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Comment by t43562 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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