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> I spent a lot more than 20h learning emacs. It was my main editor for years. Yeah same, are people saying 20h commitment is a lot now ? Not sure if I've got

> I spent a lot more than 20h learning emacs. It was my main editor for years. Yeah same, are people saying 20h commitment is a lot now ? Not sure if I've gotten old, or if things are easier to learn now - but a 20h commitment seems like very lite.

HWR_14 3y ago
(1) If I can spend 20 hours learning something boring or 20 minutes learning something else boring but they do the same thing I would prefer 20 minutes. (2) There are more tools to learn. That 20 hours/minutes is being multiplied by an ever growing number.
- cassianoleal 3y ago
  Thing is, git is pretty much everywhere. I don't think I've had a single job in the last 15 years or so where the client or employer wasn't using git. 20h to learn a tool that will be used daily for decades (yes, I expect this trend to go on for at least another 10-30 years), and the choice is not mine to make, is not much. I should say, if the choice was mine, I'd probably still choose git. It's powerful, it's something I can already make really good use, and I feel comfortable easing new people into it. Regardless, the point is that I don't have that choice as an individual who's part of a team or an organisation. On the other hand, I can choose my code editor without interfering with my fellow engineers's own choices. Here I chose the one I could learn in 20 minutes and get better the more I used it. It took me very little time to get productive with VS Code, and then a few more days to get used to most shortcuts I use. Everything else is accessible via the command palette and more shortcuts can be learned as their functions become used more frequently. Until that, the palette is an excellent interface. It also serves as a discovery mechanism for features. With emacs I had to learn a lot before I started getting productive. I got very good at it. Multiple cursors, window jockeying, buffer wrangling, the works. Any functionality that fell in disuse for some time, I'd risk forgetting their shortcuts. If I did, the only way to use it would be to somehow remember the shortcuts, probably by interrupting work and googling, or by trying to navigate its archaic menu systems. With vim it's not very different. I still use it more or less daily but mostly for single file editing over SSH, since even if I need to do more complex editing on a remote server, I can use my local VS Code. I don't think people have to use VS Code. I work daily with other engineers who use it, but also any of the Intellij editors, vim, emacs, you name it. We can all live in harmony and collaborate just fine. Not so much if each would chose their own VCS.

HWR_14 3y ago

(1) If I can spend 20 hours learning something boring or 20 minutes learning something else boring but they do the same thing I would prefer 20 minutes. (2) There are more tools to learn. That 20 hours/minutes is being multiplied by an ever growing number.

cassianoleal 3y ago
Thing is, git is pretty much everywhere. I don't think I've had a single job in the last 15 years or so where the client or employer wasn't using git. 20h to learn a tool that will be used daily for decades (yes, I expect this trend to go on for at least another 10-30 years), and the choice is not mine to make, is not much. I should say, if the choice was mine, I'd probably still choose git. It's powerful, it's something I can already make really good use, and I feel comfortable easing new people into it. Regardless, the point is that I don't have that choice as an individual who's part of a team or an organisation. On the other hand, I can choose my code editor without interfering with my fellow engineers's own choices. Here I chose the one I could learn in 20 minutes and get better the more I used it. It took me very little time to get productive with VS Code, and then a few more days to get used to most shortcuts I use. Everything else is accessible via the command palette and more shortcuts can be learned as their functions become used more frequently. Until that, the palette is an excellent interface. It also serves as a discovery mechanism for features. With emacs I had to learn a lot before I started getting productive. I got very good at it. Multiple cursors, window jockeying, buffer wrangling, the works. Any functionality that fell in disuse for some time, I'd risk forgetting their shortcuts. If I did, the only way to use it would be to somehow remember the shortcuts, probably by interrupting work and googling, or by trying to navigate its archaic menu systems. With vim it's not very different. I still use it more or less daily but mostly for single file editing over SSH, since even if I need to do more complex editing on a remote server, I can use my local VS Code. I don't think people have to use VS Code. I work daily with other engineers who use it, but also any of the Intellij editors, vim, emacs, you name it. We can all live in harmony and collaborate just fine. Not so much if each would chose their own VCS.