That said, even though I use vim/keyboard mainly, I still have embarrassing habits like opening a new vim for each file and cd'ing & ls'ing around to find the files.
And we’re not typing programs in from magazines like in the 80s here. My bottleneck is nearly always thinking time. Typing time is irrelevant.
When it comes to work that doesn't require deep thought, it matters. I'm much more likely to achieve a task that someone else might dismiss "because it requires too much typing."
It also helps a lot with refactoring, which is mostly a mechanical process. I'm much more willing to do large refactoring than some others due to the fact that I'm very good with my editor.
Point is that you're right, but you're also describing a subset of problems which require deep thought, and not fully considering the benefits that might be had from the alternative.
I don't agree. Code is communication. Imagine you had to sound out every letter of every word while speaking - it wouldn't just be slower, you'd lose your place or simply not bother saying certain things.
I'll even argue the opposite: there are many ways to write code slowly that yield better results.
- sometimes, you are 'thinking slow'. A pause between two snippets is invaluable in pre-forming the logic in your head anyway, which rules out 99% of the supposed 'efficiency' of a l33t-script-kiddie.
- pair programming is literally 2x slower in terms of man-hours, and actually even worse if we consider that talking to someone is much slower than thinking to oneself. And yet... it produces great code and makes your programmers better.
This is precisely why I never learned to type faster. The time between my thinking and typing is spent auditing my thinking.
> - pair programming is literally 2x slower in terms of man-hours, and actually even worse if we consider that talking to someone is much slower than thinking to oneself. And yet... it produces great code and makes your programmers better.
Ehhh. A lot of programming is creative and imposing my creativity onto someone else (or having someone's styles/preferences imposed upon me) usually doesn't help much. Any time I've pair-programmed (~6 years of professional programming) my productivity dives down to 1/3 while my quality sometimes increases marginally. It's a low ROI in my experience which is why I'll never advocate for it. But I'll play ball if the org I'm working for embraces it. There are social/team-building/ other nontechnical benefits to consider as well (although I'd argue that tasks built specifically for these purposes would be more efficient).
If you’d like to do that a little faster, you can use `fd` piped into `fzf` as a fuzzy file finder. Once it’s set up properly you’ll never go back! NERDTree might also be helpful.
IME, Vim is mostly nice because of the satisfaction derived from these incremental improvements.
