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Comment by encoderer | Hacker News Reader

Have you ever watched somebody proficient with Vim or Emac, who has spent years crafting the perfect .vimrc for themselves?

You'd get it if you did.

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And why would I want to spend years crafting the perfect .vimrc for myself when tools exist that already do 80% of that better and without any configuration?

I say this with a carefully crafted and organized .vim folder.

Conceptually, because of needs which exist outside of the coverage of that 80%.

Which magical tools are we talking about here?

Upvoted.

And I have an .emacs.d folder carefully crafted over 20 years.

Same here but with every new Emacs version I can cull a good bit from it. Starting from Emacs 23 it has decreased by at least 50%.

Do you mean it is decreased >= 50% since you started using Emacs 23? What version are you using now?

Yes, sorry to be unclear. When Emacs 23 was released I took a good look at my config and noticed that a lot of things I had added over the years weren't needed anymore.

Looking at the new features in Emacs 24 I expect my config to shrink even more. I am still on Emacs 23 but will switch when it both shows up on Debian Testing and when my workstation needs a reboot.

Because that last 20% is 80% of the power/speed/productivity.

citation needed

>>And why would I want to spend years crafting the perfect .vimrc for myself when tools exist that already do 80% of that better and without any configuration?

If only it were that easy. Programming trends change drastically. What is fashion today, isn't tomorrow. You need tools that survive this for years(In case of vim and Emacs its decades).

I am all ears to hear about the 'tools' that you talk about.

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