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Comment by hyperman1 | Hacker News Reader

For me, things like VIM where you first have to configure the hell out of it are a pain. Every time you're on some other machine, all your customization is gone. So after switching machines a bazillion times over the years, making the same little tweaks over and over, I've learned to deal with the default config. What I didn't expect: It made me a lot more productive in the long run.

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This is why defaults matter. People sometimes downplay changes with "well, you can just tweak it if you don't like it", but in the long run tweaking the install every time is effort. Especially when you're working on non-internet connected machines. It's why I get annoyed when for example Ubuntu stops shipping the ability to burn DVDs on the install disk.

I think vanilla VI (basically just modal editing in general) empowers the user enough to make it worth knowing. I'm pretty damn proficient editing code in a project (that I know granted) with hundreds of files using standard VI when i ssh to a VM or AWS machine etc. Still more proficient than people using an IDE locally without VI modal editing :p

The default vim config is pretty weird: incremental search is off by default for some reason, I think it still defaults to using tabs for indentation, it doesn't change the working directory to the current file's.

Incremental Search - This can be incredibly slow on large files and/or network mounted files. It can also interact with line wrapping and highlight search to slow vim to a crawl. So I think it makes sense to leave it off.

Tabs - That's the way god intended it. Stop trying to force your indentation width on me.

Stable working directory - This is how every text editor I'm aware of works. I can see use cases where you might want to change it manually or automatically, but I don't want to have to guess which directory I'm in every time I open a file.

Even some seeming no brainers like turning syntax highlighting on can be terrible because it doesn't work well with dark backgrounds or other random colour schemes.

Change working directory seans like the most stupid idea i ever heard... That would make:

  vim module/code.cpp
  :make

Not use the build system on the top level...

Why would you have to tweak it every install? Isn't the whole point of separating the configuration from the application's data so that you can move it around?

Moving in a configuration is tweaking it. And then you're on a machine that is STIGed or is on a standalone network or you're helping someone do something on their account. The end result is you end up back in the default mode a lot so you might as well learn it.

Why not just take your configuration with you? I switched machines multiple times and each time it took me just a few minutes to migrate my vim configuration over to the new one.

Especially since I have my vim configuration and other dotfiles in Git. Just git clone and I am done.

Off course that is too much when I am only using a machine temporarily (like servers over ssh), but I can be productive with the default as well. It is just that with my configured vim I am more productive.

Vim seems like the wrong example. A lot of people use it with just the defaults. Emacs seems to be customized right away by more people.

With emacs, however, people tend to use tramp to edit files on a remote server as if they were local. So, there’s less need for actually using emacs on a server in the first place.

You can do the same with vim (in recent versions) out-of-the-box via netrw.

    :help netrw

Yeah, although my experience is that when I use vim, I generally ssh into the box and start vim there while when I use emacs, I use tramp.

I would say `git clone` is less painful than downloading and installing an IDE.

I absolutely agree. On the other hand, repeated fast forwarded rebased merges of issue branches that needs to be squashed might be viewed as more painful than installing Tower.

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