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Comment by ilaksh | Hacker News Reader

I currently use vim every day. I have been trying to learn vim off and on for about 30 years.

vi and vim have modes because they were created in an era where computing and terminal capabilities were very limited and even when the terminals could support interactive editing, it wasn't expected. They had very low expectations. They were used to things like 'ed'.

The religious beliefs that programmers have about vim are a case study in why I believe that AI will easily take control of the planet in less than a century.

That sentence is questionable in multiple ways.

Anyway, I will definitely try this thing out. Hopefully I am not too lazy to keep installing it. That's what happened with the last one of these.

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> vi and vim have modes becaus they were created in an era where computing and terminal capabilities were very limited.

that's the whole point. it was designed for limited terminals and high latency, very slow serial links. that means when you learn it and all of its shortcuts and you have a fast and modern terminal, you are able to edit at ludicrous speed.

it's like training at altitude or running with weight belts for editing text.

> you are able to edit at ludicrous speed

I never ever got this argument for Vim.

I don't spend most of my time slinging around huge chunks of text or repeating commands like they do in YouTube videos where Vim pros flex their skills (to extend the fitness metaphor).

I spend most of my time thinking about code design, reading documentation, writing plans, discussing stuff with my colleagues—editing, writing code is maybe 30 – 40% of my time, at best. I also code fairly slowly anyway.

Funnily enough I think I'm decent enough with a good touch pad, so I can avoid the whole 'click-drag' dance when I have to use a mouse.

That being said, I do consider myself too stupid to use Vim beyond the simplest commands—I know how to change modes, save, and exit.

> I spend most of my time thinking about code design, reading documentation, writing plans, discussing stuff with my colleagues—editing, writing code is maybe 30 – 40% of my time, at best. I also code fairly slowly anyway.

ahh yes, the central brooklyn coffee shop as existential bus stop school of computering. "oh, you're 38 too, well then what are you doing with your existential crises?" "well, when i'm not working on my book, i like to think about code design and discuss stuff with my colleagues while listening to instrumental remixes of 90s punk and indie rock classics. my preferred languages are ocaml, erlang and ruby, but usually i tend towards microsoft visual foxpro for professional efforts."

I don't get the point of this comment, nor do I fit the stereotype at all.

I'm in my 20s, find coffee shops extremely overpriced, have never set foot in New York City, don't listen to much music at all (and if I do, it's classical and Baroque from the 1700s), and usually write in C# or C++ (both in Visual Studio).

I just don't believe that the average vim users edits significantly faster than non vim users.

I mean, maybe 5% faster. Sure. Maybe. But at what price? _At what price, I ask you??_

I don't know how faster I became at editing text after switching to vim. But it definitely has a different feeling: the text just flows from the fingers. Your mind is never interrupted to remember some shortcut e.g. to select text inside the brackets or inside the quotes. Anything you want to do with text happens effortlessly with the speed of thought.

Definitely worth it.

Another claimed impact is on cognitive load: Vim runs on muscle memory on the keyboard; it consumes as much cognitive load as typing. Mouse / GUI is distracting.

I’m a Vim user, but I don’t agree with that argument about cognitive load. When typing in a normal editor, you just type letters and those same letters typed just show up on a screen (as in Vim’s insert mode). The mouse is pretty intuitive too in a normal editor: you have a device that controls a cursor on your screen and clicking performs an action.

With Vim, I don’t think the commands are quite as intuitive (this might be a skill issue of mine), but I do think I am faster without a mouse because of fewer movements required (having to grab my mouse, move it to where I want, click and then move it back to the keyboard vs. just typing a few letters).

For me it’s somewhat slower at the price of freeing my mind from “ctrl-shift-left-wait-wait-oops-right-right”-like things. I believe that faster typing in vim is a myth supported by our adepts, who are more zealous than is reasonable.

For me, Vim is not only (drastically) faster, but also more fun.

In Vim, I enjoy the process of text editing itself (in addition to any joy derived from the substance of the text edited).

> vi and vim have modes because they were created in an era where computing and terminal capabilities were very limited

vim was released in 1991. Same year linux kernel started and Apple PowerBook came out. Limited terminal capabilities is not the reason vim is modal.

Vim was heavily based on vi, and vi was designed for limited terminal capacities.

And it's now been decades since vi itself, where things would've changed many times if that was the only reason that vi was modal.

Things have changed, just not the paradigm that vim operates on.

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