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Comment by pvnick | Hacker News Reader

I love Sublime Text. For a year or two I tried and tried to get behind vim, to no avail. I thought there must be something wrong with me, perhaps I'm not as smart as those other developers who sit there staring at several adjacent vim windows hitting cryptic key sequences as if the essence of vim were an extension of their mind (maybe it is?). I couldn't do it.

Then I made the realization that the editor you use has no bearing on your skill as a developer (well, as long as you're not using Notepad). I picked up Sublime, and my productivity shot up by an order of magnitude. It's fun, supports every single language I've written in, and has a plugin out there for my favorite color scheme of all time, Tomorrow Night (previously it was Solarized Dark). With sublime I can code circles around my former vim-imprisoned self any day.

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Your editor does have a bearing on your skill as a developer. When I interview candidates, the question I ask is "what is your favourite editor?" I don't actually care (much) what the answer is, but I do care that the developer periodically examines the tools they use a lot, and see if they can improve their productivity.

Editors do make a difference in your productivity - that is why people have favourites and why they have flamewars. That productivity matters.

"Editors do make a difference in your productivity - that is why people have favourites and why they have flamewars. That productivity matters."

How do these people know it makes a difference? Do they measure their productivity? Is there any scientific research on this?

You don't need scientific research to know that a good extensible, programmable editor that can become an extension of your mind and hands is going to make you more productive than Notepad. It's like playing a musical instrument. The finger movements and thought processes move into the background over time as you master them with proper practice and you start operating at a higher level. A world-class musician isn't thinking about which notes to play when and where to put their fingers but rather how to put more emotion into a performance.

Similarly, a top flight programmer who has mastered emacs or vim or Sublime Text won't be operating at a conscious level but will be controlling the environment in front of them at a far higher level, especially if the conceptual model of the text buffer is the same no matter what they're doing with it.

An extreme comparison would be to sit two people of the same ability down in front of the Linux kernel source tree, one armed with emacs, cscope, syntax highlighting, org-mode and cc-mode and the other with nano and see who is faster at some non-trivial task.

You don't need scientific research to know that a good extensible, programmable editor that can become an extension of your mind and hands is going to make you more productive than Notepad.

Sure you don't. You can feel the difference. The problem occurs when people treat their editors as an extension of themselves and can't tell the difference between "not liking you" and "not liking your editor", eventually getting defensive. That's a "cognitive level" I don't want to get myself into.

There will always be flamewars and defensiveness about technology choices. Some people are insecure, some aren't. Not everyone becomes a dick just because they've mastered an editor. My best friend for many years used vim while I used emacs and we used to constantly rib each other about our choices. But we still worked very well together. Maybe you need to work where people don't care what you use to get stuff done as long as it gets done?

It doesn't have to be measured to 7 significant digits in a scientific way. But if you spent a week trying out various editors every now and then for the kind of work you do, you should at least be able to make a more informed choice about which editor to use. Or you may discover functionality in another and see if you can get it in your current favourite.

I've interviewed people who were exposed to Nano at school, and have never tried out any other editor. They are missing out on productivity improvements available in many other editors. More middling of the scale I've also interviewed someone who used Eclipse as their first editor and has proceeded to use it ever since despite not working on Java projects any more. That isn't bad per se, but I rank someone higher if they at least try out others every now and then.

> Editors do make a difference in your productivity - that is why people have favourites and why they have flamewars

The fact that people feel strongly about something does not mean it is important. Lots of people have very strong feelings about the New Jersey Devils or the Miami Heat. That doesn't mean that sports or teams matter.

I'm not saying your conclusion is wrong, but your comment does not constitute a valid argument in favor of that conclusion.

> The fact that people feel strongly about something does not mean it is important.

I meant important to them individually, not the whole world

"Lots of people have very strong feelings about the New Jersey Devils or the Miami Heat."

Which would probably be important if you were interviewing them to be local sportscasters in those markets, no?

As a vim user, I feel as if the essence of vim is an extension of my mind. Much like riding a bicycle, I instinctively think "select this line and the four lines below it and copy it" as "V4jy" with little cognitive thought. Kind of cool from a cognitive science standpoint.

Do you think it's possible some people just aren't wired like this? Or am I just not trying hard enough?

I've tried to pick up Vim several times and never made it very far. But at least I know "i" and ":wq" now :)

I was in your position for about a year until bit the bullet and uninstalled Sublime Text from my machine forced myself to use vim exclusively. It was an arduous and painful 2 weeks, but it got better and paid off in the long run.

Why do you need to uninstall? I use Sumblime text in Vintage (VIM) mode and it's amazing!

I agree. Vintage mode is among the best emulations/mappings of vim that I have used.

Same here. I'm using Sublime now for larger tasks, as I like the plugins and code completion, but for smaller, more isolated things and remote work vim is still, and will be, my choice.

> Do you think it's possible some people just aren't wired like this?

Absolutely. Well, maybe I wouldn't call it "wired", but no one tool is right for everyone, and no one should feel bad or wrong for using something different.

I am a Vim lover. You can pry Vim from my cold, dead fingers. But of course it's not for everyone, for the same reason that we don't all use just one programming language or one web framework.

Don't worry. I find vim completely dated, arcane, and esoteric. Sure, it can do almost 25% of the stuff sublime can do but every feature has it's own learning curve.

If I want to select four lines of text in any text editor that isn't vim, I just hold down the shift key and use any of the cursor navigation available to me. Not so in vim.

Upon leaving vim none of the key bindings are never used in any other program. That's antithetical to the manner in which I operate. Normally if a program doesn't support the odd keybinding or two I just use autohotkey or equivalent. But vim makes that impossible.

I can't comment on the 25% claim, but I've used both extensively and found them comparable.

I personally find the navigation of vim so convenient that I use vimperator for Firefox, as well as the built in vim mode of sublime text.

I totally get that vim is a completely unnatural fit for some people. I certainly don't hold that against them, and I hope they don't hold it against me or vim itself.

The other approach is to use autohotkey to make everything work like vim.

The 25% claim sounds a little weird - what are some features that sublime has that vim doesn't have?

I like the multicursor feature. Vim can't do that.

I haven't tried it, but it looks like there's a decent plugin for this for vim: https://github.com/terryma/vim-multiple-cursors

> Upon leaving vim none of the key bindings are never used in any other program.

That's actually not true at all. Lots of terminal programs have keybindings for stuff like hjkl. Even tig does. And if you're using git from the command line and haven't heard of tig, you need to look it up.

Even many roguelike games support vim keybindings for movement. Brogue is an example.

In fact, most shells (e.g. bash and zsh) have the option to switch from Emacs to vi mode.

`set -o vi` on bash command line to enter vim mode. life changing.

Also, this will turn on vi-style line editing in programs using GNU readline (things like mysql, psql, sqlite3):

    echo "set editing-mode vi" > ~/.inputrc

For programs linked against libedit instead (as on OS X):

    echo "bind -v" > ~/.editrc

It's just a steep learning curve. Spend a few years using nothing but vim and it becomes natural.

That just seems like a waste of time and energy to me. Text editing should not be getting in the way of your projects.

I say this as someone who uses vim very nearly exclusively.

As an avid vim user, I certainly think it might just be a difference in inclinations. Use what works for you. A text editor is not the objective here, building you project is.

If you are burning all your cycles trying to map the natural way your brain wants to operate to the way your text editor operates, what do you have left for the real work?

If you want to learn vim, by all means go ahead. But feel no shame if it just doesn't fit you.

Try this: http://yannesposito.com/Scratch/en/blog/Learn-Vim-Progressiv...

This is how I learned Vim, so as far as I know it's the best resource out there.

I've been in and out of vim, but never reached the 'extension' point. Probably due to lack of necessity, and Java work has pushed me further away :/ But mind if I ask why you select instead of e.g. "5yy"? Used to thinking visually, or does it do something different with buffers, or...?

My number one issue with VIM is the need to always count everything: number of lines, number of words, etc. That alone makes the short cuts take a lot longer because generally I'm thinking "I want to cut this function" or "I want to cut down to this line right here". I've never in my life instinctively thought, "I need to cut this line plus four more!".

I end up using visual mode a lot in VIM because it's often faster (or easier) than stopping to count how many times I need to repeat the operation.

Try using text objects: http://blog.carbonfive.com/2011/10/17/vim-text-objects-the-d...

Wish I could upvote this more. Thanks for sharing!

I think everyone should find a workflow that works for them, and I've found that what works for me is working almost exclusively from a terminal.

Combining vim and tmux with the basix Unix command line and a few other tools like ack, tig, etc., gives me an environment that I can't really replicate with desktop applications, at least not on OS X, which lacks a true tiling window manager (i.e., one which, unlike slate, spectacle, etc., tiles the windows for you automatically). I've considered a switch to Linux for xmonad, but I still love OS X overall and am more than happy with my terminal workflow.

I work with two 27-inch monitors, and I like to dedicate one entire monitor to a single full-screen terminal with tmux as the window manager.

Admittedly, this has its downsides. For instance, I feel hopeless trying to do serious coding on Windows.

Have not tried itmyself, but you could check out osxmonad :)

I believe I did try it once but couldn't get it to compile or something. I'm sure it was my fault, but I guess I just don't desire it badly enough over a terminal multiplexer to expend the effort.

Same here. My experience was with Emacs though. I learnt some of the key binding, but installing plugins for almost every need I had (syntax highlighting, debugging, color scheme) just wasn't cutting it. Sublime has very intuitive key bindings, and its blazing fast. Definitely the best editor out there. I still use emacs to edit files through the console, but the majority of my daily editing happens through ST.

Emacs 24 has ELPA with it. Makes installing plugins a trivial task.

I too LOVE sublime text (especially the mini document map, God I love that thing), I just wish there was an addon that turned a tab into a Rich Text Document editor (italic, bold, bullet points, etc...) I tend to write very long posts for my blog and I hate the Wordpress editor.

You could use a markdown language. F.ex. http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/syntax

What use is of the mini-map? Navigation is better done by search, and I cannot imagine it could be more than a cute waste of screen space.

Oh God you're such a programmer. I'm a designer dude. We're visual people. We don't do terminals, we don't do "sudo apt get". We do clicking, UI, colors, things like that. It's just the way we are. I remember what code looks like (color and shape wise) and where on the page it is, it's not in my head like it is in yours.

I know some excellent developers who write all their code in Notepad. Hell, I wrote a fairly large Java application in Notepad when I was in uni. It wasn't that bad.

You at least want to maintain indentation for new lines.

I've used Vim for many years and still found Sublime superior after trying it. While I still prefer Vim for quick edits and ssh, Sublime ended being much more productive for coding.

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