Comment by slowpoke | Hacker News Reader

Comment by slowpoke | Hacker News Reader

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>tailoring a vanilla installation

>newbies to start with using vim.

Sorry, but what? The very last thing a newbie programmer should be doing is configuring plugins. A newbie programmer doesn't need plugins. They only serve to confuse. Which is also why the very worst thing you can do to a newbie programmer is to give them an IDE.

vim is perfect for newbies. It just works, and the defaults are mostly sane[1]. Yes, there's a slight learning curve, but you can do basic text editing (enough for writing any Hello World program and then some) after taking 20 minutes to do vimtutor, and from then on it just gets more powerful.

You can add plugins when you actually need them. A newbie doesn't need plugins. They just need a good text editor - and vim (and Emacs) is the best you can get. No fancy editor or IDE of the week will ever change that. Not Eclipse, not Visual Studio, not ST2, nor whatever else.

Another thing: I refuse to take anyone serious who even brings up the "argument" of "arcance 80's style GUIs" and/or "modern GUIs". Why? Because in the overwhelming majority of cases, that means "vim doesn't have drop shadows, it sucks"[2] (or some variation of that).

Nobody even knows what a "modern" GUI is supposed to be. It's just a fuzzy way to say "I don't actually have any tangible arguments against $thing so I'm just going to accuse it of not fullfilling unwritten, non-existing standards that no one has ever agreed on.". Or in other words, bullshitting.

[1]: Really, the only things I did when I started with vim was to ":set number" and ":syntax on", then put that in the .vimrc. That's it. Everything else was added on demand.

[2]: Yes, I actually had someone trying to argue this to me. I closed the comment page and burst into laughter.

My god, you make it look as though using vim is a goal for a programmer. While the actual goal is to use something like vim to do a job.

The original argument is modern day editors aim to automate most recurring demands of a programmer out of the box.

The point in most pro-vim/emacs arguments it to make you take the most difficult route to achieving text manipulation tasks. Hoping that will make you good at text manipulation over time. While the point is you are trying to gain a expertise which you don't need.

Going by that argument you don't need any kind of an modern GUI ever. Why ATM's? Why graphically friendly email clients? And you could go like this for nearly everything.

You need modern editors because you always need to take steps forward in the usability game.

Oh please, stop these ridiculous appeals to novelty and hyperboles of things I haven't said.

You keep spouting "modern" without any sense whatsoever. The fact that vi(m) and Emacs are both veteran pieces of software does not somehow reduce their usability. They are still the most usable and powerful editors on this planet. Yes, they have a (steeper) learning curve. No, that isn't a bad thing. Please stop conflating usability with accessibility[1].

>The point in most pro-vim/emacs arguments it to make you take the most difficult route to achieving text manipulation tasks.

You don't make any sense at all. If anything, vi is the easiest route to achieving text manipulation tasks. The better you know it, the easier, the faster and the more efficient it becomes.

>Going by that argument you don't need any kind of an modern GUI ever.

By what argument? Your own confused interpretation of what I haven't said?

I said that there isn't even such a thing as a "modern GUI". It's an idiotic term that has no defined or agreed-upon meaning, and is thrown around as a pseudo-argument in discussions like this. It has no merit and can be dismissed as such.

[1]: I've made this point countless times in the past, in all sorts of different discussions about software. People keep on blabbering about how $software (like git, vi or just GNU/Linux in general) is unusable when they really just mean it's a bit more challenging to learn than, say, nano or gedit, completely ignoring the long term benefits.

Well said.

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