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Comment by dmitriid | Hacker News Reader

> Editors like vim and emacs make it much faster to edit text, due to their powerful editing, navigation, and search/replace features that aren't found in any other editor

This claim is dubious at best. While a power user may, in fact, be reasonably fast with some types of text, for most users these types of tasks rarely occur, are already a part of the editor, or can be as quickly done with existing tools.

(For example, context-aware selects and proper refactoring in IDEA beat anything vim/emacs have to offer any day, and twice on Sundays)

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They are fundamentally different ways of thinking about editing, so this doesn't read like an apples to apples comparison.

Vim is all about chaining small commands together to perform complex operations, like building a pipeline in UNIX. You start off learning a few basic commands, then as your vocabulary increases you can construct increasingly complex tools just by hitting a few keys. A Windows veteran hearing about head, grep and cat for the first time might think "I can do all of that in notepad, this UNIX thing is a waste of time"... then they watch a UNIX greybeard build a pipeline in seconds that automates a hour-long workflow of clicking and form filling.

There are criticisms you could make that would read as fair, "many common editing operations are more accessible in foo", "features in foo are more discoverable", "the learning curve in foo is shallower", "I don't think it's worth the time investment to become proficient in vim/emacs" (but you would be wrong!).

I spent two years with Emacs. I had it configured to my liking and so on. It wasn't worth the time investment.

You analogy with head, grep etc. falls apart because you're not configuring a one-off task. And god knows, I've done plenty of those using bash, and python, and ruby, and..., and any combination thereof.

Yes, all the "pipelines" you build for editing text (esp. in programming context) can't hold a handle to actual specialized tools.

I don't know what you mean by "one-off task", of course you can save the commands you use most often. I think part of mastering vim is thinking about movements and commands in a more generalizable way, then macros are just second nature. Macros just make all the insane one-off editing tasks everyone runs into trivial.

This morning I needed to byteswap all the hex constants in several huge tables, I don't know if I've ever needed to do this before, and probably won't need to ever again. I did it in vim with a macro that took me seconds (something like qa2xlpj3hq1000@a).

Sure, this isn't for everyone, but one day you are going to want a minor variation on the operation your magic button performs... and I think you're going to have to take a swig of coffee and just sit there doing it manually!

I find this argument way more dubious than GP.

You're hiding a lot of qualifiers in phrases like "power user", "some types of text", "these types of tasks".

What is a power user? Exactly which types of text can't vim handle as well as other editors ? Exactly what types of tasks rarely occur?

"Proper" refactoring and context-aware selection are absolutely possible with a properly configured vim (or neovim) install, all while remaining free, open source and I daresay quite a bit slimmer than any Jetbrains IDE.

> What is a power user?

A user who has spent a lot of time with Vim, is intimately familiar with multiple ways vim handles text, and all the arcane shortcuts, and created their own workflows

And even then it depends. I've seen people spend more time craeating macros and replays than me on the same task using a simple tool like multiple cursors.

> "Proper" refactoring and context-aware selection are absolutely possible with a properly configured vim (or neovim) install

"Out of the box" beats "properly configured" for the absolute vast majority of users. And I've yet to see the "properly configured Vim" from the self-professed Vim masters that is to do anything faster than what I do with Idea on a daily basis.

I don't know, this sounds a lot like blub to me. "I've never seen anyone do anything with a charcoal stick that i couldn't do with my ballpoint." Or "I don't see why people like regex when code refactoring tools are so much smarter."

People say the same thing about Linux vs Windows in general, particularly the "for most users" straw man. We're not talking about most users, we're talking about users that care enough about a use case to put up with the time it takes to learn tooling.

If someone cared about things vim was good at (flexible, programmatic text editing), they'd be more likely to have switched to using it. The fact that your needs don't like up, that you don't appreciate the difference or don't care about it, e.g. because you mostly edit source files in a particular language well-supported by your IDE, rather than frequently needing to do one-off esoteric things to a wide variety of files with varying semantics.

Fwiw, i know vim well, have used it many years, and still frequently switch to an ide when doing things that the IDE was specifically designed to support.

> A user who has spent a lot of time with Vim, is intimately familiar with multiple ways vim handles text, and all the arcane shortcuts, and created their own workflows.

So - only when a vim user reaches this point do they become as effective as a non power user of IDEA? I can't agree. It is simply not necessary to understand more than a 10th of what vim can do to be productive with it. And the other 90% is there to be discovered when it's needed.

> And even then it depends. I've seen people spend more time craeating macros and replays than me on the same task using a simple tool like multiple cursors

Seems like cherry picking to be honest. Plenty of people find it fun and rewarding to learn and practice features like macros, but search/replace with confirmation is as fast or faster than editing with multiple cursors, and most users probably learn about it before going near macros.

> "Out of the box" beats "properly configured" for the absolute vast majority of users.

Seems like a different claim than your initial contention that Vim is not as capable a tool as an IDE.

But there are many well-maintained configurations of vim that are as trivial to install as IDEA, with as many features (and again, free and open source).

> And I've yet to see the "properly configured Vim" from the self-professed Vim masters that is to do anything faster than what I do with Idea on a daily basis.

It's only natural that you find it easier to conceive that the tool you use on a daily basis is more effective than one you don't. Same goes for me. We each have become very effective with the tools we use every day.

I freely admit to being biased toward the sort of Unix-oriented tools that taviso described in his comment, because at their core they are simple, performant and combine well with other tools (not to mention free and open source). Can IDEA claim more than one of these?

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