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Comment by delta_p_delta_x | Hacker News Reader

I am too stupid for Vim. The bottleneck is my brain, not my typing speed.

Here is some material to challenge that idea:

https://danluu.com/productivity-velocity/

Is also funny to phrase it in terms of bottlenecks because bottleneck optimization is an 80/20 approach to performance. People who are serious about perf don’t practice it.

80/20 is good for once a month tasks. When it comes to the primary work I do everyday I don’t want to leave 20% on the table.

I spend maybe 90-95% of my time thinking, looking up existing code, reading documentation, solutions, and code exemplars online, and trying to engineer a solution either in my head or on paper. I spend at most 10% actually typing. It's just not something that I've really ever felt has slowed me down.

As a modern day tech person, you only spend 4 hours a week on your keyboard across browsers, email, messaging, command line, etc? What about your personal life?

Even then, learning Vim could improve your computer interactions easily by 10%. That's 40 min a week or ~34 hours in a year.

https://xkcd.com/1205/

I mean during my work hours I spend the majority of my time reading and thinking rather than programming.

In my personal life I try not to program. I do other things.

Did you look at the article?

I did. I disagree with the premises, the (rather exaggerated) examples given, and furthermore the author's situation appears very different compared to mine. I am a very junior developer. The codebase I work on is established and if I ever make edits, it's confined to a handful of lines. It takes a long time for me to understand and parse an existing code base. I am unlikely to ever do the sort of text-slinging that Vim users tend to demonstrate on YouTube. I move between work and home, and I type on different keyboards with different physical layouts.

At the end of work I am so physically and mentally exhausted that I couldn't give two hoots whether I used Vim, VS Code, or the trendy modal AI-augmented editor written in Rust. I just want to get dinner, flop onto my bed, text some friends and get sleep. I have a couple of blog-posts that I've been sitting on for months because I haven't had the time nor energy to sit and write them, even at weekends.

Given all this, learning to use Vim is just another drag. Oh, and I should mention—I am exceptionally lazy. I'm not the so-called 'smart lazy' type of person. I'm lazier than that. I simply don't do stuff if I can afford not to.

The author suggests I now profile my own typing to speed it up? I frankly couldn't be bothered. I type reasonably fast anyway and Vim isn't going to speed things up at all.

> I just want to get dinner, flop onto my bed, text some friends and get sleep.

Sorry, I was using the assumption you were looking to improve your craft and make great contributions.

Could your horse be any higher?

If you’re happy with where you are at why would you want to learn something new like vim?

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