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Comment by cod1r | Hacker News Reader

I feel like at a certain point of efficiency there are diminishing returns. A good analogy is typing speed. You don't need to have 200 wpm to be productive. Everybody adapts to how efficient they need to be at what they do. Vim is not a requirement for being productive. If it was, it would be the most popular editor. I also don't think the person you are replying to is saying that it isn't important to "master" your tools. I think they are just saying the editor that you use isn't the most important thing and I agree with that sentiment.

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You don't need to hit 200 wpm but I haven't seen too many programmers who hunt-and-pecks at the keyboard and can't touch type. Even on a Qwerty keyboard you should be able to get high double digits, if not hit/exceed 100 wpm. The two sites I like for practice are:

https://monkeytype.com/

https://play.typeracer.com/

Typing fast for sport is fun, that I understand. But it's really weird (to me at least) how most developers say that measuring lines of code as a performance metric is an awful idea, and then there are others that more or less kinda shame people for not being good or great typists.

Am I crazy? Isn't it conflicting? Maybe those two groups don't overlap at all? Then do great typists believe measuring lines of code to be a good idea?

And being proficient at using your code editor doesn't require or exclude being fast at typing. Between the two I personally would chose mastery of vim/emacs or some other IDE over having a typing speed faster than 80 WPM. Sure, both would be great, but if I have to choose one I know which I prefer.

Full disclosure: I type on a QWERTY layout at an average of 65 WPM.

One thing I'd add is that some stuff like Home Row Mods, Caps Lock as ESC and enhancements like that seem to me like a larger productivity booster than the jump from 70 WPM to 100 WPM. But even so I might be wrong on that because I personally haven't experienced writing faster than 70 something WPM at my best.

Anyway, rant over and I apologize if I come off as rough. It's just something that's been nagging at the back of my mind and I still don't know how to properly put it into words.

I don't see how they are related at all! Even the worst programmer can see that if we were to judge by LoC that they could add frivolous lines to juke the stats. LoC is stupid and I don't see how LoC is relevant to the conversation at hand. I do think that every programmer's had that stroke of inspiration where they can't type fast enough to get the code out of their head though

As far as typing speed, the difference between 10 wpm and 40 wpm is far greater than 70 wpm and 100 wpm. You don't have to hit 100 wpm to be a good programmer, but I have a hard time believing you can be one hunting and pecking at 10 wpm. (With exception made for the blind.)

Sure typing speed utility drops off pretty quickly but if it is a bit lower or makes just a part of your brain stop coding and think about more physical matters that should be in muscle memory then I think it has an effect on your ability to write a flow of code. (I saw this a great deal with regional keyboard layouts.)

Its hard to say if what you program will ultimately be better or worse as being used to micro interruptions can mean more diligence as much as they can mean forgetting an important caveat. But generally I think it means you are progressing at a slower rate toward an integrated group of skills.

For editors and IDEs it can be quite similar for refactoring, debugging and analysis of the code base. The worse you are at using them or the more indirect your proximity to the exact code base of the version you are working with, the more you rely on building/maintaining mental models which has its benefits and dangers.

I think its very hard to say anything is right or wrong. I do think that the question of where you expect to be in terms of needing each skill as your mastery of others grows is the question.

> that measuring lines of code as a performance metric is an awful idea, and then there are others that more or less kinda shame people for not being good or great typists

I'm not on board with shaming people, nor do I think that lightning speed typing is needed. However, one I want to type my lines of code, no matter how few they might be, it's about translating thoughts into code as easily as possible. It helps not having to bother with the details of typing, but the typing more or less taking care of itself. Keeps the zone and the focus on the code, and not on the keys.

Also shoutout to https://www.keybr.com

I used this to learn one hand typing when I was bored.

Touch typing seem like a useless skill to me. I use keyboard more for navigation than actual typing. I read many times more code than I write.

And when I write I just need to see the keyboard with the corner of my eye and my fingers just find the right keys as I'm pecking, purely through muscle memory that I've gained with zero effort just by years of experience.

What do you think Linus Torvalds' typing speed is? https://youtu.be/S5S9LIT-hdc?t=3

Low 50 if we go by the video.

He might obviously be in the 80+ range irl.

He’s also looking at the keyboard, so maybe he’s unfamiliar with it. Perhaps when shooting the video they thought, hey, we need that cool clicky sound, and had him use a mechanical keyboard.

But in all, he types fast enough to write Linux.

Typing speed is important for typists. For programmers, I’d say that even a 50-80 wpm rate is adequate for getting your thoughts down on the file and off to the compiler.

I have to switch back and forth between french (azerty) and english (qwerty) many times a day. My typing speed has regressed. But I manage just fine without hitting 200 wpm. How does one practice the constant switiching?

VS Code with vim keybindings is extremely popular. If you don't know how to use vim, you just don't realize how much of a time/effort saver it is. I can't imagine not having wrist pain if I had to use the mouse every time I wanted to move my cursor around for more than a few characters/lines. Trying to not use vim feels like going back to the stone age whenever I can't use it. I like to use vim bindings even when I'm editing english.

Ctrl+G + line number

Ctrl+F + what you are looking for

PgUp PgDown plus visual scan

Home, End, arrows (plus potentially control) for pinpointing the exact spot. Shift for block marking.

Ctrl+C (or X), Ctrl+V for moving stuff around.

No reason to touch mouse or learn cryptic shortcuts.

Only after learning vim you realize how clumsy and slow this is.

I used vim for 5 years, afterwards I switched over to Emacs, and I couldn't disagree with you more. What's clumsy and slow is having to switch between insert mode, normal mode, and visual mode hundreds of times while working rather than just using modifier keys for special actions.

If you're entering normal mode for one or two commands at a time, that could be problem. However, if you're fast at entering normal (i.e. use jj, fd, Caps Lock as Esc, etc.), that's not a meaningful overhead.

On the other hand, having to constantly hold Control/Alt, including long chords (e.g. with prefix + count), feels much worse for me. I use Emacs keybinds on the terminal (outside of vim), but I can't imagine having to constantly press modifiers. It's not as comfortable as switching to a mode where those actions are explictly first-class.

The difference in manipulating text in emacs vs vscode is day and night though.

vim equivalents:

20g line number

/ find what you are looking for

same for pgup and pgdown

i think what you're describing sounds a bit like visual mode which is just v

d and p for cut and paste if moving stuff around needs to be done (dd for whole line, 5dd for 5 lines, v and then j a few times in visual mode before d or y for yank (copy), etc...)

Note how you don't have to strain your pinky to hit ctrl for any of these?

> Note how you don't have to strain your pinky to hit ctrl for any of these?

Note how insanely context-dependent all these are? How it's completely different commands for what is essentially the same operation?

Keys can be remapped (I have CapsLock mapped to Ctrl).

Yeah I got mine remapped to esc

It's just a different modality mine just exists a little closer to where my fingertips chill on the home row

Electron makes it too slow neovim and sublime are snappier it's not even funny

I'm in two minds about this. Yes, wpm aren't everything (see the other discussion in this thread) and the same goes for the full range of your editor's functionality.

On the other hand, tools like Vim, Kakoune and Helix shouldn't be treated like your average Java IDE, for example, which shifts the line of what I'd say is reasonable learning investment. What you're dealing with there is a programming language for text manipulation. If you're fluid enough in it, you open your mind for solutions you'd never have considered before. I'd say you'd need at least intermediate Vim skills and should know macros until that effect kicks in.

I have quite some anecdotes about e.g. creating integration tests where my colleagues wouldn't test something properly just because doing so would involve 10 minutes of drudge work in their simplistic editors, instead opting for "deploy & pray" when the task was totally doable in a couple of seconds with a Vim macro. I find that at least in this regard (as for all programming languages), Benjamin Lee Whorf's quote certainly holds true: "Language shapes the way we think and determines what we can think about."

That's why I also think GP had a point. I would probably be much more in your line of thought if we were only talking about the usual contestants like refactoring snippets etc. here, although even having them handy will already influence how many of us work with our code.

Edit: As another analogy, I feel that modal editing has about the same effect on thinking as switching from roman numerals to arabic ones. The reason why it hasn't completely caught on is just that it's less intuitive and text manipulation is not as fundamentally important as calculations for our civilization.

> would involve 10 minutes of drudge work in their simplistic editors, instead opting for "deploy & pray" when the task was totally doable in a couple of seconds with a Vim macro.

I really very much doubt this. Sounds like an application of rose-tinted glasses and wishful thinking to some one-off task that then is extrapolated to all tasks.

Hey, I didn't say I do this every day. But I've had enough of these conversations that I can assure you that this low a bar is needed for some people to skip important jobs. If your doubt applies to the usefulness of knowing the system, I don't really know what to tell you -- if you can't take someone's word for it, I don't think anything less than you experiencing it yourself would convince you, anyway.

As for one-off tasks: Yes, that's what Vim bindings are good for. Just like AWK-Scripts are great for throw-away scripts. Being able to perform simple one-off tasks quickly is, incidentally, a skill I find to be far too rare even in programmers. I mean, I would've thought at least us techies see the benefit in knowing how to teach the computer to do the menial tasks for us.

> But I've had enough of these conversations that I can assure you that this low a bar is needed for some people to skip important jobs. If your doubt applies to the usefulness of knowing the system

No. My doubt extends to "omg vim is so amazing that these tedious tasks take seconds unlike in these primitive text editors".

Because my experience at work has been consistently the exact opposite: vim users routinely take longer time for most tasks precisely because it's a rather primitive text editor, and not a code assist tool.

Well, I'm not really sure if we're talking about the same thing. If you're talking about language integration, I've got no quarrel with that (see my earlier comment). The experiences I was referring to are more along the lines of text manipulation in general, not "rename class", "extract method" and the like. If you're talking about features like that, I'd readily agree with you: Trying to do the same thing with Vim macros is just picking the wrong tool for the job.

I won't beleive your assertion, however, that this invalidates the benefits of learning Vim bindings (especially since respective emulation layers are at least passable in pretty much any editor or IDE worth its salt).

If you're talking about normal minute-to-minute text handling and creation of text files without language assist (scripts, cucumber tests, any programming task not blessed by your IDE's refactoring integration) on the other hand, we're at the point where I have trouble believing you.

> If you're talking about language integration, I've got no quarrel with that

I am. Because we are talking about these mythical Java programmers who couldn't do something that Vim would have done in seconds

> I won't beleive your assertion, however, that this invalidates the benefits of learning Vim bindings

And the reason to learn them is because there's a fairy tale of some programmers not doing the job that we're led to believe could be solved in seconds in vim.

> If you're talking about normal minute-to-minute text handling and creation of text files

Are we? Let me remind you: "I have quite some anecdotes about e.g. creating integration tests where my colleagues wouldn't test something properly just because doing so would involve 10 minutes of drudge work in their simplistic editors, instead opting for "deploy & pray" when the task was totally doable in a couple of seconds with a Vim macro."

Oh look. We're literally talking about programming.

> we're at the point where I have trouble believing you.

Let's start with your fairy-tales before we come to believing or disbelieving what I wrote.

Ah, so we're arguing in bad faith. In this case, I won't try to keep some semblance of a useful discussion going. For your interest, most of our integration tests are written in a cucumber dialect and contain very verbose "business-y" messages passed in and out of the system under test.

But then, I'd guess from your tone that this won't stop you from misreading another comment of mine and accusing me of lying, so I'll just wish you a nice weekend instead.

> Ah, so we're arguing in bad faith.

Yes and no. My very first reply pointed out exactly what I found incredible in your story.

If we're sticking to anecdotal data, over 22 years as a programmer I've never seen those amazing feats of vim voodoo you're talking about.

> But then, I'd guess from your tone that this won't stop you from misreading another comment of mine and accusing me of lying

Really? Misreading? Go and read mu very first comment, will you?

I get what you mean, but "minute-to-minute text handling" for me is pretty much always covered by my IDE's refactoring integration. Like, in the last few weeks, I've written a whole load of Python, Rust, and Typescript, where the IDE covers pretty much all my needs, and then maybe in total a day or so of fiddling with Dockerfiles and config files? None of which were really long enough or complicated enough that I needed anything complicated in terms of editing techniques, most of my time was spent waiting for builds to run and then trying something else out.

So yeah, you're probably right that Vim techniques are far better when you're editing those sorts of files, but those really do make up the tiniest fraction of my time, and everything else is covered by IDE refactoring tools. And if I had the choice, I would always rather have the better IDE tooling than the improved text editing, so this doesn't really sell me on the whole thing.

I would like to try Vim-mode for VSCode at some point, because I can imagine that being a kind of "best of both worlds" thing, but I've not really got round to it yet.

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