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Comment by staunch | Hacker News Reader

Easier for a beginner ≠ better for an expert.

The goal of a new text editor shouldn't be to make things better for people who are already experts on an existing platform. It should be to make it better for beginners on the new editor (because initially, everyone is) and better for them when they become experts.

Saying "I'm an expert at vi, and other editors don't work as well for me" is a pretty meaningless statement. Of course they don't. It's like saying "I speak English, and I find speaking Spanish really hard, so English must be the best."

But that's not what people are saying. What people are saying is that Vi is better for Vi experts than Blub editor is for Blub editor experts.

Except it's always a Vi expert making that assertion. I've yet to hear anyone say, I'm a Blub expert, but Vi is better.

I think this is a case of not being able to have your cake and eat it too; you can make something easier to use, but it usually comes as a compromise to more expert users because you have to simplify the interface, remove functionality, reduce configuration options, etc. Conversely, adding more power will usually mean increasing the difficulty for beginners; if you require that users are comfortable with using a semi-programming language to write configuration files, you get more options and more power than you could via a simple and straightforward gui.

In the end I don't think either approach is better, just different. To address your first statement, I think editors can either choose to become better for experts in a particular domain, or they can choose to be easier to learn for beginners, or some compromise between the two. I have yet to see an application that manages to do both.

I agree that someone's subjective opinion of editors other than the one(s) they use is not very useful, but i don't think that was the point of the post you replied to. He was simply stating what I stated above; an app that is good for a beginner is not necessarily the best for an expert, and in the end you have to find some compromise between the two.

EDIT: For the record, I think vim has a pretty good learning curve; vimtutor is great, and you only really need to know the most basic parts of modal switching for gvim to be used like any other text editor. Once you gain some mastery of things like movement command, macros, markers, etc. you can really start to accelerate your workflow. I'm not one of those people that started using hjkl from day one.

I'm actually quite satisfied in being a perpetual "vi beginner". With regard to Linux however, I started using it (professionally too) before most people (including IT professionals) heard of it at all. I enjoy puzzling my coworkers by declaring that I am "vi-ignorant and proud of it". :)

Anyway, I guess I just dislike vi because it's different from everything else. I like things that are uniform. That's what really saves a lot of time and effort in the long run.

On servers, I only require a few simple things of the editor; for everything else, there's always the command line or one of the P* scripting languages. On my laptop, I can install anything I want. Never saw the point in wasting time to learn an arcane editor from the '70s.

Never saw the point in wasting time to learn an arcane editor from the '70s.

Well apparently you wasted your time learning an arcane command line interface from the 70s.

Linux is to Unix as Vim is to Vi. Based on 70s tech, developed in modern times.

Better for expert != harder for beginner

It's not impossible to make tools that are easy for amateurs and powerful for professionals, but empirically it's rare.

The reason is pretty simple. Take any tool, like Notepad, and start making it better for professional usage. Pretty soon it's full of features and shortcuts that help professionals and confuse amateurs.

It's as it should be though. It makes good sense for professionals to spend more time upfront learning more powerful tools because the savings over their career will be massive.

The amateur won't see any benefit from spending a lot of time learning if they only use the tool for a short period.

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