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Comment by WolfeReader | Hacker News Reader

As much as I heartily disagree with most of what you wrote - and seeing all the downvotes, I'm not the only one - there is a nugget of truth in what you wrote, which answers a lot of your complaints.

"Using it was a harsh reminder of what people running emacs or vim for the first time have to go through."

The benefit of keyboard-driven programs like Vim is that you're trading an initial learning curve for a vastly more efficient experience once the learning is done+.

Mouse-driven tools like VS Code don't demand that the user learns them. Keyboard shortcuts there are optional, since practically everything is in a menu or a UI that can be moused to. This adds on seconds per interaction, adding up quickly over time.

+And the "learning" for these tools can be shortened dramatically by keeping a printed-out cheatsheet. For Vim this can be a huge lifesaver; I made one for magit as well, back before I switched full-time to JJ.

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> The benefit of keyboard-driven programs like Vim is that you're trading an initial learning curve for a vastly more efficient experience once the learning is done+.

I have never been rate-limited by my keyboard input speed. I have lost many minutes of time daily looking up cheatsheets for terminal tools that I use occasionally.

Ironically, when I see what impact AI has had on my programming, the biggest has been in saving me time crafting command line invocations instead of browsing <tool> --help and man <tool>.

The speed change you see is not due to raw input speed, but do to eliminating a context switch in the brain. I thinking I want to see X and already seeing it on the screen.

> Mouse-driven tools like VS Code don't demand that the user learns them.

Honestly, I found the barrier to entry way lower with lazygit than with vscode.

I realise I'm not adding anything useful to this discussion. I tried to start VSCode so that I could evaluate it and, maybe, add some info. as to why I find it more difficult to get into, but it just crashes now :shrug:

> The benefit of keyboard-driven programs like Vim is that you're trading an initial learning curve for a vastly more efficient experience once the learning is done+.

This is simply not true and I say this as a life long vim user. The only reason I have vim mode enabled in all the editors that support it, is the fact that it's immensely difficult to retrain muscle memory accumulated from a decade+ time sunk in that editor. Nothing about vim or any of these other tools being keyboard driven, make me more productive in a way that matters.

> Mouse-driven tools like VS Code don't demand that the user learns them.

Good. That's how all software should be. It's a means to an end, not the center of the universe. The whole reason for bringing a UI layer into all of this in the first place is freeing up my brain from having to deal with git's bullshit.

> Keyboard shortcuts there are optional, since practically everything is in a menu or a UI that can be moused to.

The shortcuts are still there if you care to learn them - it should absolutely not be a prerequisite.

> +And the "learning" for these tools can be shortened dramatically by keeping a printed-out cheatsheet.

Or, I could use some actually well designed software and save myself some printer ink :-)

> Or, I could use some actually well designed software and save myself some printer ink :-)

Or, you could use some well-designed and self-documenting software. Too bad there's not much of that besides Emacs - on the other hand, Emacs and occasionally a browser cover most of my computering needs...

Good joke

Considering that Emacs has "eww", you could do all of your computing in Emacs

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