6 ms·

> Productivity is far greater with vim I don't agree with that at all. Vim is useful, perhaps, for a few text matching tricks but typing speed is rarely the bo

by venus 13y ago

> Productivity is far greater with vim I don't agree with that at all. Vim is useful, perhaps, for a few text matching tricks but typing speed is rarely the bottleneck in programming. It's optimising for the wrong thing. The only people advocating for vim are those who have already gone through the pointless pain of 5 years learning to use the thing. It's basically a cult, or at least a club. And frankly, watching these vim "power users" is usually quite frustrating - they struggle to do trivial tasks which can be accomplished in sublime with a simple right mouse click. It is important to know the basic vim commands for when you are editing text via ssh but for everyday use sublime text is, IMO, superior in every way.

negatmx 13y ago
I'm curious... What trivial tasks are vim power users struggling with?
- chris_wot 13y ago
  None. He's talking out of his hat!
  - venus 13y ago
    Expose the current file in the side bar so you get a picture of its location in the dir tree? Install a package? Change the window size? I'm not talking out my hat at all. I notice no productivity improvements from using vim. Maybe some appear in different lines of work, but I'm not saying it just to annoy you. I don't notice Gentoo users being all that much more productive than Ubuntu users, either. It's basically a hobby to endlessly tweak your environment, and so is vim, IMO.
    - chris_wot 13y ago
      You don't notice any improvements... Great! But don't equate your lack of understanding with the fact that plenty of people are extremely productive with vim, and can do quite extraordinary things with it!
      - venus 13y ago
        Plenty of people are extremely productive using any number of tools. I like to think I am a rather productive programmer myself, despite my general dislike of vim. However, in the general case, I don't think it is much of an advantage in and of itself, which is why I disagreed with the poster above matter-of-fact stating: > Productivity is far greater with vim as if that was an indisputable fact. It is not. That was the thrust of my argument. And regardless of typing prowess, knowledge of sound, elegant design is the essence of good programming. How fast you can edit text is almost irrelevant in the long term. I know excellent programmers who basically type with two fingers, and shitty copy and paste hack programmers who do their damage at an amazing rate with vim. The two-finger typists make more than the vim wizards, and for good reason. Don't confuse the tools with the craft itself.
        chris_wot 13y ago
        In that case I apologise, I didn't understand what you were saying. Ironically, I totally agree with you! Sorry about that.
        venus 13y ago
        No worries, glad we agree :)
    - negatmx 13y ago
      1.-NERDTreeFind (Have it mapped to ,nf) 2.-Adding the package name to a file and typing BundleInstall 3.-Basic window management... (Have it mapped to Alt+hjkl) I know how to do all of these very easily from first week of serious usage. I'm using vim for less than a year and wouldn't call myself a "vim power user". I think it's a little bit adventurous to judge an editor that popular for that long time based on seemingly (seeing the use cases you said) limited personal experience.
      - dsrguru 13y ago
        Yup, see my reply to venus's more lengthy set of concerns. Oh well, I hope venus learns the Truth some day. ;)
sigzero 13y ago
How is ST at working on Solaris in a terminal?
- venus 13y ago
  I wouldn't know, thank god.
dsrguru 13y ago
It takes several days, not 5 years, to train your muscle memory to the point where the vim editing model is much faster for raw edits than the default editor in Sublime [1]. > typing speed is rarely the bottleneck in programming You're right, especially if you're using a language that doesn't require a lot of boilerplate. But between the UNIX shell and the normal vim add-ons, even higher-level editing tasks, i.e. those that aren't strictly about raw editing, shouldn't give vim users trouble. As with negatmx, I'm convinced you haven't met people who use vim properly. Name a task on which you've either seen or you'd imagine a ST user to outperform a vim "power user". I'll let you know the logical way to do it in vim. [1] To obtain solid proficiency with the vim editing model, just work through the interactive vimtutor, read up on text objects, and spend a couple hours acclimating yourself to using the following motions and commands in place of hjkl (sort of but not necessarily in order of usefullness): / ? n N f F t T # * gg G <n>G (e.g. 42G) H M L ^ 0 $ { } ( ) w W b B e E C-f C-b C-d C-u zt zz zb
- nXqd 13y ago
  +1. So true, Vim just cannot be beat. If you want to meet the real vim hacker, try to do some task in vimgolf.com. We will see ;)
- venus 13y ago
  > Name a task on which you've either seen or you'd imagine a ST user to outperform a vim "power user". I'll let you know the logical way to do it in vim. Selecting code and copy and pasting it into a chat client for discussion. Grabbing someone else's code from a chat client and editing it, then copy and pasting it back to show them my interpretation. Copying an error message and pasting it into a web browser. Installing or updating any kind of plugin or package. Doing anything out of the ordinary (vim users will be googling for the arcane sequence of commands and don't try the "no true scotsman" defence for that - they all do) Scrolling smoothly through a large file looking for a certain method you will know by shape. Quickly navigating a tree of files at the side of the window. Changing the font to something post-1980. Make it look good (this willl take infinite time) I could go on, and on, and on. Anyway, I have no doubt that for some tasks it's possible to train yourself to be very fast in vim, and if you find that measurably speeds up some aspect of your productivity you care about, then more power to you. However, I haven't really observed this being the case. It's sort of like Linux vs MacOSX on the desktop. Linux people can and do customise their machines to an amazing extent, all sorts of crazy window managers and weird shell extensions, all promising great improvements in window management and shell completion, etc. But at the end of the day, I don't notice linux-using programmers as being any more productive, as a rule, than mac users, who tend to not fetishize the tool so much and just want to get on with the job. If anything, it's the opposite. I admit I'm biased against vim because of how ugly it is, which is sort of why the linux vs mac analogy works for me. I love linux by the way and use it on the server, and I also edit on the server with vim : P Anyway, I'm making much bigger a deal about the matter in this thread than I actually feel! I just don't think vim is a slam dunk, is all.

by venus 13y ago

negatmx 13y ago

I'm curious... What trivial tasks are vim power users struggling with?

chris_wot 13y ago
None. He's talking out of his hat!
- venus 13y ago
  Expose the current file in the side bar so you get a picture of its location in the dir tree? Install a package? Change the window size? I'm not talking out my hat at all. I notice no productivity improvements from using vim. Maybe some appear in different lines of work, but I'm not saying it just to annoy you. I don't notice Gentoo users being all that much more productive than Ubuntu users, either. It's basically a hobby to endlessly tweak your environment, and so is vim, IMO.
  - chris_wot 13y ago
    You don't notice any improvements... Great! But don't equate your lack of understanding with the fact that plenty of people are extremely productive with vim, and can do quite extraordinary things with it!
    - venus 13y ago
      Plenty of people are extremely productive using any number of tools. I like to think I am a rather productive programmer myself, despite my general dislike of vim. However, in the general case, I don't think it is much of an advantage in and of itself, which is why I disagreed with the poster above matter-of-fact stating: > Productivity is far greater with vim as if that was an indisputable fact. It is not. That was the thrust of my argument. And regardless of typing prowess, knowledge of sound, elegant design is the essence of good programming. How fast you can edit text is almost irrelevant in the long term. I know excellent programmers who basically type with two fingers, and shitty copy and paste hack programmers who do their damage at an amazing rate with vim. The two-finger typists make more than the vim wizards, and for good reason. Don't confuse the tools with the craft itself.
      - chris_wot 13y ago
        In that case I apologise, I didn't understand what you were saying. Ironically, I totally agree with you! Sorry about that.
        venus 13y ago
        No worries, glad we agree :)
  - negatmx 13y ago
    1.-NERDTreeFind (Have it mapped to ,nf) 2.-Adding the package name to a file and typing BundleInstall 3.-Basic window management... (Have it mapped to Alt+hjkl) I know how to do all of these very easily from first week of serious usage. I'm using vim for less than a year and wouldn't call myself a "vim power user". I think it's a little bit adventurous to judge an editor that popular for that long time based on seemingly (seeing the use cases you said) limited personal experience.
    - dsrguru 13y ago
      Yup, see my reply to venus's more lengthy set of concerns. Oh well, I hope venus learns the Truth some day. ;)

sigzero 13y ago

How is ST at working on Solaris in a terminal?

venus 13y ago
I wouldn't know, thank god.

dsrguru 13y ago

It takes several days, not 5 years, to train your muscle memory to the point where the vim editing model is much faster for raw edits than the default editor in Sublime [1]. > typing speed is rarely the bottleneck in programming You're right, especially if you're using a language that doesn't require a lot of boilerplate. But between the UNIX shell and the normal vim add-ons, even higher-level editing tasks, i.e. those that aren't strictly about raw editing, shouldn't give vim users trouble. As with negatmx, I'm convinced you haven't met people who use vim properly. Name a task on which you've either seen or you'd imagine a ST user to outperform a vim "power user". I'll let you know the logical way to do it in vim. [1] To obtain solid proficiency with the vim editing model, just work through the interactive vimtutor, read up on text objects, and spend a couple hours acclimating yourself to using the following motions and commands in place of hjkl (sort of but not necessarily in order of usefullness): / ? n N f F t T # * gg G <n>G (e.g. 42G) H M L ^ 0 $ { } ( ) w W b B e E C-f C-b C-d C-u zt zz zb

nXqd 13y ago
+1. So true, Vim just cannot be beat. If you want to meet the real vim hacker, try to do some task in vimgolf.com. We will see ;)
venus 13y ago
> Name a task on which you've either seen or you'd imagine a ST user to outperform a vim "power user". I'll let you know the logical way to do it in vim. Selecting code and copy and pasting it into a chat client for discussion. Grabbing someone else's code from a chat client and editing it, then copy and pasting it back to show them my interpretation. Copying an error message and pasting it into a web browser. Installing or updating any kind of plugin or package. Doing anything out of the ordinary (vim users will be googling for the arcane sequence of commands and don't try the "no true scotsman" defence for that - they all do) Scrolling smoothly through a large file looking for a certain method you will know by shape. Quickly navigating a tree of files at the side of the window. Changing the font to something post-1980. Make it look good (this willl take infinite time) I could go on, and on, and on. Anyway, I have no doubt that for some tasks it's possible to train yourself to be very fast in vim, and if you find that measurably speeds up some aspect of your productivity you care about, then more power to you. However, I haven't really observed this being the case. It's sort of like Linux vs MacOSX on the desktop. Linux people can and do customise their machines to an amazing extent, all sorts of crazy window managers and weird shell extensions, all promising great improvements in window management and shell completion, etc. But at the end of the day, I don't notice linux-using programmers as being any more productive, as a rule, than mac users, who tend to not fetishize the tool so much and just want to get on with the job. If anything, it's the opposite. I admit I'm biased against vim because of how ugly it is, which is sort of why the linux vs mac analogy works for me. I love linux by the way and use it on the server, and I also edit on the server with vim : P Anyway, I'm making much bigger a deal about the matter in this thread than I actually feel! I just don't think vim is a slam dunk, is all.