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Comment by ryah | Hacker News Reader

This is the top story on hacker news?

It looks awfully appealing when the alternative is reading about why some people don't like someone.

Or you could just say that they both are very unappealing. It probably took the author under 5 minutes to type up this blog post.

I am sick to death of the editor wars and editor advocacy, I wish people would just stop. I bet most hackers have made their editing decisions long ago and are content with their choices.

Having said that, I would like to add something positive to the discussion. I think whichever editor you choose, you should learn to move the cursor around without using the arrow keys. There is considerable value in keeping your hands on home row. Every time you reach for the arrow keys you add latency to your workflow. It adds up.

That goes triple for switching between the keyboard and mouse, unless you have a specific workflow that involves the mouse and the keyboard at the same time (as is common with Photoshop, Autocad, etc.).

> I bet most hackers have made their editing decisions long ago and are content with their choices.

I think you're completely ignoring the next generation of hackers, which is unfortunate. I've been working on getting past vim's learning curve for over a year, on and off. True, this submission sucks, but it lead me to find this: http://www.viemu.com/a-why-vi-vim.html, which is pretty informative for a beginner.

I like reading things about various editors now and then, and it certainly serves an educational purpose.

However, this does not require the spamming of "editor" advocacy posts (where "editor" has meant "vim") recently.

I've used Visual Studio and variants for 7 years professionally. I've had some familiarity with vim for the the past 3 years or so, but it was only in the last year that I have come to really enjoy using vim. As tiring as these articles may seem, they need to keep coming in a slow, but steady, stream so that others can find out what they have been missing.

Until enough people either flag it or submit other posts with more substance, yes.

In the mean time, maybe the discussion will justify its continued existence on the front page.

Hackers like/use tools like Vim?

That's a dumb reason to vote up an article. If I submitted the man page of vim, would you upvote it? The man page is actually more useful than this blog post.

It's not about the subject, it's about the content.

Right, voting up articles because you like them means that the front page will tend to get clogged with "woo $thing, vote this up if you like $thing too" type articles, which are almost always very shallow AND encourage other such banality.

There are still interesting discussions to be had about multiple-decade-old text editors, but this is not one of them.

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