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Can anyone of the "old" group explain what the benefit of vim is, if we have nano now? Having missed the days when only vim was there, I find it perplexing that

Can anyone of the "old" group explain what the benefit of vim is, if we have nano now? Having missed the days when only vim was there, I find it perplexing that vim is sometimes suggested. Personally, I have to look up each single keystroke in vim when nano just seems to follow common UX conventions.

themadsens 5y ago
See jasode's answer above[1] and make sure to follow the stackoverflow link too[2] [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29432611 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29432611 [2] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1218390/what-is-your-most-productive-shortcut-with-vim/1220118#1220118 https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1218390/what-is-your-mos...
dbrueck 5y ago
It boils down to speed of editing text, especially editing code - I've yet to find anything that comes even remotely close (and for a long time I tried to find something else, haha). Maybe one challenge in grasping it is that if you look at any one feature in isolation, it sorta looks like a negligible amount of time savings (if at all), and at the cost of weird key combinations. So maybe instead imagine if you took the top 200 common actions you do when editing code and recognize that over your career you might perform those actions many, many millions of times. Now shave 100ms to 5000ms (or more in some cases) off of each one. I dunno if that helps, but anytime I have to use something other than vim, it's incredible how slow and tedious it is to do even the most basic things, and it feels exponentially worse with any sort of bigger editing tasks.
- Helmut10001 5y ago
  Alright, I get this. Thanks for the explanation. I am using VS Code these days, which is why I have no need to use nano/vim for editing code (beyond setting of basic config settings, where speed does not really matter).
ananonymoususer 5y ago
Not stated in the other replies to your question: Vi is available on pretty much any UNIX derivative OS, and many other platforms. You can learn it once on your platform of choice, and then when you find yourself using some new (or old) platform that you are unfamiliar with, you will at least know how to edit a file.

themadsens 5y ago

See jasode's answer above[1] and make sure to follow the stackoverflow link too[2] [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29432611 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29432611 [2] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1218390/what-is-your-most-productive-shortcut-with-vim/1220118#1220118 https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1218390/what-is-your-mos...

dbrueck 5y ago

It boils down to speed of editing text, especially editing code - I've yet to find anything that comes even remotely close (and for a long time I tried to find something else, haha). Maybe one challenge in grasping it is that if you look at any one feature in isolation, it sorta looks like a negligible amount of time savings (if at all), and at the cost of weird key combinations. So maybe instead imagine if you took the top 200 common actions you do when editing code and recognize that over your career you might perform those actions many, many millions of times. Now shave 100ms to 5000ms (or more in some cases) off of each one. I dunno if that helps, but anytime I have to use something other than vim, it's incredible how slow and tedious it is to do even the most basic things, and it feels exponentially worse with any sort of bigger editing tasks.

Helmut10001 5y ago
Alright, I get this. Thanks for the explanation. I am using VS Code these days, which is why I have no need to use nano/vim for editing code (beyond setting of basic config settings, where speed does not really matter).

ananonymoususer 5y ago

Not stated in the other replies to your question: Vi is available on pretty much any UNIX derivative OS, and many other platforms. You can learn it once on your platform of choice, and then when you find yourself using some new (or old) platform that you are unfamiliar with, you will at least know how to edit a file.