It continues to surprise me why people have such strong opinions about someone else's editor choice. My current theory is vim users are like vegans/gluten free/paleo/etc, in that its a personal choice that some are public about, and people love to hate on it and "disprove" it for the same reason.
This is not a good theory. Surely, this effect appears wherever you've got conflicting choices about what is best, but there are always reasonable arguments on why you should do X over Y. And you know, there are always people who respect other's choices.
I am a vim user and I 100% understand why others don't want to get into it. I don't bully them, I will explain only once why I think it is a better environment and then they are free to carry on with their lives and so am i.
People who are extremely attached to their choices are (to me) unable to understand that every tool is for a job && different people have different needs. This shouldn't lead us to label a group of users and ignoring the pros and cons of smth
In any case. For a long time I was a fan of my editor of choice, slickedit. It definitely has a few features I use for which I don't know the analogs in most other editors. Features like versions backups. Undo of multi-file search and replace.
Also once had someone show me IntelliJ for C++ and was fairly impressed with its refactoring features. Enough that I thought I should look more into it.
I have yet to see a feature for vim that makes it clear win over any other major editor. I have read articles that make me understand why others might like it but seriously. I think you're all deluding yourselves.
Just as an example, lately I mostly do JavaScript and a little typescript. I'm 100% sure that the VSCode experience there out of the box is superior to vim for the same purpose. VSCode is node aware, browser aware, npm aware, eslint aware, typescript aware out of the box. I have no idea how much configuration I'd have to do in vim to get it to match and I find all of that invaluable. I'm not saying vim can't do it but I am saying if I tried to start using vim today on the projects I'm working on the experience would be seriously inferior. I don't know what language I'd have to be using to change that.
My thesis, which is a borderline polemic, is that if Vim doesn't suit your needs you are doing it wrong. If your program/language/environment needs a smart editor, you've built or chosen a program/language/environment that is too complex, and an IDE won't ever solve that fundamental problem. I get we don't always get to choose these things (wh o hasn't had to learn React, Typescript, or the general JavaScript ecosystem) but my cultural stance is the people who made those things should have used Vim, realized it was hard to manage w/ Vim, and questioned their priors.
That might sound nuts or the ravings of someone who's completely drank the kool-aid; who got good at one difficult thing and now like, jams it in everywhere to ladder pull or whatever. And so I should say that I'm super amazed by the capabilities of IDEs like PyCharm or even Eclipse (or, honestly, even Code::Blocks). The sheer engineering effort alone is awesome, but some of the stuff you can do with them is incredible. I can't imagine developing the source code of Eclipse with Vim. But does using an IDE to develop Eclipse make Eclipse great, or does it simply make Eclipse _possible_?
I contend Eclipse shouldn't exist, at least not in its current form. It's too complex for humans, and its design necessitated so many engineering hours it was a net loss for humanity. If the complexity of your program/language/environment rises to the level you need an IDE to manage it, the only thing to do is start over.
The first (chronologically speaking, for most people) is modal editing. Most popular editors today support vim bindings. So this bulwark is gradually eroding.
The second is the automation. Any piece of your workflow can be captured and remapped to a couple keystrokes.
Some other editor might innovate a new feature that vanilla vim doesn’t have (in fact this occurs regularly).
The (not unique in idea, but in implementation) power of vim is not any superficial feature, it’s the meta feature of extensibility, and how this is interwoven with the modal editor idea.
I think many people who come to vim and then leave it for another editor get the first idea, but never got used to the second idea, or never got around to integrating the two.
Yes they can. Let me list them: 1) Familiarity 2) Ready out if the box, less effort 3) For specific languages and projects, you can't do it vim. Javascript is not one of those. Maybe android development is.
> I am saying if I tried to start using vim today on the projects I'm working on the experience would be seriously inferior.
Correct, it would be a BIG pain, and I know because I have done it. It sucks hard. But if you suck it up and start molding this extremely flexible editor to your needs, after a few months you will get a far superior experience than your out-of-the-box IDE. The most important aspect of all is that you reason differently about writting and editing text, in a much more efficient way than normal.
But by no means do I judge people for not doing it, as I said in my initial comment, everyone has their needs. Vim turned out to give me great power and comfort after all and I can barely go back to another editor. Maybe it's not the same for you. All is fine.
I can touch type both QWERTY and Dvorak. I usually type Dvorak, and the longer I type QWERTY, the more I get this mental fatigue of continually overriding what my fingers wanted to do. Using vim gives me a tinge of that feeling, that I wouldn't recognize as a hint of that feeling if I didn't know how the bigger version of the feeling feels after a day of typing QWERTY. It has something to do with the impedance mismatch of hitting keys in the wrong mode/forgetting what mode you're in (humans are terrible at moded interfaces) and throwing around a minilanguage for text editing in my head besides the actual task I need to do.
Saving 2 or 3 minutes of text editing a day isn't worth the aggravation.
I would say you can feel like you have a godlike sense of power over the text, like you're playing Age of Empires. Some people probably like that, and equate it with productivity and time-savings. It's optimizing for the wrong thing.
I think because people identify themselves too much with their editor, programming language or whatever else choice. Everyone wants to think of themselves as the smart ones, only making objective rational choices, so everyone else making other choices has to be stupid. If now someone criticises their choice or argues about other choices, then they feel personally attacked, and there the flamewars goes.
For vim: plug-in development effort. Nowadays we have to recycle VSCode ones because Vim is seen as too niche to develop for it directly.
For vegan: meal availability in shop and restaurants.
For Android vs iOS: app availability.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/28820444-the-elephant-in...
(edit: I'm basically paraphrasing eindiran's argument)
There a lot of vegans who don't eat animal products and just leave it at that. Like my partner who just cooked me an anchovy pizza.
You never hear about the just-a-vegan-and-god-knows-why-you'd-want-to-tell-everyone, because they creep through the world, in absolute dread of being discovered by the like-to-tell-people-they-are-a-vegan people.
I want to reiterate that I'm merely pursuing an intellectually curious line of inquiry into whether modal editing enthusiasts are brainworm-infested cultists, not engaging in base mudwrestling about editors, which the guidelines forbid.
Absolutely.
I am not wedded to my editor, I happen to prefer Emacs, if it’s not installed I shrug and use cat and sed. The older more experienced people at my company tend to use vi or Emacs. The younger ones use VS Code, PyCharm, Sublime etc. And they spend an awful lot of time on chat asking “how do I do this simple thing in my editor??” that you simply don’t see from the Emacs/vi crowd.
You're neglecting the folks who use keyboard editors (and fancy keyboards) to reduce the incidence of RSI.
If I can accomplish the same tasks in four keystrokes (~1s) as it would take me in a dozen clicks and 15 seconds of mousing, then poorly designed programs forcing me to use the mouse to interact are causing an order of magnitude more strain than those designed for keyboard interaction.
(This is less an issue in text-editors, and more an issue in everything else user-facing.)
I happen to be a person who uses a fancy keyboard (Kinesis Advantage2) and text editor (vim) to reduce RSI.
I think there's some truth to that.
I've been vegan for 20 years and a Vim user for half of that time.
Back in the day, I was questioned a lot about why I was vegan, being asked all the time where do you get your protein? Grateful those days are over.
Vegans can tell you the worse people are the former vegans, who almost always had a bad experience of some kind being vegan and want to tell anyone who will listen.
I think people who tried and didn't get Vim are often the ones wanting to disprove that Vim is any good. Because obviously if it didn't work for them, it can't be any good.
The subtitle for Drew Neil’s Practical Vim book is Edit text at the speed of thought and that's kinda how it is when you start to get pretty good at Vim.
I don’t think it’s all overblown. With a GUI editor if you’re not efficient with it you can fall back to using a mouse until you know enough shortcuts. With vim if you don’t know enough of the controls for even basic navigation you can’t do much, the learning curve will always be steeper, and some people don’t want to go through that even if it pays off in the end.
