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Comment by munk-a | Hacker News Reader

I do not and have never used Vim, if I started at your company would you prefer to have me waste three or four days learning it or just pay an extra six hundred dollars on hardware?

Just for your knowledge, your answer probably differs from the one I'd get from whoever does the accounting at your company, and their answer is the right one.

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> waste three or four days learning it

If you're a proficient IDE user, learning and setting up Vim up to a comparable level to a top-notch IDE (Visual Studio, IntelliJ) would take more than three or four days. Three or four weeks (or even months sounds) more realistic, in order to get efficient:

* code navigation * code refactoring * debugging * tool integration * workspace/project management

Don't let anyone tell you otherwise, I'm a Vim user and the people that say it will take just days or a few weeks have just forgotten how long it took them to ramp up. Or they're fooling themselves that their Vim does everything a capable IDE does on strong hardware.

I agree, but I wanted to clearly under estimate because three or four days is already enough cost wise and it's hard to argue. I think two weeks is on the optimistic side, but I think real proficiency would be a slow process and likely end up not paying off for about a quarter, though you'd be productive in other ways during that time.

At a previous company, I never told the new college grads that there were options other than vi, so unless they were enterprising enough to figure things alternatives by themselves (this was before widespread availability of Linux and the web), they were forced to learn it.

And then I'd tell them about alternatives after they were proficient with vi. Not one ever switched away from vi.

Did that cost us in initial productivity? Probably. But it's such a minor thing when it comes to NCGs.

Good thing I'm not in charge of these things at my company, I'd probably look for people who used hardware properly rather than just rely on Apple to make their POS GUI IDEs to run... Most of my colleagues run IDEs, but not the ones who actually get stuff done.

> three or four days learning it

Now this is being ambitious :)

> I do not and have never used Vim I do wonder, what editor do you use when you're sshed into a remote machine?

I generally use nano for quick and dirty things, but prefer to push/pull changes. The environment I'm working in doesn't necessitate editing local files on a remote very often.

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