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Comment by mettamage | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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/?

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.

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.

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