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Comment by applfanboysbgon | Hacker News Reader

> I have way more stuff to keep in my head than I have room for and I can't afford to expend more than about 0.0001% of context on a text editor.

I can't say I agree. To me this is equivalent to saying "I have way more music in my head than I have room for and I can't afford to expend more than about 0.0001% of context on a piano". The tool you use for 8+ hours a day is extremely important and even small gains will pay dividends over the long run. The more efficiently the text editor allows you to do tasks, the more time you have to think about other tasks.

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He IS saying that. Vi is more efficient for him every hour every day because he has been able to learn it to the point where there is nearly zero effort in using it. To learn something else would be to throw away all that hardcoded memory and try to rebuild it.

Learning how to use a proper IDE is a change in workflow.

I never made that switch. The muscle memory of 2 decades of using a software is under appreciated.

For me, it is about preference for what to optimize for.

I have tried making that switch many times and lasted for a few months and then one day I find I've been back at the CLI for a week without noticing.

I love CLI tools that effectively give me the things an IDE would offer such as astgrep for refactoring for example. zoekt with a browser does pretty good indexed searches. fzf can be used to build up almost any useful way of selecting things that you can imagine. So the CLI becomes my IDE.

IDEs made the mistake of locking the user into desktop-traditional keybinding paradigm instead of using a more flexible one which would allow for implementation of both vim and desktop paradigms. (don’t respond with “well they have vim mode plugins”. no they don’t. they’re hacky and unreliable)

My usual saying is that if all you wanted from vim was a few keybindings, you weren’t really using vim’s capabilities to any extent that matters anyway.

To continue the musical instrument analogy, I already master the piano and I am happy with it solving my requirements. Learning the guitar will be a great undertaking, and provide me no new songs to play.

Hence, I will stick to my piano.

They didn't say they mastered the piano, though.

> I consider my vi/vim skills to be extremely minimalist subset, and probably horribly inefficient

Likewise, "I don't configure anything from the default" could be likened to playing an out-of-tune piano because you just can't be bothered. If you genuinely switch machines so often that configuration becomes a burden, sure, stick with the defaults -- but I think it's doing yourself a bit of a disservice if your reason is instead "I don't think it's worth spending time or mental energy on my tools".

I feel like the closest analogy to leaving everything set to the default would not be an out-of-tune piano but one that you've left in 12-ET instead of retuning it to just intonation in the key you use. Vim on default configs is still a perfectly functionality piano.

That's actually funny, because I play both.

Show off :)

I didn't say I was any good at them! Just like my text editor.

All pianos have the same interface, no?

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