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Comment by hevelvarik | Hacker News Reader

I’ve tried to force myself to pick up vim a few times but after getting a bit older I realized that I don’t want to become one with my machine as a fighter pilot might be with their plane. I like the distance the mouse move and click provides me. I do more thinking and reading than typing anyways

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The reason to pick up vim is ubiquity, not efficiency. And you REALLY don't need to know much. Maybe half of what's in the vimtutor tutorial is enough. Personally, I'd also suggest at least learning how to do search/search & replace with regex which is easy too (and bonus, has high affinity with sed.)

That seems like the most any modern developer/*nix user should need to concern themselves with vim and wholly for the reason I mention above: it's the most likely text editor to be there on unix-like systems.

Editing text on servers by hand is not necessarily a practice you want to invest in. Even if you are not on the immutable infrastructure / containers / cloud bandwagon... Puppet is 15 years old now. CFEngine is 27.

I've yet to encounter a Linux system without nano

It's 2020, dude. No one sysadmins individual boxes anymore, it's all infrastructure-as-code. Which means if you have a problem with your server infrastructure, you shoot those cattle and provision new cattle with the CFT you wrote in Visual Studio Code.

I picked up vim decades ago and I’m glad I did. I don’t feel “one with the machine” any more than I feel “one with the paper” when I use a nice pen. I feel like the machine is getting out of the way.

In a strange way, Vim might be for you then. I've used it steadily for the last decade as my IDE, and I have a minimal set of plugins and an unimpressive .vimrc. I've put most effort into setting up very limited, low-key syntax colouring schemes; and linting. To me now, Vim (well, neovim) feels like the bare tool with a few ornaments I keep around, and little more; switching to VS Code occasionally feels like going into a circus. Vim is effectively my distraction free coding environment.

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