Comment by apothegm | Hacker News Reader

Comment by apothegm | Hacker News Reader

Do you already do any work over SSH? What do you do if you need to edit any files in that context?

Learning the essentials of vim was the sort of skill that for me took about 10 min per day over a couple months and has come in handy almost every day since then. Can you get by without it? I guess, if you do absolutely everything via a GUI. Or delegate all CLI work to LLMs without ever questioning or second guessing their output.

And yes, I use vim for almost every git commit or interactive rebase. Access to the full power of CLI git is something I value very much and has saved me countless hours. Not to mention using it for editing any config file that’s not part of a repo.

Every time you’re able to keep your fingers on the keyboard instead of reaching for a mouse saves you both time and precious context switching energy.

Aficionados of modal editing often insinuate that one would require mouse use in non-modal editing. Yet I have always fully keyboard-operated my non-modal editors, whether VSCode in the last 9 years or previously, Sublime and others, all the way back to Turbo Pascal in the late 90s. I don't ever use the mouse in them, whether I'm inside a text buffer or in the Command Palette (or in menus for the pre-Sublime editors back when). For example, F1 is bound to show "hover" doc tips over the symbol that the caret is in. A couple function keys and ctrl/alt/shift-plus-some-mnemonic letter are soo swiftly and easily muscle-memoried, I never felt any need for mousing, or for "modes" and typing just to switch from one to another.

I'm sure once one is used to modal editing, one can be speedy with it. So can I, entirely without modal yet without mousing =)

I also use VSCode and derivatives. Also mostly without mousing. But I don’t HAVE to, because I know how to use CLI tooling to not only edit files as needed but also handle things like version control — which I’ve noticed a disappointing percentage of my colleagues, even those with a decade in the field, are mystified by. I haven’t touched VSCode’s git integrations, but the astonishment at being introduced to CLI rebasing — followed by interactive rebasing — was eye-opening.

Well for git stuff or any CLI stuff, I just key-chord into the integrated terminal (or alt-tab into my terminal emulator, depending on task) and do the git commands, having the whole "git integration" thing disabled in `settings.json` in the first place..

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