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Comment by wtetzner | Hacker News Reader

> It's silly, really. Take the entirety of a project and multiply typing time by, I don't know, 1.25. It would still be insignificant when compared to the overall project time.

I mostly agree with you, but I think there is value in fast text editing for software development. The advantage of being able to edit code quickly is that typing doesn't interrupt your train of thought as much.

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If someone's train of thought is interrupted by the difference in code entry time between vim and a good IDE or code editor --which is milliseconds-- they have a real problem requiring medical attention.

Forget IDE's for a moment. Look at an editor like Atom. It's fantastic. You type "for" and it expands the for loop automatically for you and it understands languages. And, more importantly, you have to spend exactly zero minutes configuring that behavior.

Let professionals make great IDE's and tools. Focus on the real job in software development, which is not being a text entry machine.

I get the impression that you haven't gotten proficient in an editor like Vim or Emacs. The difference in speed in terms of getting your thoughts out of your head into the computer is definitely more than milliseconds. I usually use Emacs, but I use an IDE for Java, because I think the benefits outweigh the costs, which is why I said I mostly agree with you. What I find frustrating is that there's no reason an IDE couldn't be as good as Vim or Emacs for editing text while retaining all of their IDE goodness.

On of these days I may try my hand at building something like that (assuming nobody beats me to it, which would be even better).

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