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Comment by ilaksh | Hacker News Reader

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).

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