Ask HN: Can you show me how fast coding is in vim?

Somewhat related, I started out using Emacs and have since moved to using vim. I'm at the point where I feel semi-proficient in it, and I've started playing around with .vimrc, pathogen-based addons, as well as other stuff like ctags a bit, and based on my experience so far this extensibility and customization is what makes the text editor so powerful compared to other ones (although I can't really speak for Emacs since I didn't get as far with it).

That being said, I've recently started picking up an interest in lisp (currently slowly making my way through sicp), and I've seen indications that Emacs is somehow more suited to lisp development than vim. As a result, I've actually been considering switching back again, despite emacs pinky, although I'm still on the fence about this.

If anybody here has some knowledge about what Emacs offers in terms of lisp development that vim doesn't (or vice versa) and/or has some good references, I would be very interested to know.

In this topic: people worrying about how fast they can make mistakes.

A ton of hyperbole, but an enjoyable read - https://www.norfolkwinters.com/vim-creep/

Interviews of vim programmers - http://howivim.com/

Gary Bernhardt's screencast on - https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/screencasts

Same! Love it

If you work with UNIX / Linux servers a lot, or really at all, it's a good idea to be comfortable with basic vi usage - vim being Vi IMproved, with some features that we've all become comfortable with.

You will find a version of vi on almost any UNIX-ish system you're likely to find running. It's an incredibly robust and battle-tested editor which can help you out of tight situations.

Nano isn't so bad and is fairly common now, but its' predecessor, Pico, was absolutely terrible for editing code. Pico was originally the editor bundled with the Pine e-mail client, and it had a nasty habit of chopping lines of text at 80 characters wide. I once used Pico to edit a hundreds-of-lines-long apache config, bungled the whole thing, and had to manually reconstruct it with vi.

At the time, I was a fairly new employee in my first tech job as support for a Linux distributor in the 90s and our build engineer fairly quickly informed me that it was time I learn vi.

Any system with vim installed on it - including a fresh Mac - will have vimtutor, which I highly recommend everyone spend a half hour with. When I taught Linux admin courses, I had everyone run through this at lunch on the first day to help them avoid the professional embarrassment I had. ;)

[Edit: and I second what everyone else says about it not necessarily being a supreme development experience. I use a Mac with, over the years, TextMate, Sublime, Light Table, and now Atom. Some people make a convincing argument that Emacs is a supreme dev environment, but I've never quite picked it up]