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Comment by n0on3 | Hacker News Reader

IMHO the reasons in 2020 are the same of the last few years and are not changing any time soon: you don't need to leave the terminal AND it is everywhere AND (once you get used to it) it is extremely powerful and blazing fast (most "normal" people think vim users are having some sort of meltdown when they see vim users do even pretty simple stuff).

TBH, although this might be an unpopular opinion among vim users, I don't think vim is worth for coding beyond simple scripting, a decent setup requires way too much work which defeats one of its key points. But for everything else in editing files, nothing compares.

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Not quite everywhere. At my current job, I have gotten somewhat proficient with sed, which is the most advanced editor installed on our production systems.

Also, for some reason, many modern systems still only install vi by default. If you know vim, you know vi; but it is missing enough features to be annoying.

A lot of Linux systems (most as far as I know but could be wrong) actually ship vim but in a very stripped down build and set up to run in vi compatibility mode by default, e.g. vim.tiny on Debian and Ubuntu. BSD systems often use nvi, which is quite close to the original vi, and can feel very weird if you are used to vim.

> blazing fast

The thing I'm running into recently is that it gets very slow for large files. Unfortunately, where I work, the norm is to have files be thousands and thousands of lines long, which causes my setup which otherwise works fine to become very slow.

It's probably a plugin I'm using, but as you say, it now becomes my responsibility to figure out which one it is. Contrast this with vscode, which works fine out of the box, and already has most features built in.

If you are editing over a network connection and you normally have cursorline on, then try turning it off. That makes a big difference for me when there is network latency.

You're right, the benefits of a great debugger are so overwhelming that putting up with crummy key bindings is worth it. There have been many times where I've been plowing away in some $IDE, then swap over to vim to do some text munging operation in the file like converting some tool output into coded constants, and then swapping back into $IDE to continue the build cycle. It's right there, and it's so good at what it does.

> (most "normal" people think vim users are having some sort of meltdown when they see vim users do even pretty simple stuff).

You know, people always say this, but I've never seen that actually happen. And I've been using vim for around 10 years, with lots of customizations. I consider myself fairly proficient (though by no means an expert).

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