Care to elaborate on that? I'm fairly entry-level when it comes to vim and I'd be interested to hear some good examples of what it can do over something like sublime.
If you're a touch-typist and you become proficient in vim, the friction between thinking about an edit and it materializing on the screen in front of you is reduced. I think 'whoops, need a comma there', my hands move around a little without thinking and the edits done. Contrast this with move hand to mouse, click where you want to edit, hit backspace, type in new character.
IME this is not necessarily faster, just a lot more comfortable once you get used to it.
A lot of comments will say 'you can have vi-mode in <other editor>' but I've yet to see an implementation that covers the entirety of normal mode _and_ supports custom remaps, and even then the mappings would need an interface to its plugins before it approaches a vim-like environment.
Vim plugins obviously don't work, but there is a world of Emacs libraries and you can now extend your editor in lisp.
There are still some inconstancies that bother me (e.g. special buffers that don't respect vim shortcuts), but overall I'm happy.
I don't know if I'd call Vim overly-opinionated. It's a legitimately incredible way to work with text.
(I know you can use home/end or ctrl to jump over words, however often these aren't always applicable and often still need visual feedback)
In vim it's significantly easier to jump to the desired point on the line with fewer key strokes and no need for a visual feedback loop.
In short; it's not the fact you can use the keyboard to navigate, rather it's the fact that you can navigate efficiently with the keyboard without having to think about the position of the cursor.
Which makes vim faster, but doesn't mean one needs to reach for a mouse; secondly, what touch typist isn't already watching what he's typing? Requiring visual feedback is hardly slow.
> In vim it's significantly easier to jump to the desired point on the line with fewer key strokes and no need for a visual feedback loop.
I'm aware of that, but that's not the argument you made. You said you didn't have to reach for the mouse, well, neither do any of the other editors.
> In short; it's not the fact you can use the keyboard to navigate, rather it's the fact that you can navigate efficiently with the keyboard without having to think about the position of the cursor.
While true, you overestimate how much other editors make you think about the cursor as well. Our muscle memory works just as well as yours and though vim gives you more options to exploit it, it's not as if other editors don't offer anything other than visual and a mouse.
Yes it is. You can go seven or eight keystrokes in vim recording a macro without any feedback whatsoever, and still end up with a wickedly powerful edit.
> I'm aware of that, but that's not the argument you made. You said you didn't have to reach for the mouse, well, neither do any of the other editors.
No I didn't. I simply said contrast that to moving your mouse. You could also contrast it to ctrl+right arrowing to the word on the line but in vim thats just `5w` (where five is the number of words along the line) in normal mode. It still requires less cognitive and physical effort. You could also contrast it to the built-in readline ctrl+ shortcuts and it would still be less keystrokes.
> While true, you overestimate how much other editors make you think about the cursor as well.
No I really don't. I wasn't magically born with vim superpowers. Like everyone else I started with a regular text editor and worked my way to vim proficiency. I became proficient with eclipse, crimson editor and quite a few others before deciding that vim was what I wanted to invest in long term.
> Our muscle memory works just as well as yours and though vim gives you more options to exploit it, it's not as if other editors don't offer anything other than visual and a mouse.
Very well, good luck to you with your other editors. I seriously think you should use whatever you feel most comfortable with.
Take this example line of code:
#define test "Some magical string."
f"ci"
WgUe
Vim is absolutely awesome, however it is but one way of editing text. Other methods have their own merits and incorporating their styles in your workflow will make you more proficient in the long run even if you eventually come back to Vim.
When you really know a fundamental text editor, that sensation of helplessness gets worse and worse when you can't use the shortcuts that are burned into your fingers.
If you don't know what I'm talking about, I suggest reading the StackOverflow answer "Your problem with Vim is that you don't grok vi."
I spend 95% of each day (not just my 8-5 - 95% of my time on a computer at all) in vim. The rest is in firefox or in a console briefly to tell it to run my tests. I code all day every day, and I quite enjoy it.
Today, I had a 7 hour meeting with a customer to spec out a new project. I had to put together mockups in balsamiq. On a mac (I'm a linux user). My level of discomfort was extremely high, eclipsed only by the fact that since a customer was there I couldn't take to just cursing like a sailor.
When you keep your hands on the home row for an entire day and then all of the sudden you have multitouch swipe gestures and clickie-scrollie touchpads and home keys that don't go home and delete keys that delete the wrong direction and inadequate terminal emulators, HOLY CRAP IS IT LIKE MINI-DYING.
That's all. I just completely feel you.
On my laptop, it's just fn+arrow for home, end, and page up/down, and my pinky is usually right there anyway for the control and meta keys.