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> What is a power user? A user who has spent a lot of time with Vim, is intimately familiar with multiple ways vim handles text, and all the arcane shortcuts,

> What is a power user? A user who has spent a lot of time with Vim, is intimately familiar with multiple ways vim handles text, and all the arcane shortcuts, and created their own workflows And even then it depends. I've seen people spend more time craeating macros and replays than me on the same task using a simple tool like multiple cursors. > "Proper" refactoring and context-aware selection are absolutely possible with a properly configured vim (or neovim) install "Out of the box" beats "properly configured" for the absolute vast majority of users. And I've yet to see the "properly configured Vim" from the self-professed Vim masters that is to do anything faster than what I do with Idea on a daily basis.

deleted 4y ago
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mpalmer 4y ago
> A user who has spent a lot of time with Vim, is intimately familiar with multiple ways vim handles text, and all the arcane shortcuts, and created their own workflows. So - only when a vim user reaches this point do they become as effective as a non power user of IDEA? I can't agree. It is simply not necessary to understand more than a 10th of what vim can do to be productive with it. And the other 90% is there to be discovered when it's needed. > And even then it depends. I've seen people spend more time craeating macros and replays than me on the same task using a simple tool like multiple cursors Seems like cherry picking to be honest. Plenty of people find it fun and rewarding to learn and practice features like macros, but search/replace with confirmation is as fast or faster than editing with multiple cursors, and most users probably learn about it before going near macros. > "Out of the box" beats "properly configured" for the absolute vast majority of users. Seems like a different claim than your initial contention that Vim is not as capable a tool as an IDE. But there are many well-maintained configurations of vim that are as trivial to install as IDEA, with as many features (and again, free and open source). > And I've yet to see the "properly configured Vim" from the self-professed Vim masters that is to do anything faster than what I do with Idea on a daily basis. It's only natural that you find it easier to conceive that the tool you use on a daily basis is more effective than one you don't. Same goes for me. We each have become very effective with the tools we use every day. I freely admit to being biased toward the sort of Unix-oriented tools that taviso described in his comment, because at their core they are simple, performant and combine well with other tools (not to mention free and open source). Can IDEA claim more than one of these?
hiptobecubic 4y ago
I don't know, this sounds a lot like blub to me. "I've never seen anyone do anything with a charcoal stick that i couldn't do with my ballpoint." Or "I don't see why people like regex when code refactoring tools are so much smarter." People say the same thing about Linux vs Windows in general, particularly the "for most users" straw man. We're not talking about most users, we're talking about users that care enough about a use case to put up with the time it takes to learn tooling. If someone cared about things vim was good at (flexible, programmatic text editing), they'd be more likely to have switched to using it. The fact that your needs don't like up, that you don't appreciate the difference or don't care about it, e.g. because you mostly edit source files in a particular language well-supported by your IDE, rather than frequently needing to do one-off esoteric things to a wide variety of files with varying semantics. Fwiw, i know vim well, have used it many years, and still frequently switch to an ide when doing things that the IDE was specifically designed to support.

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mpalmer 4y ago

> A user who has spent a lot of time with Vim, is intimately familiar with multiple ways vim handles text, and all the arcane shortcuts, and created their own workflows. So - only when a vim user reaches this point do they become as effective as a non power user of IDEA? I can't agree. It is simply not necessary to understand more than a 10th of what vim can do to be productive with it. And the other 90% is there to be discovered when it's needed. > And even then it depends. I've seen people spend more time craeating macros and replays than me on the same task using a simple tool like multiple cursors Seems like cherry picking to be honest. Plenty of people find it fun and rewarding to learn and practice features like macros, but search/replace with confirmation is as fast or faster than editing with multiple cursors, and most users probably learn about it before going near macros. > "Out of the box" beats "properly configured" for the absolute vast majority of users. Seems like a different claim than your initial contention that Vim is not as capable a tool as an IDE. But there are many well-maintained configurations of vim that are as trivial to install as IDEA, with as many features (and again, free and open source). > And I've yet to see the "properly configured Vim" from the self-professed Vim masters that is to do anything faster than what I do with Idea on a daily basis. It's only natural that you find it easier to conceive that the tool you use on a daily basis is more effective than one you don't. Same goes for me. We each have become very effective with the tools we use every day. I freely admit to being biased toward the sort of Unix-oriented tools that taviso described in his comment, because at their core they are simple, performant and combine well with other tools (not to mention free and open source). Can IDEA claim more than one of these?

hiptobecubic 4y ago

I don't know, this sounds a lot like blub to me. "I've never seen anyone do anything with a charcoal stick that i couldn't do with my ballpoint." Or "I don't see why people like regex when code refactoring tools are so much smarter." People say the same thing about Linux vs Windows in general, particularly the "for most users" straw man. We're not talking about most users, we're talking about users that care enough about a use case to put up with the time it takes to learn tooling. If someone cared about things vim was good at (flexible, programmatic text editing), they'd be more likely to have switched to using it. The fact that your needs don't like up, that you don't appreciate the difference or don't care about it, e.g. because you mostly edit source files in a particular language well-supported by your IDE, rather than frequently needing to do one-off esoteric things to a wide variety of files with varying semantics. Fwiw, i know vim well, have used it many years, and still frequently switch to an ide when doing things that the IDE was specifically designed to support.