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0 pointstheonemind5y ago0 comments

I got pretty good with vim. I'd say it was the fastest I could ever edit text. It really can be insanely fast for editing text but ultimately, I don't like vim. I don't spend that much time literally editing text, like a copy editor. I spend much more time typing and thinking, and very little editing.

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.

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DennisP5y ago

It worked out the opposite way for me. Using vim bindings keeps me in flow. If I don't have them I get aggravated, every time I have to slog through an inconvenient editing task because I changed my mind about some bit of code. It's not the seconds I save that makes me more productive, it's the mental state it helps me stay in.

It doesn't resonate with everybody, but I think it's going too far to say it's optimizing for the wrong thing.

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