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Comment by umvi | Hacker News Reader

I've tried several times to get into vim. I feel like it's similar to dvorak though - unless you use it 24/7 you won't develop the muscle memory necessary to use it efficiently.

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Using it 12/7 was enough for me for me to be become proficient. ;)

If it takes 84 hours a week of use in order to become proficient I think I'll pass.

Maybe 80 hours total, but then that's it. And then you have speedy skills that can serve you in almost any command line environment. AND vi commands are used in a lot of other places, like man pages and such.

second the sibling comment.

it's an up-front cost, but it's one that you'll benefit a lot from over the years.

I recommend starting with soft plaintext, like a diary. Over time, you can migrate to using it to edit code. My conversion took a couple months, and followed this pattern.

I started by editing plaintext diary files. Then, once I was very use to the in-file navigation, I installed vim-mode on my editor of choice at the time, so I could benefit from efficiencies there, while keeping all the IDE benefits.

Then, I began the process of replicating all of the features I used in my IDE, in vim. that took maybe another month, and was motivated by how painfully un-snappy my IDE was relative to vim.

This is all to say, it doesn't have to be an all-or-nothing cutover. That would be painful and frustrating.

It honestly isn't nearly as difficult as learning Dvorak; you can be productive with Vim if you use it full-time for about a week. If you stay dedicated to learning and improving, you can get really good and become pretty productive.

While I love Vim and I use it most of the time, I don't really buy it when people act like it saved them a whole lot of time. I love the Vim keystrokes and philosophy, but I don't really know if I'm any more productive with Vim than I was with Emacs...I stick with Vim because I find that, once you "get it", it's relatively easy to translate stuff from your brain to the screen.

I've always considered that it's more about comfort than productivity. And perhaps that comfort leads to a small increase in productivity, but more because you enjoy it than because it's so much faster to use (as we always say, we spend more time thinking that writing). And because so many tools use vi-style keybindings, if you spend any significant amount of time in a terminal, then you're going to experience that comfort and familiarity all the more.

Yep yep, completely agree.

I wish most of my time was spent writing code, but a vast majority is spent reading it and swearing at my monitor because things don't work, so I don't think even a perfect editor would make me a lot more productive, at least not directly, except (as you stated) maybe through me liking the editor a bit more.

I personally spend as much time as I can in the terminal, and so my "IDE" is actually is typically NeoVim, tmux, some kind of language-server, and a command line. Am I more productive than my peers using IntelliJ because of this setup? Almost certainly not, but I find it very intuitive for me to do stuff with, since I'm super familiar with the tmux keystrokes, and I find Vim's design really intuitive for me.

You don't need to go hard core all at once. Start learning a few commands, such as "i", "a", "x", ":w", then add progressively more to your repertoire.

Oddly enough, learning Dvorak during a [slow] summer internship and then learning to use Vim regexes to edit/search a couple TCP dumps at my first job probably are the reasons I eventually became interested in scripting/programming and eventually a software developer.

Really if it weren't for the first challenge of learning Vim, I wouldn't have learned to program. Which, I know, sounds kind of backwards :P

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