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Comment by jrm4 | Hacker News Reader

This feels like the "wrong" direction today with the advent of AI? Just seems like in the realm of "bending yourself to the tool vs bending the tool to yourself," it's the LATTER that's about to get a whole lot easier, if it isn't already.

So, sure, there are probably things you can learn, but e.g. I'm much more about "I think it should be THIS way so how do I make it do that."

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Learning Vim has been one of the highest-longevity skill I picked up in University. With every new technology - autocomplete, IDEs, various GUI design interfaces - there's always a chorus of folks who say: "Well now you don't need to Vim, this new tool makes that obsolete." And every time I end up having to manipulate a mountain of text regardless - whether that's in logs, source code, configuration, or documentation. With the amount of text that AI outputs I don't see the need to manipulate text going away and Vim is one of the fastest and most flexible ways to do that.

But the thing is -- will it be?

Which is to say, let's take two extremes. The "vim" way vs. the ultra-Emacs way, right? The thing is, it will soon become trivially easy to modify your own "text editing environment," and by you I mean everyone?

The more I read this, the more I'm strongly predicting a resurgence in this sort of individualization.

>The thing is, it will soon become trivially easy to modify your own "text editing environment,"

elisp enters the chat

Any thoughts on Neovim? Do you like it?

The problem is both (1) knowing what you want, and (2) specifying what you want.

(1) is hard enough and a necessary prerequisite to (2) which, even so, is even harder than (1).

Good, documented software is the accumulated knowledge of people who (1) knew what they wanted, (2) implemented it, and (3) communicated how it works. AI can ease the building of such software but does not make the process trivial.

I don't believe your last sentence at all -- especially if we're talking about "bespoke software for individuals."

I strongly predict it will be trivial.

neovim is pretty flexible and extensible if you don't want to follow default behavior.

You are getting downvoted quite heavily but I do wonder what percentage of people are growing more and more accustomed to the latter.

I say this someone who was dedicated to (neo)vim for a decade. With AI I spend a lot less time writing/editing pure code these days, and all the VSCode based IDEs have become so essential to my workflow/productivity that using vim only would be masochistic. I still enable the vim binds in my editor and while they’re never a perfect 100% replacement I get so much value out of other tools I can’t see myself going back.

Exactly. My journey is similar, probably because I've never had to code for a living. I started learning Vim. I dedicated 2 years to Emacs + Org-Mode.

And eventually I left. I've come to realize (for me) anything that can't do CUA keybinding easily and well, usually out of the box, is useless to me because I use other software.

So now I'm riding this weird middle space between Vim and Geany mostly because I haven't had time to dig into making something different. But I'm just about 100% certain that I'll be able to make a perfect-for-me bespoke text editor very soon, thanks to AI. I know it would have been possible in Emacs, I just didn't have the time.

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