Comment by abraininavat | Hacker News Reader

Comment by abraininavat | Hacker News Reader

The key piece of advice you were missing is "Don't try to learn vim at work."

Let's say you delivered packages using a horse and buggy, and people started talking about this new fangled "automobile" thing. Sure, you could try to dive into it and use an automobile for your next delivery. And when you crash the thing and your delivery isn't made, you get pissed off and say "I'm never using an automobile again!"

Or.. you could keep using your horse and buggy at work, and start learning the automobile in your free time. Then, once you've mastered the automobile, start using it at work.

But I'd disagree with the advice of learning vim a little bit at a time. It may be necessary to do that if you're trying to learn vim at work, but most people will acquire bad habits that way and learn to use vim in a watered down way. You've now tied some reins to the steering wheel and are sitting on the automobile's roof, trying to reach in the window and whip the gas pedal.

I disagree. I tried to learn Vim a few times during university. It was fun, I was able to use it productively, but it didn't stick. Neither did Emacs.

I only got invested in Vim at work, where I actually had to use a text editor for a significant portion of my day (actually, ViEmu, at the time). For university work, I never used Vim for quite long enough for it to really sink in.

Sure, you lose most of your productivity for a few days when switching text editors. So, I guess you should not switch editors when time is at a premium and deadlines are piling up. But you certainly need to have a good amount of time where you use the software full time, if only to build those all-important habits.

By the way, this is how I learned Vim, Emacs, and (shockingly) touch typing. It worked well for me.

I think you hit the nail right on the head here. It can be detrimental to try and learn vim (or emacs, for that matter) while trying to get stuff done, but it is necessary to immerse yourself, as it were.

For those who don't use vim, switch right now (unless you're at work.) If you want to be productive, you'll have to learn to love the home row.

As an aside, it might be worth it to learn a couple of emacs movement commands as well if you're using OS X, as you'll be able to navigate textboxes without leaving the home row as well!

But then, I've also head "If you have a pet project, don't make it your first project in a new language - you'll end up hating the project, and hating the language", so it's definitely a variable, and arguably much more related to people's learning styles.

The biggest time sink in adopting vim in my experience isn't necessarily learning the editing mechanics but rather the temptation to customize everything and adding plugins or scripts to perform actions with fewer keystrokes.

If people want to use vim in a "watered down way" then let them, it's better than rejecting a great tool because they can't fulfill a critical work need

I'm not ordering anyone to do anything they don't want to do. I'm just throwing some advice out there.

Why bother? You're not going anywhere any faster, and the ancient automobile you're clanking along in takes just as much maintenance as the horse did.

For one, there are automobiles (vim) everywhere. I can't take the time to install a horse on every remote server I use.

Well, that makes sense. I can imagine that someone whose job involves ssh'ing into a lot of remote servers and doing configuration things to them might have very different needs than a typical software developer does.

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