Vim's speed is not really the point (2013)

Car mechanics debate who makes the best 3/8" flex-head ratchet. Engine designers don't. [citation needed]

Still, the flex-head ratchet was probably invented by someone who got frustrated trying to turn a tricky bolt with a fixed-head ratchet. Discussing the benefits/limitations of current tools is worthwhile.

However, when it comes to text editors, I see a lot more "X editor is amazing, here's why" than I see "all editors are insufficient, here's how we should make them better."

I prefer not using the mouse at all, and rarely do when I'm using emacs, but for any other apps and most websites it's unavoidable. The trackpoint is right there under my index finger and the mouse buttons convenient for thumbs. Far better than reaching for a mouse or even moving your hand down to a touchpad.

Lazy is preferring to move your hand over to the mouse instead of spending weeks learning an obscure editor called vim.

I have a beef with using the word "lazy" wrong like that. Lazy is undisciplined. The undisciplined will not become good programmers.

It takes a lot of discipline to learn vim.

It takes a lot of discipline to automate mundane operations.

My .vimrc now has "inoremap jj <Esc>" in it, and that was the final missing piece to get me into uninterrupted-productivity mode with Vim. Since you seem to have similar preferences, you might find that a useful optimization.

ETA: Apparently whoever I got this idea from got it from the Vim tips wiki. http://vim.wikia.com/wiki/Avoid_the_escape_key

And just for the sake of having mentioned it, ed is still the standard text editor!

I don't know about that. I've been proficient in other editors too, but I found that vim's modal editing mode confers unique advantages when it comes to staying in flow.

But if compared to an IDE there are several flow-breaking things in vim that just don't work as well out of the box (navigation, indexing, debugger integration etc), so if that's your point then I agree.

Of course most major IDEs have some sort of vim emulator these days so you can have your cake and eat it.

Whether or not the 10x developer is a myth, there are people who are vastly more productive than others. And they are people who have invested in themselves and their skills, automating away everything they possibly can.

After some time, it all become muscle memory.

I use emacs now with a highly configured set of key bindings, and you're right it's taken me a lot of time. You're comment makes me think there are two types of programmers, those in the "don't make me think" school and those who spend an insane amount of time in one of the big editors, i.e vim/emacs/sublime. To make a gross example of the deficiencies of each, the "don't make me think" school are the people who would manually enumerate function calls instead of learning what a for loop is, while the crazy emacs hackers are the type to spend more time fine-tuning their config than actually working.

I haven't used an install of Vim in a _long_ time that didn't map the arrow keys (and home, end, pgup, etc) to the way most modern computer users are used to.

I use Vim because it's what I learned when I first started using Unix/Linux. It's on just about every machine I work with and is easily installed on anything that doesn't come with it out of the box. I'm not arguing that it's the best ever editor, just that it works well for me.

But, yeah, the days of having to always use hjkl to move around are pretty deep in the past at this point.

Sorry, emacs user here... I just wanted to say that adjusting muscular memory can go faster than you expect. I learnt how to use emacs a couple of months ago, and have recently noticed the tendency to do ctrl-x + ctrl-s to save, or ctrl-y to paste, even when not in emacs ;-) The latter can be a bit annoying, but learning emacs was such a big plus that I don't mind much.

The article on vim sounds interesting, I tried and gave up learning it some time back, I should definitely revisit it again.

I use VIM plugins heavily in Sublime (the Vintage plugin) and Android Studio.

> Try all the popular ones, give them all a fair shot like several weeks of exclusive use. Pick one. Practice it. Move on to more interesting problems.

Vim is a good well-rounded editor that can do anything Sublime or Atom can do. And it did them before Sublime or Atom existed. It has Gui's that feel native.

Every new generational crop of editors, I give the new guys a fair shot. Use them for a few weeks, but usually end up back on Vim after that. Last one that really "shook things up" was TextMate...though all editors have those features now.

So, to your question specifically: Why vim?

I could go on about keyboard efficiency or home row or more terse key combos to get the same thing done or blah blah blah. But really, none of that is true.

The reason I use vim is simple: It's feature full, does everything I need, I know it and know it well, and....

I've got better things to do then learn another editor as well.

Because those editors use GUI that isn't optimized for editing text. They use the same widgets that are used by the Volume Manager, the Finder, the web browser. Vim's interface is geared only towards editing text.

I kind of felt the same way when I first started learning vim. It seems "foreign" at first, but now that I'm able to use it pretty proficiently I think this is a bad comparison.

Vim is more like a power screwdriver that not just anyone can handle, but once you get the hang of it you never want to use a regular screwdriver again.

Vim, unlike other editors, usually requires customization though, so you really have to emerge your self in vim to get up-and-running whereas with an editor like atom you're typically good to go.

I don't need any IDE fancy stuff when MVC is pretty straight forward.

If I need to split screen or jump between window it's tmux or vsplit/split on vim really. I don't use many commands with VIM.

Plus most front end tools are cmdline. bower, composer (for php), grunt, npm, etc... I also use vagrant to run my projects and ansible those are mostly cmdline.

I guess in general, I like the fact I have everything in control in one terminal.

I don't have to jump or juggle between different programs. IDE, Commandline, and bunch of other programs.

Some IDE might have bower, grunt, etc.. extension tuck in somewhere where I have to search for. No thanks.

I got tmux and I don't have to jump between window just to restart or do stuff with vagrant either.

edit: I know about 15 at max vim command. >___<. And like maybe 8 commands for tmux.

I'd like to ask you the same question: what makes you think Sublim or Atom is a superior text editor (not: I'm not talking IDE) ?

Personally I took the time to learn and be proficient with vim; it is now my editor of choice because it gives me a lot of power and doesn't get in the way. It did take time, but it was worth it. I'm pretty sure if I chose another editor I would be equally proficient; it's not so much about vim being the best one, it's more about how I'm efficient with it today.

I guess you've been turned down by vim because it's hard to start with, and in that sense Sublime or Atom are certainly better text editors ... but it doesn't matter, because the learning phase is only temporary.

What makes Vim NOT not a good, well-rounded editor in your opinion?

I don't know anyone of my generation that doesn't simply laugh or look at the cult of vim and isn't perplexed by some of what proponents of the cult say. We ran as fast as we could from those kinds of interfaces once the computer keyboard developed further and the GUI took to the world. The people who had to use that shit 'cause there was no other choice dropped it like hot potatoes as soon as they could.

Here's reality from the perspective of designing, building and programming all sorts of computers for over 30 years:

If you are spending so much time typing that fractions of a second at the keyboard make a significant impact on the development cycle, you are a hack and don't know what you are doing.

Real software and hardware engineers spend far more time designing and planning than coding. Coding is the end result of a process and, in terms of time, is often dwarfed by design and debugging.

As an example, we are in the middle of a month-long process of designing a database for a project. Not one line of code has been written. Every day is devoted to database structure discussions and documentation. Once settled, the DB code might take a week to write.

We are also designing an FPGA-based board as part of the same project. Over three months have gone into research, circuit design and other tasks. The time coding in Verilog won't even compare to the effort before getting to that point.

And then there's debugging and the inevitable pivot or two.

There's nothing whatsoever an editor can do to impact this development cycle in a measurable way. We use several GUI-based code editors. Nobody here is saying "if I could only keep my hands on the keyboard for another few seconds I could...". If they did, the laughter in the room would be so loud you could measure it with a seismograph because it is so utterly ridiculous.

Do I use vim? Of course, only when I have no other choice.

> Why not just use a good, well-rounded editor like Sublime or Atom, or even Eclipse, for that matter..?

- Sublime: Closed-source. - Eclipse: I don't need that big of an environment just for editing text. - Atom: That one actually tempts me. I gave it a try, with the vim keybindings plugin, and it had a slight delay when executing commands that made me go away. I'm keeping a close eye on neovim integration, though; it sounds very promising.

Why is back-end different from front-end? It's all text on a screen. Your statement amounts to, "It might be good for writing and viewing text on a screen but for me, someone writing and viewing text on a screen, it seems like a burden."

I believe the need for fancier editors like Sublime and Atom has come about because VIM's development has waned and its code base is hard to update and innovate on.

There are also text objects that allow you to apply operator on the object. For example if you are anywhere inside if (.) condition, you can type ci(, which stands for change inner ( i.e. change everything inside brackets, to quickly change the condition. Similarly, there is inner word, paragraph, XML tag, brace {, etc text objects, so it is fast to delete/modify etc entire blocks of code.

Vim also has Perl compatible regex engine, which allows you to do sweeping changes and transformation of text. The operators work with search motion as well, so you can do things like d/regex i.e. delete everything from current cursor position to first match of regex etc.

The :g ex command alone alows you to do fairly complex transformations, for example

    :g/pattern/d 

    :g/pattern/m$

    :.,$g/^\d/exe "normal! \<C-A>"

Of course there are a plethora of motion commands that allows you to quickly get to the line, character etc where you want to edit, all without taking your hand from the keyboard. In fact, most times you will be editing text well before the person using a mouse finds their mouse cursor.

This is all just scratching the surface (Vim has over 2000 commands), but hopefully it gives you the flavor of the experience editing in Vim. Getting proficient in Vim is liberating, it allows you to bend text effortlessly to your will without too much thinking really. It's programming your text, and in my mind a very valuable skill, just like learning the UNIX/POSIX command line is incredibly valuable (it's another functional programming environment where individual commands are your functions/filters and shell is executing them and you can string these filters together in unique ways to do all kinds of powerful things that simply don't have an equivalent in the GUI). Command line and Vim multiply you as developer and there is nothing in the GUI world that can come even close to this experience.

Vim is a good, well-rounded editor.

You can have the best of both worlds. For example, I use Visual Studio with the VsVim plugin. Visual Studio is my IDE, but vim is my editor.

I also prefer integrated tooling like merge and git tools - both intellij and eclipse have great examples of these, rather than running 10 commands to replace 1 button click and pretending its the same thing.

i suppose my ideal company uses only typesafe languages so you can really ramp up your dev velocity with an ide - scala+scala.js or java+typescript for example.

personally I find intellij has better frontend plugins, but i honestly prefer the editing experience in java eclipse - too bad each editor in eclipse is its own experience.

I wouldn't choose my editor based on something that happens rarely and is merely "annoying."

>1. Click anywhere between the parentheses;

You lost me at step 1.

I know you mentioned 'some might object to the mouse use', but I would argue that a large number of people who prefer modal editors like Vi(m) do so because they can be driven completely by the keyboard and don't require you to use the mouse - which is disruptive and annoying (IMHO), obviously YMMV.

P.S. I gave you an upvote and I'm not sure why people were downvoting you. You presented clear and logical arguments for your opinion and even if I disagree with them, I can still respect them.