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Comment by kstenerud | Hacker News Reader

I've used both vim and emacs in various incarnations over the course of 30 years. After all that time, I hate emacs, and I tolerate vim because sometimes I need a remote editor. Are they powerful? Yes. Are they useful for the things I do as a developer? Not really.

For everything not remote, there's sublime text or a real IDE.

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I’m not sure why someone would use vim over an IDE with vim key bindings

Sometimes the vim key-bindings are incomplete, or wrong. I moved from intellij to vim with language server plugin because the times where the keybindings did something that I didn't expect, or were not supported leaving me hunting through dropdowns were a pain in the ass.

The other thing to consider is if you are really comfortable in a language, sometimes the lag you get from editing fast in an IDE outweighs the feature set you get from it. Vim is always buttery smooth for me, even in large files and with a bunch of plugins. I can't say the same for other editors.

Finally, having vim from within a terminal means that I can CTRL+Z to all my cli apps to manage the project I'm working in. That combined with backgrounding live-reload for web development, or jumping into a REPL make for a rewarding flow-state between building, executing commands and editing that I've only heard about from Emacs users. As much as it is on topic with the rest of the conversation here, I tried emacs and spacemacs and doommacs a few times, and have never been able to enjoy it as much as jumping between vim and zsh.

VSCode-Vim is much slower than Vim, and lacks plugins like targets.vim.

It also doesn't do Lisp. So that keeps me from venturing in that direction as well. I just use a well set up vim - fast and easy on the eyes.

Spacemacs is a great answer.

No kidding. I don’t understand how people put up with these things. Something like Sublime (which at this point is a category- I’d include Atom and VS Code and likely others) is just so much nicer.

Since this post is about newbies, I’ll add that I’ve been programming professionally for over 15 years and over 20 in total.

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