4 ms·
ahh yes, editor holy wars... a) it has little to do with the tool itself (vim vs. whatever), it's about the payoff from investing time in learning an editor or
by a-dub 11y ago
ahh yes, editor holy wars...
a) it has little to do with the tool itself (vim vs. whatever), it's about the payoff from investing time in learning an editor or environment well. once you know your tool well, friction drops substantially. if you take someone who knows something like intellij well and put them next to someone who knows vim well, it would probably be a wash in terms of who is hobbled most by the shortcomings of their tool. if you know a tool well, you know where it excels and where it sucks, and you have strategies for using it effectively.
b) to really know a tool well, a significant investment of time and effort must be made. i prefer to spend my time and effort on projects, to be honest.
c) vim is a tool that can be taken anywhere and the rewards of learning it can be paid back for years. corporate environment? usually already there or easy to get due to it being open source. platform? you can get it for pretty much any visual environment. language? if more than 10 people have written in it, there's a syntax colorizer for vim. need to do some ops stuff? vi will be there. hell, in a pinch, even busybox has a vi clone.
is it intrinsically better or worse? hard to say. but as far as i'm concerned, vim is a worthwhile investment because of its portability, longevity and constant adaption by a strong community to changing environments.
- veddox 11y agoditto to just about everything you said. And just for the sake of having mentioned it, ed is still the standard text editor!
- tomlu 11y ago> it has little to do with the tool itself (vim vs. whatever) I don't know about that. I've been proficient in other editors too, but I found that vim's modal editing mode confers unique advantages when it comes to staying in flow. But if compared to an IDE there are several flow-breaking things in vim that just don't work as well out of the box (navigation, indexing, debugger integration etc), so if that's your point then I agree. Of course most major IDEs have some sort of vim emulator these days so you can have your cake and eat it.
- bcheung 11y agoIt's curious that vim uses modes and it is actually one of the things I really like about it. A lot of HCI talks about how modes are "evil" because the user can get confused and what mode they are in. I do occasionally issue a command from the wrong mode but I find that the time to correct is usually extremely small and far outweighs having to create more cumbersome bindings that don't have collisions in other modes.
- nnain 11y agoThe article is not about editor wars. The author only tries to make the point that how, after few years of use, the editor gets out of the way. It could as well be said about Emacs or maybe <insert your fav editor here>.