Hacker News Reader

Comment by sheer_horror | Hacker News Reader

> it just doesn't make sense to me.

Here's how to think of Vim that will make sense.

Suppose you have two identical codebases that each need to have the same 200 lines changed. Functions need to be added, comments to be removed, templates need modifying, and so forth. In one of the two codebases, you use Nano to apply those changes. In the second codebase, you use Vim. Assuming the Vim user was proficient at Vim, you can be sure that he/she used 1/3 -> 1/2 as much hand and wrist effort than the nano user to make the same changes. It could be that the effective Vim user ended up using less than 1/2 the hand effort than the nano user.

If you extrapolate this over these two coder's careers, you realize that the Vim user is going to be glad he spent the time learning Vim.

Learning how to use Vim has been so rewarding for me. I love coding in Vim and I love learning new ways of doing things.

View on HN

> Suppose you have two identical codebases that each need to have the same 200 lines changed. Functions need to be added, comments to be removed, templates need modifying, and so forth. In one of the two codebases, you use Nano to apply those changes. In the second codebase, you use Vim. Assuming the Vim user was proficient at Vim, you can be sure that he/she used 1/3 -> 1/2 as much hand and wrist effort than the nano user to make the same changes. It could be that the effective Vim user ended up using less than 1/2 the hand effort than the nano user. > If you extrapolate this over these two coder's careers, you realize that the Vim user is going to be glad he spent the time learning Vim.

This I completely understand, and if I was a professional programmer who had to deal with those sorts of operations regularly I'd probably find Vim very rewarding to learn.

The perspective I come from is that of a sysadmin. If I'm editing large amounts of text I'm probably on a system where I control what's installed and thus can have whatever editors and IDEs I want, within reason. The situations where I find myself forced to use Vim are stripped down appliances where more often than not I'm looking to make a single change in a single line of text.

For that use case basically any editor with a working find feature is equally fast, so I'd much rather have one that uses a standard or at least discoverable user interface.

To me Vim is like one of those simultaneous torquing machines used in modern vehicle assembly plants, where I'm just looking for a torque wrench to check my lug nuts.

I hear you for nano, but what about compared to [graphical mouse-clicky editor of choice] (in non-vim mode)? I know enough of the basic vim commands that I could edit a file if I ever needed to but how much hand effort could it save me vs. kate or VS Code? (though i really prefer notepad++ to both of those) I feel relatively efficient in a good graphical editor but maybe I just don't know any better? Really just give me reasonable multi-selection features and I'm happy.

There's a plugin (can't remember the name of it right now) that lets you use mouse controls as well. Click where you want the cursor, scroll, click on which tab you want, etc. That was game over with Sublime for me.

I don't think you need a plugin for that? set mouse=a, unless I am missing something

Yep you're right, my bad.

To prove that Vim is faster than a graphical editor as well, I might make a WebM where I edit two identical files, one with notepad++ and one with Vim. Would you appreciate that? I will do that if you respond to this.

Because yes, Vim ultimately will be faster.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com