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> I'm sure the author means well, but this rubs me the wrong way

Me too.

I don't want to live running on the treadmill my whole life. Default human state is idle - all work comes from necessity, whether from hunger, cold, or some other, more sophisticated need.

The idea that "we can all do better, therefore we must" might seem noble from at first - striving for the perfection and whatnot - it's still an idea that mostly benefits those who benefit from our work and don't benefit from our idleness, whoever those people may be. And it is often used as an excuse to bully those who fail to meet such expectations.

I get what you are saying, and I agree. I am a believer in wu wei, and a long time vim user.

I agree the tough love to tone is a bit much, and harms the author's message.

The real message is that learning vim is like learning stenography after learning how to type. Many people don't want or need to do it, but people that know both can do things that others can't.

My guess is that the author may be presenting that tough love attitude because they had to tell themselves that to get over the comfortable rut for themselves.

I love vim, but what do I care what you use?

That makes sense.

I just prefer learning about things when bored, instead of begin forced to. I find idleness very comfortable for exploring new stuff on my own pace.

Thanks for those comments, I really appreciate your feedback.

Let me explain what was on my mind when writing this paragraph. I feel like atm many of my University colleagues are working very ineffective and thus they actually don't have free time, or very little to say so. This is very depressing for some of them and I think that their coding effectiveness and often poor knowledge of shell, linux administration in general or other dev tools is the main bottleneck here. This comment was not about working more effective for the sake of it. It was about getting you more time to do stuff you want to do.

The way I see and usually use these kinds of things is not necessarily to get more done, but rather to remove annoyances.

I like vim because I don't have to mess around with cursor keys and remember whether the system I'm using expects me to press home, or fn+arrow, or the key in the left corner (ctrl) or the key next to the space bar (command) or the one in between (option – office for mac) to select a word text. It just gets out of my way and lets me enjoy what I'm doing.

I prefer a tiling window manager not because it allows me shave some milliseconds off window management, but because having to drag windows around is irritating to me. Bonus point for not having a different behavior if there is one or multiple open windows of the same application running.

The same with keyboards, I may type faster on a mechanical keyboard, but that's not why I use it. I use it because it feels better when I type on it. I don't have to make sure I press the keys exactly in the middle or else they may or may not get stuck in the middle and not register (cheap HP keyboard at work). Do I type faster? You bet. But cranking code faster isn't the reason.

I agree. Watching videos on YT is part of some people's free time (like for other people is going for hikes, cooking, doing a hobby, etc), we shouldn't be condescending about that.

It also begs the question, if I "have" to be learning about something productive, why Neovim? Why not Golang, Zim, the latest React plugin, etc

People really need to calm down

I think it’s more charitable to read it as “it’s not a good enough answer” — you have the time, you’ve just chosen not to spend it here. Perhaps you have a good reason for it, and perhaps you don’t, but if you default to “who has the time for such things” you’re not being honest about it (to yourself, or to your questioner).

It’s also only once you move on past that first nonsense answer that I can make my case: it’s worth spending your time on subject X, for reasons…

But if we never get there, you’ve just brushed off the person unfairly.

He did not say "Seriously, you probably have time to go for a junk hikes or cooking or whatever" - he talked about watching silly youtube videos which most people feel guilty about. I might choose to watch cute cats for 3 hours but I won't be proud of it.

I don't think there's anything condescending about that, it's probably an advice the author found genuinely helpful in the past as well (well, I did).

The way I think about it is that if you can spend 10 or 15 hours to learn your tools better, you can become more productive, often dramatically so.

And then it's up to you what you do with that. Maybe that means you push yourself and do more, and chase the raises and promotions. Or maybe it means you work a half hour less every day and still get the same amount of work done.

It's unfortunate that the knee-jerk reaction to a suggestion to master our tools is cynical.

I think we all should invest more of our time in improving ourselves and our productivity, because then we get to decide what to do with that, not our employers.

You're not wrong, the constant focus on "productivity" can be off putting.

For me, it's not about productivity. It's about how less frustrating the process is. You don't realize the base level of stress you have in your day to day life as a result of the unergonomic UX of your tools until you try something different. I wanted to learn vim like operation as a sort of academic experience, and now my computer just does what my mind wants it to do, very little friction. The hard part is convincing yourself to learn to do something a different way. Don't worry yourself with the productivity sales pitch, just do it out of curiosity and I'm almost certain, when you're done, you'll like it a lot better.