3 ms·

> Not sure if just trolling, but if not it seems you're not very experienced yet in the use of the tools of the trade of the professional programmer. [emphasis

by lutusp 14y ago

> Not sure if just trolling, but if not it seems you're not very experienced yet in the use of the tools of the trade of the professional programmer. [emphasis added] Guess again -- I wrote Apple Writer in the late 1970s (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Writer http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Writer). One of my goals was to eliminate the modes that plagued contemporary editors and attract people interested in ease of use and efficiency. Apple Writer became a best-seller because (among other things) its competition, most derived from vi, required users to switch modes. And I can't believe I'm having this conversation over 30 years later, still trying to get people to choose more efficient tools. > ... you're not very experienced yet ... It's likely that I was programming -- and publishing my programs -- before you were born: http://arachnoid.com/programmable_calculators http://arachnoid.com/programmable_calculators

tikhonj 14y ago
There's a difference between "more efficient" and "easier to learn". You're advocating the latter. This is not a good thing. For example, moving around by using the search feature (at least a well-designed incremental search like Vim or Emacs) is more efficient for longer distance moves (e.g. more than a couple of lines)--it's faster and, more importantly, takes less thought and context switching. When you have to move to a distinct part of your text file, chances are you know what the content there is. With a command like /, you directly turn that knowledge into efficient movement. With the arrow keys, you have to leave the home row and do a bunch of movements to get where you're going. You have to figure out how to turn the word you want to go to into a bunch of arrow actions. It's even more difficult of your target is off-screen. Ultimately, a rich set of movement commands you can access without moving your hand is going to be more efficient than using the standard arrow keys. This is particularly true for somewhat semantic commands like moving by block or expression or moving to a word (the command in question here). Ideally, you want to move around faster with less context switching. Keyboard-oriented editors like Vim and Emacs are much better at this than any other editor I've seen, as long as you learned how to use them properly. This really makes the learning curve more than with it.
- lutusp 14y ago
  > There's a difference between "more efficient" and "easier to learn". You're advocating the latter. This is not a good thing. You've posed a false dichotomy. Modern editors are both more efficient and easier to learn. > Ideally, you want to move around faster with less context switching. Keyboard-oriented editors like Vim and Emacs are much better at this than any other editor I've seen, as long as you learned how to use them properly. Pico is a keyboard-only editor, and it's easier to navigate, and to use in general. So is every other editor that exists, written after about 1980. None of them require the user to switch modes, an idea that died with vi -- I mean, if only vi had died. As soon as keyboards included arrow keys, the handwriting was on the wall.
  - nsmartt 14y ago
    How is a mouse more efficient than an ability to move to a phrase with a bit of typing, skip words ahead with a single letter instead of ctrl + shift, move to a new line and a specific place on that line with a couple of button presses, etc?
    - lutusp 14y ago
      > How is a mouse more efficient than an ability to move to a phrase with a bit of typing, skip words ahead with a single letter instead of ctrl + shift, move to a new line and a specific place on that line with a couple of button presses, etc? I can't improve on your explanation as the answer to your own question. Obviously using a mouse to cut/copy and paste, within the same document or between independent documents, is more efficient than what you just described.
      - nsmartt 14y ago
        Moving my hand over to the mouse, moving the mouse cursor to wherever I need, selecting that text and dragging while my editor slowly scrolls with my cursor when I could use a few key sequences with no context switch is the opposite of efficient. edit: wording
robomartin 14y ago
I am so glad to see someone else with perspective at least make their voice heard. This vim thing is absolute lunacy. I was booting machines from scratch thirty years ago with Forth and writing my own text editors to be able to program the machine. I used crippled keyboards without mice, function keys and cursor buttons. And I gladly said goodbye to that crap years ago. Then you come to a place like HN and you have "youngsters" forming a cult around a shit editor with a shit interface that ignores all modern peripherals. A shit editor that would have been written in an entirely different way had the authors had access to more than A-Z, 0-9 and a few mode keys. Then they actually make themselves believe that they are being more "efficient" by using this shit editor. I guess that's no different from cults who believe in imaginary things. As I have said before, show me one company, one project, that has some in on time, budget and without bugs because of their choice of vim over even something like Notepad and I'll eat my words. Young HN readers need to at least be made to consider that the factors influencing the quality, success or failure of software project or startup have so little to do with your choice of text editors that it is beyond ridiculous to even discuss it.
- Riesling 14y ago
  > As I have said before, show me one company, one project, that has some in on time, budget and without bugs because of their choice of vim over even something like Notepad and I'll eat my words. Show me one transportation company that would fail because their trucks do not have air conditioning or power steering. Is it nice to have those things, especially if you drive around the entire day? Of couse. I'm with you that vim should not be a cult. But calling it a shit interface is over the top. If it was, why are there so many popular vim emulation plugins for many of the modern IDEs.
- j45 14y ago
  You have a fair point. It really doesn't come down to right or wrong, but rather interpretation, and ultimately preference. So, if someone people enjoy vim, celebrate them. Same goes for whatever you use. I do agree that the assumption that nothing can exist beyond how one sees things possibly ever being right being the realer and bigger problem.
nessus42 14y ago
> One of my goals was to eliminate the modes that plagued contemporary editors and attract people interested in ease of use and efficiency. I certainly bought into this line of reasoning when I learned Emacs instead of vi all those years ago. These days I'm not so sure. Me, RMS, and most of my Emacs-using friends have developed carpal tunnel syndrome, while the people I know that use vi have mostly not. Furthermore I can feel my fingers hurt every time I have to type C-M-something or M-something C-something M-something C-something. This sort of stuff is rampant in Emacs, not to mention Eclipse and all the other IDEs that I know of, and from what I can tell of vi, seems to be less so in vi.

by lutusp 14y ago

tikhonj 14y ago

There's a difference between "more efficient" and "easier to learn". You're advocating the latter. This is not a good thing. For example, moving around by using the search feature (at least a well-designed incremental search like Vim or Emacs) is more efficient for longer distance moves (e.g. more than a couple of lines)--it's faster and, more importantly, takes less thought and context switching. When you have to move to a distinct part of your text file, chances are you know what the content there is. With a command like /, you directly turn that knowledge into efficient movement. With the arrow keys, you have to leave the home row and do a bunch of movements to get where you're going. You have to figure out how to turn the word you want to go to into a bunch of arrow actions. It's even more difficult of your target is off-screen. Ultimately, a rich set of movement commands you can access without moving your hand is going to be more efficient than using the standard arrow keys. This is particularly true for somewhat semantic commands like moving by block or expression or moving to a word (the command in question here). Ideally, you want to move around faster with less context switching. Keyboard-oriented editors like Vim and Emacs are much better at this than any other editor I've seen, as long as you learned how to use them properly. This really makes the learning curve more than with it.

lutusp 14y ago
> There's a difference between "more efficient" and "easier to learn". You're advocating the latter. This is not a good thing. You've posed a false dichotomy. Modern editors are both more efficient and easier to learn. > Ideally, you want to move around faster with less context switching. Keyboard-oriented editors like Vim and Emacs are much better at this than any other editor I've seen, as long as you learned how to use them properly. Pico is a keyboard-only editor, and it's easier to navigate, and to use in general. So is every other editor that exists, written after about 1980. None of them require the user to switch modes, an idea that died with vi -- I mean, if only vi had died. As soon as keyboards included arrow keys, the handwriting was on the wall.
- nsmartt 14y ago
  How is a mouse more efficient than an ability to move to a phrase with a bit of typing, skip words ahead with a single letter instead of ctrl + shift, move to a new line and a specific place on that line with a couple of button presses, etc?
  - lutusp 14y ago
    > How is a mouse more efficient than an ability to move to a phrase with a bit of typing, skip words ahead with a single letter instead of ctrl + shift, move to a new line and a specific place on that line with a couple of button presses, etc? I can't improve on your explanation as the answer to your own question. Obviously using a mouse to cut/copy and paste, within the same document or between independent documents, is more efficient than what you just described.
    - nsmartt 14y ago
      Moving my hand over to the mouse, moving the mouse cursor to wherever I need, selecting that text and dragging while my editor slowly scrolls with my cursor when I could use a few key sequences with no context switch is the opposite of efficient. edit: wording

robomartin 14y ago

I am so glad to see someone else with perspective at least make their voice heard. This vim thing is absolute lunacy. I was booting machines from scratch thirty years ago with Forth and writing my own text editors to be able to program the machine. I used crippled keyboards without mice, function keys and cursor buttons. And I gladly said goodbye to that crap years ago. Then you come to a place like HN and you have "youngsters" forming a cult around a shit editor with a shit interface that ignores all modern peripherals. A shit editor that would have been written in an entirely different way had the authors had access to more than A-Z, 0-9 and a few mode keys. Then they actually make themselves believe that they are being more "efficient" by using this shit editor. I guess that's no different from cults who believe in imaginary things. As I have said before, show me one company, one project, that has some in on time, budget and without bugs because of their choice of vim over even something like Notepad and I'll eat my words. Young HN readers need to at least be made to consider that the factors influencing the quality, success or failure of software project or startup have so little to do with your choice of text editors that it is beyond ridiculous to even discuss it.

Riesling 14y ago
> As I have said before, show me one company, one project, that has some in on time, budget and without bugs because of their choice of vim over even something like Notepad and I'll eat my words. Show me one transportation company that would fail because their trucks do not have air conditioning or power steering. Is it nice to have those things, especially if you drive around the entire day? Of couse. I'm with you that vim should not be a cult. But calling it a shit interface is over the top. If it was, why are there so many popular vim emulation plugins for many of the modern IDEs.
j45 14y ago
You have a fair point. It really doesn't come down to right or wrong, but rather interpretation, and ultimately preference. So, if someone people enjoy vim, celebrate them. Same goes for whatever you use. I do agree that the assumption that nothing can exist beyond how one sees things possibly ever being right being the realer and bigger problem.

nessus42 14y ago

> One of my goals was to eliminate the modes that plagued contemporary editors and attract people interested in ease of use and efficiency. I certainly bought into this line of reasoning when I learned Emacs instead of vi all those years ago. These days I'm not so sure. Me, RMS, and most of my Emacs-using friends have developed carpal tunnel syndrome, while the people I know that use vi have mostly not. Furthermore I can feel my fingers hurt every time I have to type C-M-something or M-something C-something M-something C-something. This sort of stuff is rampant in Emacs, not to mention Eclipse and all the other IDEs that I know of, and from what I can tell of vi, seems to be less so in vi.