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Comment by mywittyname | Hacker News Reader

Personally, I think it speaks to the ability to learn. Vim and Emacs are borderline torturous for beginners and it's easy to give up. The ability to push past insurmountable difficulties is likely highly correlated with programming performance (since most of us need to do that often).

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I don't know about emacs (never tried it), but I really disagree with vim. I keep saying this on Hacker News over and over again but go to your terminal, type in vimtutor and 30 minutes later you can survive in vim and not flip out anymore.

Mastering vim or becoming pretty good in vim, seems quite a bit more difficult.

I've given up on vim 5 times, until someone on HN suggested me vimtutor. It really taught me the value in good educational content.

you need to master it though before it stops being a productivity hindrance if you have already mastered an IDE with first class support for your language.

That's why I gave up on Vim at work vs Visual Studio.

But it's my go to for Haskell projects.

What I like best about vim is the startup speed and fewer reaches for the mouse. I do like using the mouse to select a large block of text to indent tho!

I use Vim everywhere and if I want IDE stuff I use VSCode at home and IntelliJ IDEA at work but you can pry my Vim bindings from my cold dead hands regardless of the editor I'm using. Putting in the time to learn (it wasn't even that long until I was productive again, maybe one day of work) is one of the best decisions I ever made.

VsVim is pretty decent if you're using Visual Studio. It gives you modal editing and support for a healthy subset of vim keybindings. I was doing some C#/.NET work a couple of years ago and VsVim was a lifesaver.

C-h t (ctrl+h then t). This will bring you to the emacs tutorial. It's similar to vimtutor but covers primary emacs usage.

Learning Vim using vimtutor is one thing for people coming from editors like Sublime/Atom, but setting up vim so that autocomplete/File Tree/FileSearch work like expected is a whole different ball game.

And at that point one may as well leverage the work of the hundreds of developers at JetBrains or Microsoft and use a real IDE.

This is exactly his point. Taking the initiative and spending time to learn something like vim, not giving up, looking for tutorials and working through them just shows the person is willing to endure some hardship to gain something good in return.

Yup.

> insert joke about how using emacs or vim probably led to natural selection weeding out all but the most committed programmers or how the bad vim programmers

uh.... /joke/?

>Vim and Emacs are borderline torturous for beginners and it's easy to give up.

Hardly so, IMO. Plus - and I assume here that you are talking here mainly about developers (using programming languages) and maybe web designers (using CSS/HTML/etc.) - the complexity of vi(m) and emacs can hardly be called higher than those dev and design technologies, except, maybe, for the use of advanced editor features and scripting of those editors in VimScript or ELisp.

Anyway, FWIW, I had published this article (a vi quickstart tutorial) in Linux For You magazine some years ago, after I first wrote it for some Windows sysadmin friends of mine, who were given additional charge of a few HP Unix boxes. After using the tutorial, they told me it helped them to quickly come up to speed on the basics of using vi (the predecessor of vim).

The tutorial is available here; it is short and easy to digest:

https://gumroad.com/l/vi_quick

Edited for wording and typos.

Thing is you don't need such tutorials for other text editors, you know how to use them intuitively. This itself is a barrier for entry for most people, people who manage to cross this barrier prove they've some initiative and motiviation to spend time in learning something that makes them more productive, they're more likely not to shy away from obscure tasks which may appear difficult on the surface.

That's a good point. I did read similar comments to yours in this thread (such as the nearby one by andrewstuart2, and others), before posting about my vi tutorial, and agree with the general argument stated. I've grown from scratch in my own career by the same method you and others describe, i.e. doing a lot of self-study, trying out stuff a lot, poring over tech docs and books a lot (used to buy used ones earlier, when I could not afford too many new ones), borrowing from libraries, etc.

Edit: And have always recommended such an approach to younger developers and aspiring ones, when they ask me for advice, which sometimes happens. Basically tell them to learn as much as you can and invest in your future (with study effort, not only money) for the long term, not just for quick immediate gains.

I think it also speaks to the ability to look beyond short-term pain to the long-term benefits, as you alluded to in your third sentence. Just because something is foreign and difficult should never be enough to discount the best, most efficient long-term solution. Powering through the barrier to entry with your mind on the long-term is necessary for success in engineering disciplines, and also happens to be required for proficiency in daily use of these editors.

>Vim and Emacs are borderline torturous for beginners and it's easy to give up

I really do not understand where this belief comes from. I learnt Emacs as a beginner in the early 2000's when I started university I'd never done any programming before (I'd also never used Unix before) our course was taught on Sun Solaris workstations and emacs I had many frustrations at the time I remember cursing Solaris and the stupid GUI it had (CDE) but never emacs - emacs just worked not sure what is supposed to be torturous about it.

Nearly 20 years later I still use Emacs daily it's one of the programs on my computer I probably "couldn't live without". Maybe at this point I'm just a hostage to my tools but i'm too old and too familiar with emacs to bother trying some other editor out - what do people use now sublime text? (if the article is accurate) I've never heard of it before I don't know anyone here at my work who uses it (I am an engineer not a software person though) could be a generational thing I'm in my mid 30's and one of the younger people at my work so maybe all the "cool" Mac kids use it or something...

There is documentation of secretaries not only learning how to use Multics Emacs in the 1970s -- a much more primitive version than what prevails today -- but also how to extend and customize it using Lisp. (Multics Emacs was the first Lisp-extensible Emacs.)

It's not torturous to learn Emacs. But Emacs doesn't work like a standard Windows/Mac app, and today we have fewer professional developers willing to make it past the initial rejection phase of "wellp, this is weird".

And yes, today people use Sublime Text, something like Atom, IntelliJ, or -- for hipster cred -- vim. Emacs is apparently retro enough to be a total gonk for new users but advanced enough to not be redeemable for whuffie in hipster circles. Vim closes that gap.

Got a pointer to the documentation?

http://multicians.org/mepap.html

This actually appeared on Hackernews a couple of times, which is how I found it. Money quotes:

"It was soon found that Emacs could be taught within minutes or an hour to those with no technical experience at all." (referring to TECO Emacs actually but applicable to Multics Emacs)

"Non-technical personnel have been observed to acquire enough knowledge of Lisp to extend Emacs for only this purpose."

"While ITS TECO code is quite baroque, and accessible to only a few experts, the extension language of Multics Emacs is sufficiently natural and simple to learn that non-technical personnel have successfully written and debugged non-trivial extensions."

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