Comment by SaintRomuald | Hacker News Reader

Comment by SaintRomuald | Hacker News Reader

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I tried vim motions as a daily driver many times but, I don't think that with today's expansive IDEs vim motions are all that superior. IDEs have very competent shortcuts and features built in.

My biggest problems with vim are lack of feature discoverability and the fact that you can't change the keybindings. It's very hard to learn new things in Vim without specifically googling for them. It's highly likely that if I sat down to some online course I could learn a lot more about the Vim way of editing but I could never sit through one long enough to discover new things, so most of the things I learn about Vim come from me specifically looking up how to do certain things, not a bad way to learn, but I feel like I never got extremely proficient becasue I didn't go deep enough.

I find a lot of the keybinding to be unintuitive or not very ergonomic or inconsistent, but I also don't want to rebind anything because part of the reason vim is so useful is the fact that you get this tool with every linux install and changing things means you're no longer using The Vim. On the contrary it feels perfectly fine to tweak your IDE's keybindings because that IDE is already very specific to your needs.

I don't think anyone claims vim motions are superior in absolutes with a straight face.

I like a nearby comment that essentially says "it's not superior for everyone, it's just infinitely better for me; also it doesn't magically make anyone 100x better than the next developer".

I've seen people using IDEs and flying around massive codebases at incredible speeds, all the while they're completely mystified by even the simplest vim editing.

Me? Put me in front of an IDE and painfully witness the absolute grind: I'm a sitting duck; but in Vim I feel like my brain is plugged straight into the computer: I don't even think about my hands, code is conjured just by thinking about it.

Yes, vim is not intuitive. It doesn’t teach itself to you. It takes hard work. I bought the O’Reilly vi/vim book [1] and read it cover to cover. I practiced a lot of things and was very deliberate about it.

To me, learning vim is like learning a musical instrument. You’re not going to get there without committing to it. For many people that’s just not going to happen: they have neither the time nor the inclination/energy to do it. That’s totally fine! There are loads of other tools for people to use and they get by just fine without vim!

I think my main complaint is that there aren’t a few more tools like vim. Almost all software is designed for people to be able to pick up casually and be able to get work done at a passable level of productivity without ever reaching mastery and flow state. Tools like that (easy to use but with no real incentive for mastery) are deeply unsatisfying to me for a lot of reasons.

I guess what I’m saying here is really just a restatement of “Worse is better” [2].

[1] https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/learning-the-vi/1565924...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better

This “worse is better” is very interesting. Are you suggesting vi/vim is an example of “the right thing”, vs a “New Jersey” style?

Yes, though that characterization is time-relative. I think vi would’ve been called “New Jersey Style” back at the time it was created, owing to its legacy as a minimal extension to ed for full screen interactive editing on a video terminal.

Today, the editing landscape is dominated by IDEs which have very basic (nearly minimum viable) editing functionality in support of getting the product out the door ASAP and letting plugins handle the fine details. This stands in marked contrast to a legacy tool like vim which gets editing right out of the box, allowing people to be productive even with a stock configuration (no plugins needed, though of course many are available).

We might call this an analogue of the Overton Window: the TRT vs WIB Window has shifted so far towards Worse is Better that we now consider UNIX an elegant tool. The old team at MIT must be really disappointed now!

You can absolutely change the keybindings, vim is programmable.

Yes, but I meant that in the sense that when you change vim, it's no longer the vim that ships with Linux distros. It stops being the universal tool and starts becoming your custom text editor,and to me the biggest advantage of vim is how you're going to encounter it everywhere.

Doesn't everyone customise their editor(s), to a lesser or greater extent?

Okay, but that's true of anything? If you customize the shortcuts in an IDE, then you are also no longer running the defaults.

Exactly. See .vimrc.

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