2 ms·

Not necessarily -- you're universalizing your experience. I learned vim in the nineties and still use it daily. I can play it like a piano. There is simply no

Not necessarily -- you're universalizing your experience. I learned vim in the nineties and still use it daily. I can play it like a piano. There is simply no substitute for deep-trained muscle memory. I don't futz; I just sort of want and the cursor is there and the paragraph is changed, etc. The risk, though, is that I have to protect this muscle memory like a precious investment. I actively avoid tooling that prevents me from using it, or will create a bunch of conflicting habits. I'm effectively married to vim, and, to be more specific, the extremely dialed-in neovim config I use. Like a pianist. Because musicians aren't the only ones who need an HD realtime uplink to their minds. I agonize over shortcut changes and consider long-term impact on typing speed, because typing speed -- like website loading speed -- is conceptual fidelity, and can make the difference between capturing an idea and losing it forever. I'm always surprised that other engineers don't notice this, but then again, I didn't really notice it either, until I got severe carpal tunnel for a year or two back in the mid '10s.

marssaxman 4y ago
> Not necessarily -- you're universalizing your experience. Perhaps I was overly terse; I meant to do the opposite, with regard to the limited perspective represented in the previous comment! > I don't futz; I just sort of want and the cursor is there and the paragraph is changed, etc. Our strategies are very different, but it sounds like our experiences feel much the same. I don't really think about editing at all; my fingers just do what years of practice have trained them to do, while my conscious mind works on the actual problem. I made my own quirky commitment to keyboarding speed: I learned to touch-type very young, using the Dvorak layout, and I've been cruising along at 100 wpm ever since. I have never learned QWERTY at all, so a normal keyboard cripples me - I become a slow, clumsy, two-fingered hunt-and-pecker, for whom getting any text into the machine represents a significant labor. (This is the primary reason I rejected vim, twenty-odd years ago - the Dvorak layout scrambled its command mode into anti-ergonomic chaos.) In that way, I very much agree with your belief that typing speed matters! I have simply found it in a different layer of the stack.
- 1attice 4y ago
  Fascinating -- I too once had to choose between my mastery of Dvorak and mastery of vim. I choose vim, but I agree that I was forced to choose by how hecking terrible it is to use vim under Dvorak. If anyone who is reading wants a cool project, make a kakaoune-like Dvorak-specialized text-mode editor!

marssaxman 4y ago

> Not necessarily -- you're universalizing your experience. Perhaps I was overly terse; I meant to do the opposite, with regard to the limited perspective represented in the previous comment! > I don't futz; I just sort of want and the cursor is there and the paragraph is changed, etc. Our strategies are very different, but it sounds like our experiences feel much the same. I don't really think about editing at all; my fingers just do what years of practice have trained them to do, while my conscious mind works on the actual problem. I made my own quirky commitment to keyboarding speed: I learned to touch-type very young, using the Dvorak layout, and I've been cruising along at 100 wpm ever since. I have never learned QWERTY at all, so a normal keyboard cripples me - I become a slow, clumsy, two-fingered hunt-and-pecker, for whom getting any text into the machine represents a significant labor. (This is the primary reason I rejected vim, twenty-odd years ago - the Dvorak layout scrambled its command mode into anti-ergonomic chaos.) In that way, I very much agree with your belief that typing speed matters! I have simply found it in a different layer of the stack.

1attice 4y ago
Fascinating -- I too once had to choose between my mastery of Dvorak and mastery of vim. I choose vim, but I agree that I was forced to choose by how hecking terrible it is to use vim under Dvorak. If anyone who is reading wants a cool project, make a kakaoune-like Dvorak-specialized text-mode editor!