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Comment by civilized | Hacker News Reader

Yeah. It's pretty easy to delete a line in Sublime, and contrary to CLI fan wisdom, a single accurate trackpad gesture is simpler and faster than the barrage of commands needed to jump to a particular line.

The studies that "prove" CLIs are faster than GUIs are decades old now, and my experience says they're obsolete.

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I develop with emacs using my keyboard exclusively and I'm 100% convinced there is no appreciable benefit for doing so, it's pure personal preference. I remember seeing John Carmack express that didn't feel it was worth it to become a text editor power user, and he was getting numerous twitter replies insisting he was missing out on enormous productivity benefits. Imagine saying that to one of the most productive programmers of all time. It cracks me up every time I think about it.

Vim movements allow you to compose rich intentions with a matter of a few keystrokes. I find it very hard to believe that can be beat with a mouse unless someone is using gestures.

More than anything, it's about not switching devices. Typing feels like playing the keyboard. Switching to the mouse feels like having to pick up a trombone between keys. (I know that's a bit dramatic of an analogy, but...)

Bringing up the old mouse makes this conversation sound so dated - as I said, I use a trackpad. Specifically, like millions of others, I work on a MacBook Pro with an incredibly precise trackpad right under the keyboard. I move my hand to and from that trackpad in about 0.1s, and I can click on anything I want in less than half a second. "Rich intentions in a few keystrokes" doesn't sound competitive with that IMO.

I'd happily race using vim against anyone using any pointer device. Your very fast 0.1s accumulates over the day, the week, the year. Versus never moving your hand away from the keyboard.

trackpads are the keyboard, on ThinkPad laptop for example you can use it entirely with only your thumbs.

How do you handle having to change a function's parameters, for instance?

In vim, you just have your cursor inside the (...) and do `ci)`, which is (c)hange (i)nside `(, which instantly deletes all the test inside the (...) and you can type that stuff out easily

For a trackpad, don't you have to manually select all that text, hit delete, then start typing again? Or is there a better way I'm not thinking of

So. Many. Shortcuts. And, if you use it as an extension to your IDE, say for VSCode, you can still use your pointer.

Delete to line's end: d$ Delete to next blank line: d] Replace current character: r Surround the next 3 words with quotes: ys3w" (non standard, but out-of-the-box on VSCode)

On and on

Yep, using Vim in VSCode is just about everything I could ever want

It's all about uninterrupted experience, I don't want to move my hand anywhere off the home row and then move back again, it feels clunky.

Regarding competitiveness, with a bit of get used to, you can muscle memory things like: "remove content inside this bracket (), or "", or block {} and place me into insert mode so I can start typing new content" in 3 keystrokes. I don't see how searching manually for start and end then select with mouse/trackpad can ever be competitive to that.

For the record, the "3 keystrokes" are "ci" (mnemonics: "Change In") + the delimiter. Also works with "w" and "W" to change the word under cursor.

I think there is merit to learning vim, and merit to using a GUI/IDE. Especially if you can combine both. Submlime, vscode etc all have reasonable vim bindings.

I was an avid user of vim for many many years, and I would not describe myself as a vim expert, rather I know a lot of the core commands. I have since switched do vscode (for many reasons) and still use the vim bindings.

I also don't believe it is just an issue about speed using the mouse. I believe it's also a movement issue.

This is the benefit I get, if it is vim/vscode/jetbrains etc as long as it has vim bindings I know `dd` is going to delete a line etc, the editing experience is fairly static. Block editing and yanking, F, T, ctrl-D, ctrl-U, cw, de, cs"`, vwS(, ci", and many others are all great vim methodologies, just like cmd-p (mac) for sublime and vscode.

Multicursor in vscode, feels broken do to me compared to block editing but even if I need to do mutlicursor across distributed lines (something missing from vim) I can use `gd`.

I would say vim is more of a methodology than just an editor.

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