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Comment by piracykills | Hacker News Reader

I too would like a clear answer to this, I've made numerous attempts to learn vim and emacs and can find my way around in both, but I never broke my habit of the old school CUA keybindings and arrow keys so always found myself gravitating back, especially when more full fledged IDEs and such were an option. ReSharper C++ is a major time-saver on a daily basis for me and I have a hard time thinking that would be easily replaced.

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I think Vim for me is solely in the 'fun' category. I mean, actual text editing is a pretty small portion of the time I spend on programming - thinking, reading, and debugging are much more significant for me.

That said, I think that a well-set up version of vim is probably the most fun anybody can have while editing text. I actually enjoy doing finnicky and tricky textual tasks. You feel like a wizard literally every day. That's worth something for me.

I actually picked it up because I wanted a new natural-language text editor, and I figured vim would probably still exist in 20 years, and I don't like learning new things. It's been an unmitigated blessing in this role - and it's also pretty nice for programming, if a little bit more annoying to set up.

Whether there's an advantage that'll sell you on putting the time in, I don't know, but JetBrains' IDEs are my goto alternative to vim when I'm either stuck using Windows or need more IDE features for whatever language I'm working in. The vim bindings are probably the best I've used - there's still some mismatch, but for editing at least it works great.

So, if you ever feel the need to try it, CLion (which I would assume is on par with ReSharper C++) in vim mode may be a good option.

> I never broke my habit of the old school CUA keybindings

For me it's the opposite. I can't switch to IDEs and sometimes accidentally close browser tabs because my brain has mapped `cut` to Ctrl-W.

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