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It takes too much thinking to use editors like that. I'm very much of the "don't make me think" school, and I grew up using Notepad. Well, maybe I don't use Not

It takes too much thinking to use editors like that. I'm very much of the "don't make me think" school, and I grew up using Notepad. Well, maybe I don't use Notepad anymore, but I like it when I press the up-arrow key and my cursor moves up a line. Simple.

colinbartlett 11y ago
It seems to me that an approach like that won't advance you very far. There's a lot of work in software development that can reduced to nothing, if only you put the time up front to "think". Whether or not the 10x developer is a myth, there are people who are vastly more productive than others. And they are people who have invested in themselves and their skills, automating away everything they possibly can.
z92 11y ago
For me it feels like I am pressing the up arrow key and the cursor is moving up, too. But really I am pressing a different key. Which key I no longer remember. If someone asks me, I have to retype it to check which key I have just pressed. After some time, it all become muscle memory.
wtetzner 11y ago
This is the reason people like Vim. Yes, there's an up-front learning curve, but it's not long until it's muscle memory. Now even complex editing tasks can be done without thought or effort.
inclemnet 11y ago
It takes thinking to learn to use editors like this. Actually using them requires little to no thought after an acclimatisation period. This is one of the points of the article.
mcbuilder 11y ago
You're right it takes more thinking in order to learn vim or any set of key bindings. Vim has taught me that you are able to "speak", by typing, a language related to editing text. You are severely limiting your self in your efficiency of editing if you choose to ignore your ability to define macros/modes/whatever in a powerful text editor. I use emacs now with a highly configured set of key bindings, and you're right it's taken me a lot of time. You're comment makes me think there are two types of programmers, those in the "don't make me think" school and those who spend an insane amount of time in one of the big editors, i.e vim/emacs/sublime. To make a gross example of the deficiencies of each, the "don't make me think" school are the people who would manually enumerate function calls instead of learning what a for loop is, while the crazy emacs hackers are the type to spend more time fine-tuning their config than actually working.
smhenderson 11y ago
but I like it when I press the up-arrow key and my cursor moves up a line I haven't used an install of Vim in a _long_ time that didn't map the arrow keys (and home, end, pgup, etc) to the way most modern computer users are used to. I use Vim because it's what I learned when I first started using Unix/Linux. It's on just about every machine I work with and is easily installed on anything that doesn't come with it out of the box. I'm not arguing that it's the best ever editor, just that it works well for me. But, yeah, the days of having to always use hjkl to move around are pretty deep in the past at this point.
u04f061 11y ago
And you would have to press it ten times to move to 10th line. It is your choice. If you are happy with it, go with it.

colinbartlett 11y ago

It seems to me that an approach like that won't advance you very far. There's a lot of work in software development that can reduced to nothing, if only you put the time up front to "think". Whether or not the 10x developer is a myth, there are people who are vastly more productive than others. And they are people who have invested in themselves and their skills, automating away everything they possibly can.

z92 11y ago

For me it feels like I am pressing the up arrow key and the cursor is moving up, too. But really I am pressing a different key. Which key I no longer remember. If someone asks me, I have to retype it to check which key I have just pressed. After some time, it all become muscle memory.

wtetzner 11y ago

This is the reason people like Vim. Yes, there's an up-front learning curve, but it's not long until it's muscle memory. Now even complex editing tasks can be done without thought or effort.

inclemnet 11y ago

It takes thinking to learn to use editors like this. Actually using them requires little to no thought after an acclimatisation period. This is one of the points of the article.

mcbuilder 11y ago

You're right it takes more thinking in order to learn vim or any set of key bindings. Vim has taught me that you are able to "speak", by typing, a language related to editing text. You are severely limiting your self in your efficiency of editing if you choose to ignore your ability to define macros/modes/whatever in a powerful text editor. I use emacs now with a highly configured set of key bindings, and you're right it's taken me a lot of time. You're comment makes me think there are two types of programmers, those in the "don't make me think" school and those who spend an insane amount of time in one of the big editors, i.e vim/emacs/sublime. To make a gross example of the deficiencies of each, the "don't make me think" school are the people who would manually enumerate function calls instead of learning what a for loop is, while the crazy emacs hackers are the type to spend more time fine-tuning their config than actually working.

smhenderson 11y ago

but I like it when I press the up-arrow key and my cursor moves up a line I haven't used an install of Vim in a _long_ time that didn't map the arrow keys (and home, end, pgup, etc) to the way most modern computer users are used to. I use Vim because it's what I learned when I first started using Unix/Linux. It's on just about every machine I work with and is easily installed on anything that doesn't come with it out of the box. I'm not arguing that it's the best ever editor, just that it works well for me. But, yeah, the days of having to always use hjkl to move around are pretty deep in the past at this point.

u04f061 11y ago

And you would have to press it ten times to move to 10th line. It is your choice. If you are happy with it, go with it.