I don't think I'll ever describe myself reaching <X> nibbana, because, well, a hammer is a hammer, an IDE is an IDE, a tool is simply a tool, a means to an end.
> I don't think I'll ever describe myself reaching <X> nibbana, because, well, a hammer is a hammer, an IDE is an IDE, a tool is simply a tool, a means to an end.
According to the Zen master Dogen:
“Before one studies Zen, mountains are mountains and waters are waters; after a first glimpse into the truth of Zen, mountains are no longer mountains and waters are no longer waters; after enlightenment, mountains are once again mountains and waters once again waters.”
"When I first began
To cut up an oxen
I would see before me
The whole ox
All in one mass.
After three years
I no longer saw this mass.
I saw the distinctions.
“But now, I see nothing
With the eye. My whole being
Apprehends.
My senses are idle. The spirit
Free to work without plan
Follows its own instinct
Guided by natural line,
By the secret opening, the hidden space,
My cleaver finds its own way.
I cut through no joint, chop no bone."
It's not the tool, but the wielder.
It’s following the tao of the ox. That’s why he didn’t need to sharpen his cleaver for a decade or something, it just “naturally” went into the empty spaces, rather than stumble against bones and sinews.
(If I remember correctly; my old Burton Watson copy is now sadly long lost.)
It's safe to say most people see mountains as mountains etc. When you start practicing Zen, you glimpse into the inseparability of things: there is really no defined boundary between the 'atoms of the mountain' and the 'atoms of the water'. (Also the atoms themselves are mostly empty space with a probability distribution of where the 'stuff' 'is'). Things like 'mountains' are really illusory abstractions that humans build on top of the underlying reality of the swirling wave patterns of the universe. 'Existence precedes essence', as the existentialists say.
Still in this second phase, you notice things like when you have a conversation with another, the conversation is not really being generated by either brain, it is being generated by the system that includes both brains (and nerves, muscles, vocal cords, the air between them, eardrums, etc.)
However, after enlightenment, you realize that the underlying physics is no more 'real' than the abstractions, as the abstractions are what really has an effect on the universe. As Zizek might say, the distortion itself is the real. When I see a mountain, the way that my brain interprets it as a mountain, in effect makes it a mountain, because the symbol itself manifests itself in my thoughts and actions.
I’d also note that Dogen wasn’t trying to sound deep - perhaps unlike Sartre and Zizek.
It's the same with vim. You start thinking "delete that word", or change everything until the '(' character. When you start thinking that way, changing the way you think becomes distracting.
> It blows my mind that there's so much devotion to the tool first, problems second, which must be mashed into a shape that fits my tool.
I see it more of a question of, do you change the way you think to match the tool? Or change the tool to match the way you think?
I don't think there's necessarily a right or wrong answer, at some point I changed the way I think to match the vim model. Now I change things to match the vim model rather than change the way I think.
for some the journey is never the goal.
And I still use it.
So yeah, guess I haven't hit 20+ years, but I'm pretty damn close, and still not as committed to it as you are.
Length of time using it doesn't correlate to passion.
(Also, 30 years? Christ I'm old.)
i was trying to make a point that it's a tool with a very long history and all the time i "wasted" (and still waste) on learning it was well invested, as it's going nowhere and i spend 8-9h in it a working day.
i think i've been using only a shell longer than vim.
Yes, that's true. I can't fathom writing Java in anything other than Intellij because it's shaped my thinking to "my tool should already know what this symbol is, where it is, and what arguments it might take". I guess it's shaped my expectations more than my thinking, but I hope you see what I mean.
> I see it more of a question of, do you change the way you think to match the tool? Or change the tool to match the way you think?
Fair question. I guess my response is that one of the lessons I've learned the hard way in life is that my way of thinking can be wrong.
And while I enjoy a tool you can tweak to your desired tolerances, I prefer to use the tool that is most closely aligned to the task at hand.
You can get a nice even surface on a piece of timber using a chisel very carefully. Or, you can use a plane.
You can cut down a tree with a stone lashed to a branch, or you can use an axe with a metal head. Or, a chainsaw.
Changing between any of them requires a revision of how you think about the process, but it seems obvious that the cost of doing so might be worth it, even if the chainsaw requires changing how you think to incorporate concepts like kickback.
There are other languages besides java and C#, where advantages of IDEA are small to none. For them, you have to accept a bloated project-based resource-consuming monster. Or you do not and just write rust in vim or emacs. In times of LSP and DAP the gap is getting smaller each day. But IDEA is not getting faster, and never will.
> But IDEA is not getting faster
I disagree, there's been several changes made I can think of to improve speed
It's the best of all worlds!
What made you think that their devotion to the tool indicates that they care less about the problem? I wonder what you might think about me then in that I have vim integrated with mutt for composing emails, git, my password manager, code editor, text pager, etc land me in vim. I choose most my apps so that I can use vim for text editing. It gives me uniformity. It saves me time.
More importantly, I do not get a negative reaction from people that use different text editors for different text editing tasks looking for buttons to click, shortcuts to press in different places.
Especially nowadays, when tech is converging, getting locked down, and we are being told what and how to do things by a few companies, we must appreciate and encourage diversity of tools (except for emacs obviously:) that empower their users. Not be dismissive and judge them for using a tool that we don't use.
It's okay for people to master tools they find valuable, and use that mastery to do good things even if they're off-road tools (by today's standards) such as vim.
Other people love certain tools so much that "the work" is actually just an excuse to use their favorite tool in more elaborate and challenging ways. Their attitude is something like "and now for my next trick..."
The funny part, to me is that I've never been able to see one method as producing better results than another. I've seen work focused folks produce bad output and I've seen tool focused folks get caught up in their tools and never produce anything at all.
But I've also seen both types produce masterpieces.
Just different approaches and personalities I think.
We're both driving cross country, following the speed limits. We'll both arrive at roughly the same time but maybe I'll enjoy my time more if I'm driving a stick shift.
This is in general of course. Me personally, I save tens of minutes a year by using vim.
Probably more. It’s not only the speed of typing and editing that matters, but also the time you spend on context switching. When your hands don’t leave the home row you don’t leave the current context.
> It blows my mind that there's so much devotion to the tool first, problems second
The problem is clearly outlined here: "Manipulating raw ipynb files is difficult and unergonomic."
OP is not fiddling with his or her editor configuration because of any undue focus/deficiency regarding Neovim. The deficiency is in the Jupyter notebooks editors. In other words...
Problem: Jupyter sucks; my thoughts are always slowed down by having to squeeze them through a low-bandwidth link and the ergonomics hurdles that comprise basic text inputs--I want to go fast, but with Jupyter, I can't.
Their solution: This.
What are the odds?
PS, describing my comment as knee-jerk is unhelpfully dismissive. I'm always keen to engage, and always happy to acknowledge when I'm wrong. :)
What are the odds that the solution involved a popular, mature tool that the developer could leverage?
> What are the odds?
Very good, actually.
You seem (and seemed) to be unaware how dismissive your original comment was. In fact that was the entire point of the response. To take issue with that response on the grounds it itself is "unhelpfully dismissive" involves layers of irony.
1. You’re talking about an editor that has been popular across multiple decades and across many many generations of technologies.
2. The editor they’re already using obviously already does things in ways they like. That’s why they are using it. So the odds that their editor will perform the job well for them is also pretty high.
It's possible I missed something, but I didn't see the author being devoted to tools first, nor mashing problems to fit their tools.
If you know a text editor like the back of your hand, why would you learn another tool when you can take a different approach and be even more effective?
I always remember a coworker who was determined to use Emacs on our Java codebase. He spent three months trying to get functionality equivalent to 2010 Eclipse (I was one of the IDEA hipsters in the company back then), and failed. Hard.
I always thought that in 3 months,n if he'd applied that effort to Eclipse, he'd probably be contributing patches to it.
I have sought to incorporate vim wherever I could because my muscle memory demands it for productivity.
It's not from a lack of learning tools.
Or are you saying the blog post is a hoax?
Because there’s a tool and there are (current and future) problems that can be solved with this tool. It’s an one time investment into a tool and it helps to solve multiple future problems more efficiently. Especially with vim or rather modal editing - this skill can be applied everywhere, including your favorite IDE. Though, it may be unrelated to the problem that OP was solving.
It was always my editor of choice when SSHing into a box over dodgy dial-up for the very obvious reasons, a few keystrokes could be immensely powerful, and they're easy to transmit.
But I've never felt the urge to run Vim bindings in my IDE, or my browser. But for working on a file over SSH? Vim all the way.
Different tools for different situations.