficiency and optimization are messy.

swombat 15y ago
> On (2), length, I don't recall any of my meta editing tasks involving "100 keystrokes and a mouse movement." Customizable shortcuts can trim down the outliers. As a simple example of that, using a dumb text editor like notepad as the baseline, changing the same 10 characters on 10 consecutive lines will take at least 200 keystrokes (100 DELs, 100 times typing the same characters back in, plus the movement keys - about 9 to move down to the next row. With a bit of thought, in notepad, you can reduce this a bit. use Ctrl-C and Ctrl-V to reduce the amount of typing - but you'll still need to either DEL or select the words to replace, in the same location on each line. With a more modern text editor, you can select a rectangular area and replace the text within it. In vi, replacing those 10 strings on 10 consecutive lines will take (starting at the first character to replace, like Notepad, and assuming it's a single word inside separators): Ctrl-V e 1 0 j c A_NEW_WORD That's 16 keystroke instead of over 200, with no mouse movements. This is something I do frequently enough that I didn't need to even think for a millisecond to bring to mind the keystrokes needed to do it. Now, I'm not arguing your editing style isn't different - maybe you've never needed to do this - but I would argue that this is a fairly common programming text editing task.
- mayanksinghal 15y ago
  In a dumb Editor: 1. Ctrl-shift-Right to select (1 or 3) 2. Ctrl-C copy (1 or 2) 3. Ctrl-H Open replace dialog box (1 or 2) 4. Ctrl-V Paste the old (1 or 2) 5. Tab (1) 6. A_NEW_WORD (10) 7. Enter (1) 8. Replace (1) x10 (or Tab + replaceAll == 2) 9. Escape (1) ------------- Total 27 or 32 That >80% Better. On an intelligent IDE: 1. Right Click Key (1) 2. R - to choose refactor (1) 3. R - Rename (1) 4. A_NEW_WORD (10) 5. Enter (1) ---------------- Total: 14 I still want to learn Vim, because I somehow find it 'artistic'. There is some inherent beauty in Vi that I would love to be a part of. Unfortunately, the learning curve is fairly steep and the fear of losing productivity for 2 weeks is too huge. I still use vi for small changes, but for coding I find eclipse a more useful tool.
  - Ideka 15y ago
    You forgot to take the conversion rate between clicks and keystrokes into account. c = (k.d.t.r) / 13333337 Where: c = click k = keystroke d = distance in centimeters between the "J" key and mouse t = area to be clicked in pixels² r = screen resolution in pixels²
    - mayanksinghal 15y ago
      There are no clicks, the Right Click Key on keyboard is just too awesome! :)
  - sirclueless 15y ago
    There's another giant advantage to renaming in an IDE over a text editor: You can be sure not to clobber any other variable/method references. Here's an example, I want to change the name of my MyClass.Execute() method to something more descriptive. In an IDE, I right click and rename and I'm done. In vim or other plaintext editors this is practically impossible without manually inspecting each call-site. Is "foo.Execute()" a reference to MyClass.Execute() or YourOtherClass.Execute()? Without actually parsing the program it's tough to know. I love using vim, and I'm getting better at it the more I use it, but this is one of the major productivity drains I encounter that an IDE does way better.

swombat 15y ago

> On (2), length, I don't recall any of my meta editing tasks involving "100 keystrokes and a mouse movement." Customizable shortcuts can trim down the outliers. As a simple example of that, using a dumb text editor like notepad as the baseline, changing the same 10 characters on 10 consecutive lines will take at least 200 keystrokes (100 DELs, 100 times typing the same characters back in, plus the movement keys - about 9 to move down to the next row. With a bit of thought, in notepad, you can reduce this a bit. use Ctrl-C and Ctrl-V to reduce the amount of typing - but you'll still need to either DEL or select the words to replace, in the same location on each line. With a more modern text editor, you can select a rectangular area and replace the text within it. In vi, replacing those 10 strings on 10 consecutive lines will take (starting at the first character to replace, like Notepad, and assuming it's a single word inside separators): Ctrl-V e 1 0 j c A_NEW_WORD That's 16 keystroke instead of over 200, with no mouse movements. This is something I do frequently enough that I didn't need to even think for a millisecond to bring to mind the keystrokes needed to do it. Now, I'm not arguing your editing style isn't different - maybe you've never needed to do this - but I would argue that this is a fairly common programming text editing task.

mayanksinghal 15y ago
In a dumb Editor: 1. Ctrl-shift-Right to select (1 or 3) 2. Ctrl-C copy (1 or 2) 3. Ctrl-H Open replace dialog box (1 or 2) 4. Ctrl-V Paste the old (1 or 2) 5. Tab (1) 6. A_NEW_WORD (10) 7. Enter (1) 8. Replace (1) x10 (or Tab + replaceAll == 2) 9. Escape (1) ------------- Total 27 or 32 That >80% Better. On an intelligent IDE: 1. Right Click Key (1) 2. R - to choose refactor (1) 3. R - Rename (1) 4. A_NEW_WORD (10) 5. Enter (1) ---------------- Total: 14 I still want to learn Vim, because I somehow find it 'artistic'. There is some inherent beauty in Vi that I would love to be a part of. Unfortunately, the learning curve is fairly steep and the fear of losing productivity for 2 weeks is too huge. I still use vi for small changes, but for coding I find eclipse a more useful tool.
- Ideka 15y ago
  You forgot to take the conversion rate between clicks and keystrokes into account. c = (k.d.t.r) / 13333337 Where: c = click k = keystroke d = distance in centimeters between the "J" key and mouse t = area to be clicked in pixels² r = screen resolution in pixels²
  - mayanksinghal 15y ago
    There are no clicks, the Right Click Key on keyboard is just too awesome! :)
- sirclueless 15y ago
  There's another giant advantage to renaming in an IDE over a text editor: You can be sure not to clobber any other variable/method references. Here's an example, I want to change the name of my MyClass.Execute() method to something more descriptive. In an IDE, I right click and rename and I'm done. In vim or other plaintext editors this is practically impossible without manually inspecting each call-site. Is "foo.Execute()" a reference to MyClass.Execute() or YourOtherClass.Execute()? Without actually parsing the program it's tough to know. I love using vim, and I'm getting better at it the more I use it, but this is one of the major productivity drains I encounter that an IDE does way better.