The Efficiency of Vim
bencornia.com
bencornia.com
I only bothered to learn Vim after seeing somebody do some wizardry with it and wondering how they did it. But I didn't have the time to learn it then. I later had some downtime at work and was able to learn it. I imagine the learning process is similar for many people.
(Personally it also competes with the working memory of changes I am trying to make, but I am willing to concede that could go away with years of practice).
Simpler abstractions like sublime-style multiple cursors have almost the same power without the complexity of programming your editor live. I wouldn’t recommend new people spend time on vim, unless you like, expect to find yourself in freshly initialized Linux boxes or developing on minimal hardware often.
I have seen an alarming number of programmers hunt-n-peck typing, and it's getting larger..
To them, vim is probably on-par or slower
I never felt a need to punch things out so efficiently that minute differences in time spent on or off keyboards, or my touch typing speed matter. Most of my time that consumes the budget allocated to me is honestly spent in researching and thinking. Once I get to writing the code, sure I could shave down the time to implement it by a few minutes each time, but its not enough for me to care about honestly.
That being said, I do use vim, but only because I was at one point a junior systems administrator and my CTO demanded to know why I was not already using it and instructed me it would be good practice to do so as its installed on everything we ran and so...vim it was. Not for efficiency, or because it empowered me but instead because it was there.
Now that I do more busy work instead such as discoveries, PIR's etc, sure my touch typing speed matters but its very different work.
I think there was a time when vim saved a lot of time over other editors, and it still feels like a powerful time saving when you kick off a macro, but I am not convinced it actually is saving time over modern editors with their far easier to use features and plugins.
Even with all that said, I think the type of productivity that Vim's edited language provides is overall pointless. E.g., it just doesn't optimize things that are actually hard and/or time consuming (at least relative to other similar solutions to the same problems, like multiple cursors). The one exception being really complex edits, per the macros you mentioned (e.g., `:cdo norm` is the most effective way to do a complex edit that isn't supported by a IDE refactoring command that I know of), but I don't think most folks in this thread are talking about that when they talk about Vim's productivity (e.g., stuff like `ci"` is cool, but come on who cares, it's not like making small edits like that have ever been a big deal).
And of course there is also search and replace and lots of excellent plugins, which crucially work today as well as they worked 15 years ago. Tabularize is a vim plugin that lets me do things like realign
foo: bar
fang: wizz
This isn't programming your editor live, it is just composition of simple elements you learn gradually. At first it is just navigating from the home row (mice suck, especially on laptops), and dd to delete lines etc. Then you learn new text objects and new effects over time, and your O(m+n) work in learning them has O(mn) results.
That's usually the biggest motivator. It was for me too.
25 years professional and going, I've given vim shortcuts a fair go. I learnt the ones I thought were making vim more efficient.
But the reality is, I look first, which then I click there and I'm there. I don't have to jump between modes, the cursor is typing words. I map pageUp and pageDown to paragraphs jumping and that's about the only non traditional setup I have.
I realise a lot will oppose to this reasoning, claim I don't know what I'm talking about, but maybe it's time to consider your RSI and effective speed, not perceived speed due on hammering keys, as a factor.
That said, I am jealous at times, watching vim people smack some keys around, feels cool!
Edit: I mostly use IntelliJ(CE) and Zed nowadays. I jump in vscode if I need to debug breakpoints on a language Intellij(CE) does not support.
Again even if you are productive in notepad nothing wrong with that! Also typing speed is not an indication of actual productivity.
Changing designs, data structures, similar logic across several functions, copying existing files to new locations and making minor edits. These and other tasks are so much faster with visual mode selections, Quick file-wide find and replace/ignore, freaking recording a macro and then executing it 100 times in a handful of seconds -- this is a real difference, and it scales.
Maybe it's just that I'm much more familiar with the ins and outs of how to use Vim efficiently for this purpose, and maybe VS Code can be equally efficient. But when you learn Vim, these are things that you will learn -- or at least learn about -- very soon. With VS Code, you will reach a plateau you don't even know about because these are not the features that VS Code differentiates itself with -- namely, fast in-editor documentation, jump to definition, visualize file structure, etc. Useful things when writing new code fast, sure, but not necessarily editing en masse.
Using clangd in vscode, I don't see how you'd be faster in neovim making changes by glorified search and replace? Also you're limited at "file-wide" and not project wide?
1) macros
2) ctrl-w <hjkl> "does the right thing" with visual (IDE) window-splits(!!)
I just about fell out of my chair when I stumbled upon <c-w> in a random vscode session (almost literally).
Many editors pay lip service and think "if we stop at hjkl, that's good enough!" Even fewer make it to a rational macro implementation, but vim is so much more.
The fact that vscode "does the right thing" when stabbed with <c-w> is incredible... now if only I could figure out how to get simplistic <c-p>/<c-n> to work with raw strings instead of trying to omni-complete...
While I could just hook up a vim plugin that is present on almost all IDEs, I debilatery chose not to because they feel ucanny since many vim bindings conflict with the IDE default bindings and their intregation don't work well. It's better suited as standalone application.
Everyone should do what works for them, but with e.g. flash it takes 3 keypresses in most cases to go to any position I can see on the screen, without taking my hands off the keyboard. I was relatively late to Vim but I would never go back, even just for the improved physical ergonomics of not having to move my arm repetitively back and forth between mouse and keyboard.
It feels a little like people that swear that they can type perfectly well with 2 fingers - I have seen some very fast 2 finger typists, but in truth they're missing out on efficiency and comfort in the long run because they don't want to face the short-term pain of learning the better technique (and it is pain).
The few times in my career where "I switched" to vim bindings and tossed the mouse far away to give it a good crack, I ended up feeling sore pretty quickly. Maybe it's just my experience.
The time spent between mouse and keyboard is made up by a fairly high wpm.
Anyway, this was never about pure programming speed. Programming is mostly thinking. It's about "think of something, scroll fast, go there, make the change" and I'm faster at that than with vim bindings. I'm sure of it after testing both setups.
Like someone else pointed out, "you do you" works best here. I started with a 386 dx 33 back in the day and professionally on windows NT, maybe if I had started professionally on linux, I'd be a vim guy today(?)
> It takes two seconds to decide upon which special-function key to press. Deciding among abstract symbols is a high-level cognitive function. Not only is this decision not boring, the user actually experiences amnesia! Real amnesia! The time-slice spent making the decision simply ceases to exist.
> While the keyboard users in this case feels as though they have gained two seconds over the mouse users, the opposite is really the case. Because while the keyboard users have been engaged in a process so fascinating that they have experienced amnesia, the mouse users have been so disengaged that they have been able to continue thinking about the task they are trying to accomplish. They have not had to set their task aside to think about or remember abstract symbols.
VS vim gives you a good mix too and basically while in insert works like a regular editor when that is more natural. But you miss out on piping lines to unix commands and stuff and a common thing of searching all occurrences of an identifier and opening all the files in vim, which warns on exit if you forget to look over all of them. Also ctrl+p to complete to nearest previous occurrence is broken in it.
Overall just much less reaching around for modifiers and arrow keys or home/end but the default placement of ESC is a pain. Switching caps lock to that can help but makes it not great for muscle memory when using other machines.
Ctrl+[ is an alternate for ESC I'll use sometimes but usually only if Ctrl is in my next command. That can be a bit more ergonomic if you change capslock to ctrl instead of ESC and then less chance of messing up in other apps with an errant ESC.
Overall most of the time when I click somewhere I'm deleting/transposing/replacing and not just immediately typing something, and that is much more awkward in a vanilla editor. Maybe with a four button mouse you could have a button to click somewhere and automatically enter insert mode at the same time, without it emitting keys to do it and messing up other apps.
Overall I think vim is much better for RSI, so much stuff is home row, and especially with numpads usually being on the wrong side of the keyboard makes mouse reaching unergonomic. The only main thing keeping me on numpads is Blender, but Blender is surprisingly vim-like as well, in a good way.
But I don't think it is actually more efficient than traditional editing, but rather just a different way of editing which may be (or may be not) more convenient to _some_ people (myself included).
Especially nowadays with modern IDEs and auto-completions and AI code helpers, it's not really about text editing anymore, it's not the bottleneck.
It's taken some time to grow into it, but I'm definitely enjoying having diagnostics built-in and having types helping me do autocomplete. Step-by-step debugging is fine, if not great.
One of the things that I'll credit as having made a huge different is switching to AstroVim ~2 years ago. It provided a bunch of helpful, sensible leader key bindings, and a little mini dynamic TUI at the bottom of the screen to show them off. AstroVim also has an excellent community repository of ready-to-go preconfigured plugins. I'd been loath to get deep into configuring my own vim, felt overwhelmed by setting up LSP, but having these community packs ready to go has really opened up a broad interest in exploring, in seeing whats out there. Whatever language you work in, there's probably a pretty good ready-to-go setup to get good LSP support! https://github.com/AstroNvim/astrocommunity/tree/main/lua/as...
I'd done some years with Eclipse & Eclim, doing Java, long long ago. And knew there were some really important, key dev tools I was missing. Just having separate debugging programs going (or falling back to printf-style debugging), versus that being something I could do in vim was a huge sign to me that while I could edit reasonably well, I was behind the power curve of where I wanted to be in coding, in what I expect from an IDE. It's been nice to very rapidly gain ground these past couple years.
I thought Vim could be efficient because if you just learn all these codes you can instantly cut 5 lines of code 5dd. But in practice I can't count so I cut the wrong number of lines, then I have to look up how to undo because obviously Ctrl+Z doesn't work, and the end result pretty much every time is that I'd be more efficient with VS Code or even Notepad than with Vim.
I just can't see where this "efficiency" is supposed to be at all.
If you tell me I'm supposed to spend 4 weeks reading VimTutor to gain efficiency in Vim, I could probably become more efficient faster in VS Code by learning all of its keyboard shortcuts. Btw Ctrl+/ comments the current line, but I always just press home // because that feels faster. It works with multiple lines, but I just use Alt+Down key in that case to create multiple cursors.
However the larger attempt and redo problem you highlighed is mitigated in a modal editor that does selection first (not vim) instead of action so you get a preview of what you will delete before hitting it, you can also expand it.
I did give up vim for the same reasons, but I am happy with Helix.
I won’t deny that I still make lots of errors, I still use vscode for other features like folder search and replace, easier diff comparisons
This is pretty much what Visual mode does. V4jd is
* V: enter visual line mode. * 4j: select the next four lines (in addition to this one) * d: delete.
The selection is highlighted before the delete command, you can change the selection range, etc.
I use visual mode to replace stuff all the time: V10j:s/foo/bar/g It even shows the changes interactively.
The find and replace is more at folder level with vscode previews only terminal equivalent I know is serpl
I frequently use c (change) on my visual selections, type in new code at the point where it was removed, then use p to paste the old code somewhere else.
The key is to almost always be in command mode. I am only in insert mode briefly to add or change text. The power of Vim comes from its terse command language, so you want to be in command mode most of the time. I find myself reflexively hitting Esc or Ctrl-[ in other programs because I have drilled this into my mind.
> I just can't see where this "efficiency" is supposed to be at all.
I did not see the efficiency myself until I witnessed a Vim master do some extremely complicated bit of text editing in seconds. I think that most people will not see the value of Vim until they witness something like that.
> If you tell me I'm supposed to spend 4 weeks reading VimTutor to gain efficiency in Vim, I could probably become more efficient faster in VS Code by learning all of its keyboard shortcuts. Btw Ctrl+/ comments the current line.
I personally found Vimtutor boring, if I recall correctly, so I did not use it to learn Vim. I just started to use Vim for all of my coding for several weeks during a slow period at work. I had a printout [1] with all of the keys next to my monitor for several weeks. That was necessary to get muscle memory for every action. I also read a lot of "Learning the vi and Vim Editors". That helps you get into the mindset about how to use the Vim command language. My point is that there are many ways to learn Vim and you can pick which way works best for yourself.
[1] http://www.viemu.com/a_vi_vim_graphical_cheat_sheet_tutorial...
Do people know they can use regex substitutions in VS code, for example? I'm sure Vim can do this as well, even Notepad++ has it, but it's the sort of feature most people don't know about because they just don't use regex very often.
The key to Vim mastery is realizing that every key you press is a command in the language of Vim. Once you realize this, you can construct complicated sequences of commands that do exactly what you want without having to do it yourself manually. This is why I say that it is difficult to see how much more efficiency you can get without witnessing it yourself. It is a fundamentally different way of doing text editing.
Let's just focus on navigation for a second. Yes, you can type things like "10j" to go down 10 lines. Yes, you can type "10}" to go down 10 "paragraphs" (could be functions, etc.). Or you can type "/text" to find the next instance of "text", and then type "10n" to go to the 10th instance. Once you realize all of these things, you start to think about navigating the code a lot differently, since you realize that you can make your code very structured and make it incredibly easy to navigate with just the keyboard.
Let's now focus on something that would be really tedious to type but would happen instantly in Vim. Let's you you want to make an array of 100 elements for some reason. If you had to type that manually, you could have an off-by-one error or something. It's really tedious and not something you want to do yourself.
Instead, you can type this in Vim:
i
array = [
Esc
99A
0,
Esc
A
0]
Esc
and you have an array with exactly 100 zeros. This is a simple example. You can continue this to much more complicated structures. That is the power of Vim.
(Yes, if this is Python you can do the same thing with "array = [0] * 100". My point is to illustrate Vim's command language and how it changes how you approach text editing.)
I love Vim, and agree with this, but using this as a reason to learn Vim feels silly to me. How often do truly complicated text editing tasks come up for most programmers? Vim is really handy for when I maybe need to cut and paste some data from a web page and get it into CSV, but that's just not a common enough task for me that I'd actually recommend anyone else learn it for that purpose.
:set rnu
:set nu
FWIW I would very rarely if ever use '5dd'; to me that is spelled 'd4j'. ':set rnu' obviously influences this, since the last line to be copied is labeled '4'.
Undo is 'u' and, yeah, you probably need to know that one before starting. Even after over 15 years using vim I still make tons of mistakes and change my mind, and a fairly robust undo system is crucial.
There are other ways of navigating next besides just counting characters/words/lines as well (text objects and the like).
Vim does have a big learning curve. If you don't want to invest in it, that's perfectly fine.
Doesn't sound more efficient than VS code to me.
Absolutely! It takes learning relatively few command/motion combos before you are really cooking. The commands are fairly composable as well. I rarely find myself without being able to find a command that can't do what I want. To be fair it takes some time to learn all the commands but eventually you just forget about it and it becomes automatic.
For browsing/reading code, I don't see how vim can be much more efficient than a properly configure IDE that support crtl+click, the back and forward mouse buttons and a command of the keyboard shortcut.
At first, err on the lower side, and 4dd. Over time, you'll start viewing things in chunks naturally, which probably only helps your code scanning ability, which is probably half the benefit of learning Vim. You get really good at looking at code like building blocks.
And undo is an easy one... Just type 'u'!
Like any skill or tool, it often seems not worth it before you know how to do it. But every time you learn a new skill (like you just learned undo!), it makes you more efficient for the rest of your life! How amazing is that?
"Novices are not the only victims of modes. Experts often type commands used in one mode when they are in another, leading to undesired and distressing consequences. In many systems, typing the letter "D" can have meanings as diverse as "replace the selected character by D," "insert a D before the selected character," or "delete the selected character." How many times have you heard or said, "Oops, I was in the wrong mode"?"
Vim tells you the mode though!
Insert -> Normal/Visual: ESC, Ctrl+c, or Ctrl+[. You could also do something like, while in Insert mode press Ctrl+o to do "one movement" (e.g. "i234[Ctrl+o]^1[Ctrl+c]", or maybe, "ihelo world[Ctrl+o]2Fll[Ctrl+o]$![Ctrl+c]" -- don't type the "[" and "]").
Normal -> Insert: well... it depends on where you want to insert.
> But in practice I can't count so I cut the wrong number of lines
Sometimes you don't need to keep track of the number of lines. But, if you really wanted to, you could do something like:
:set relativenumber
If it's code or text you could also use sentence ("(" and ")") or paragraph ("{" and "}") movements like "5d)" (delete the next 5 sentences); "d{" (delete up to the previous paragraph). There's a bit of jank when it comes to code though, but there's some support for it (or maybe I'm just doing it wrong).
> then I have to look up how to undo because obviously Ctrl+Z doesn't work
"u" for Undo, Ctrl+r for "redo". ":help undo" goes into _way_ more detail, and it does get complicated. I don't think I've needed anything past section 2.
> I just can't see where this "efficiency" is supposed to be at all.
The "efficiency" comes with investment, which you can get with any editor.
> If you tell me I'm supposed to spend 4 weeks reading VimTutor to gain efficiency in Vim
I didn't go through vimtutor for a very long time. You can become a reasonably okay Vim user, but it does take some investment. On the order of weeks is probably correct.
But honestly, VSCode is fine too. Notepad is... probably fine.
...pause it before you watch it, look at the video description, and skip to 1m23s.
Grab the text from the video description in the editor of your choice, compare the before and after (heck, I'll probably go in and paste the "after/goal" so you don't even have to work at it).
Time yourself in your editor of choice to match the "goal" output.
Basically: `var $foo, $bar, $baz;` => `$obj = { "foo": $foo, "bar": $bar, "baz": $baz }`
...I randomly did it in about a minute, conveniently and subconsciously, and thought it was worth making a video about it (15 years ago...).
Nowadays I see easy fixups (eg: `gv`, maybe a macro...) that would have made it faster, but it's not about the speed, it's about the accuracy!
One of the most important "commandlets" of vim is the `.` command: "repeat last edit"
In the video when I perform(!) one "change comma into an arrow", I can `n` to "next" to the next anchor point (eg: a `,`) and repeat the edit(!)
Cleverly stringing together "edits" into interactive repetitions is like getting tetrises in Tetris (and about as easy, once you know to look for them).
vim is not an "editor", it's an interactive programming language for editing text:
`:g/def /norm 0fdf ywA #<c-r>"`
...find lines that match `def ...` (slightly sloppily), find the first 'd', find the following '<space>', yank the subsequent word (also could have yanked until a '('), and then append what was yanked as a comment.
Why?! Dunno. But like 30 keystrokes and I can edit the whole file to perform that operation, or any other arbitrary operation, and I can repeat that operation on any file I'd like.
It's "editing" in the sense that after a certain point you don't think about it, you just do it, and the text transformation isn't polluted by inaccuracies, as "advanced vim" encourages you to repeat, replace, define as opposed to "type".
Nowadays with LLM-autocomplete, and the temptation of "whole-git-repo" refactorings like: "change all my uses of list comprehensions to for loops, and use generators, but only for api responses that come from a particular domain" ... yeah, vim feels pretty baroque.
...but when you actually need to do some editing to fix up the mess that was made by the LLM, come talk to me. ;-)
Select the $, Ctrl+D to select the other ones, then select and copy the identifiers. Took me 28 seconds in total.
select $, cmd-d, "enter" (to get them all on newlines), then "$" to replace the lost "$", shift arrows/end to capture "everything", arrow/space over and "cmd-v" for paste, and then I got stuck. (can't "easily" line up the raggedly-pasted items with the multiple cursors and all the cursors seem to "float" weirdly after the paste)
...surely someone more experienced with sublime would know how to "get out of the mess", but I'm more experienced with vim.
I'm wholly not expecting to change your opinion on preferred editor, just sharing a little of the details the make the difference!
In Sublime Text there was an addon that did that. I assume something similar exists for VS Code.
To align the items manually I would Tab (or Space) as much as necessary so that each item has enough space for the alignment. I would then use the mouse to create multiple cursors in the same column. In VS Code it's drag MMB, in Sublime it's Ctrl+LMB or sth. Then Ctrl+Shift+Arrow_Right, Ctrl+Shift+Arrow_Left to select the spaces up until the (misaligned) beginnings of the words, then hit Delete.
Though I'd argue most of the programming time is spent on thinking what to do, not on typing it. It's different when you write prose or transcribing something. Then typing speed matters way more.
That said, having keyboard controls for editing actions is definitely making editing experience more convenient. Same goes for the modes switching and ability to express commands for the editor like you'd do in a shell.