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Comment by gingerlime | Hacker News Reader

One small thing I was wondering about - how comfortably can you drive in a pair programming session on someone else's computer?

I mean, I don't mind being in the back seat on whichever editor the driver is using, but if I'm driving, I really feel awkward without vim and my plugins and key bindings etc...

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I was thinking the same, but in reverse. If I asked someone to sit and drive my esoteric setup, there is no way they'd even be able to type code let alone be productive :D. And the same is true when I walk over to help someone. I start typing and then I realize, this isn't vim, they don't have my .profile in their shell :D, ah fuck it, let me do it on my machine and I'll check it in or send you the change.

In my experience, it can be a little awkward. At one point I interviewed with a company that uses Rubymine almost exclusively, and I had previously only used Sublime / vim (and Eclipse for Java).

It was definitely more distracting than I would have thought going in. Everything is a potential hickup, from tab switching, file navigation and basic shortcuts. It's definitely less than ideal, given that you're essentially context switching into basic operational stuff when what actually matters is the logic of the problem at hand.

More than IDE, it's about the code you are doing. If you aren't comfortable with the IDE other person is using, I think you should request to change it and that person should allow.

My understanding of pair programming is that the driver never even touches the keyboard. Do I have that backwards?

I think you have it backwards. According to [1] at least:

"Pair programming is an agile software development technique in which two programmers work together at one workstation. One, the driver, writes code while the other, the observer or navigator, reviews each line of code as it is typed in"

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pair_programming

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