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Ask HN: Is it worth learning Vim in 2026?

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Re: Ask HN: Is it worth learning Vim in 2026?

#31

Post by dualogy »

apothegm wrote: post #22

Do you already do any work over SSH? What do you do if you need to edit any files in that context? Learning the essentials of vim was the sort of skill that for me took about 10 min per day over a couple months and has come in handy almost every day since then. Can you get by without it? I guess, if you do absolutely everything via a GUI. Or delegate all CLI work to LLMs without ever questioning or second guessing th…

Aficionados of modal editing often insinuate that one would require mouse use in non-modal editing. Yet I have always fully keyboard-operated my non-modal editors, whether VSCode in the last 9 years or previously, Sublime and others, all the way back to Turbo Pascal in the late 90s. I don't ever use the mouse in them, whether I'm inside a text buffer or in the Command Palette (or in menus for the pre-Sublime editors back when). For example, F1 is bound to show "hover" doc tips over the symbol that the caret is in. A couple function keys and ctrl/alt/shift-plus-some-mnemonic letter are soo swiftly and easily muscle-memoried, I never felt any need for mousing, or for "modes" and typing just to switch from one to another.

I'm sure once one is used to modal editing, one can be speedy with it. So can I, entirely without modal yet without mousing =)

Re: Ask HN: Is it worth learning Vim in 2026?

#32

Post by apothegm »

dualogy wrote: post #31
apothegm wrote: post #22

Do you already do any work over SSH? What do you do if you need to edit any files in that context? Learning the essentials of vim was the sort of skill that for me took about 10 min per day over a couple months and has come in handy almost every day since then. Can you get by without it? I guess, if you do absolutely everything via a GUI. Or delegate all CLI work to LLMs without ever questioning or second guessing th…

Aficionados of modal editing often insinuate that one would require mouse use in non-modal editing. Yet I have always fully keyboard-operated my non-modal editors, whether VSCode in the last 9 years or previously, Sublime and others, all the way back to Turbo Pascal in the late 90s. I don't ever use the mouse in them, whether I'm inside a text buffer or in the Command Palette (or in menus for the pre-Sublime editors…

I also use VSCode and derivatives. Also mostly without mousing. But I don’t HAVE to, because I know how to use CLI tooling to not only edit files as needed but also handle things like version control — which I’ve noticed a disappointing percentage of my colleagues, even those with a decade in the field, are mystified by. I haven’t touched VSCode’s git integrations, but the astonishment at being introduced to CLI rebasing — followed by interactive rebasing — was eye-opening.

Re: Ask HN: Is it worth learning Vim in 2026?

#33

Post by Gooblebrai »

bgar wrote: post #29

Pretty much every engineer needs to use Vim/vi when logged into any server, so from that point of view, this shouldn’t even be a question. I don’t think knowing how to use a modal editor in 2026 is a flex anymore, it’s just standard. But if you’re planning to commit to modal editing as a lifestyle, you should be using Helix, not Neovim.

Why Helix and not Neovim?

Re: Ask HN: Is it worth learning Vim in 2026?

#34

Post by bgar »

Gooblebrai wrote: post #33
bgar wrote: post #29

Pretty much every engineer needs to use Vim/vi when logged into any server, so from that point of view, this shouldn’t even be a question. I don’t think knowing how to use a modal editor in 2026 is a flex anymore, it’s just standard. But if you’re planning to commit to modal editing as a lifestyle, you should be using Helix, not Neovim.

Why Helix and not Neovim?

It’s one of those tools that’s well designed and you don’t need a thousand line configuration file to be productive. The modal editing style is also an improvement over vim/neovim because you do selection -> action rather than action -> selection. Lastly, it’s written in Rust, which is not a plus purely because of that but because it’s a lot easier to contribute code changes to or tweak a modern Rust codebase.

Re: Ask HN: Is it worth learning Vim in 2026?

#36

Post by xp84 »

grugdev42 wrote: post #13

It's a handy skill to have if you interact with Linux machines. You'll need to edit files sometimes, and Vim (or Vi) is usually present. I don't think I've seen an install without it. The basics (opening files, writing, and closing) can be learnt in an hour. It's enough to make simple changes to .conf files.

Using vim to do this seems silly. Nano is also nearly always present, and doing those “basic” things is 10x more straightforward in an editor that isn’t modal and just gets out of your way.

I’ve often in my career witnessed engineers who’ve cargo culted the need for vim, but they only know how to hit ESC !wq or whatever, and one errant keystroke puts them in modal hell of some sort that, often requiring they just close the terminal and try again.

I don’t begrudge those who want to become power-VIM-users, though it seems wildly awkward to me, to each their own. But if you just want to use it to do the “basics” on ssh sessions, using nano makes more sense. PGUP and PGDN and Home and End and arrows work just fine to navigate, and the bindings for most things are printed right on the screen (except Ctrl-S to save… for some reason, but it works).

Re: Ask HN: Is it worth learning Vim in 2026?

#37

Post by dualogy »

apothegm wrote: post #32
dualogy wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aficionados of modal editing often insinuate that one would require mouse use in non-modal editing. Yet I have always fully keyboard-operated my non-modal editors, whether VSCode in the last 9 years or previously, Sublime and others, all the way back to Turbo Pascal in the late 90s. I don't ever use the mouse in them, whether I'm inside a text buffer or in the Command Palette (or in menus for the pre-Sublime editors…

I also use VSCode and derivatives. Also mostly without mousing. But I don’t HAVE to, because I know how to use CLI tooling to not only edit files as needed but also handle things like version control — which I’ve noticed a disappointing percentage of my colleagues, even those with a decade in the field, are mystified by. I haven’t touched VSCode’s git integrations, but the astonishment at being introduced to CLI reba…

Well for git stuff or any CLI stuff, I just key-chord into the integrated terminal (or alt-tab into my terminal emulator, depending on task) and do the git commands, having the whole "git integration" thing disabled in `settings.json` in the first place..

Re: Ask HN: Is it worth learning Vim in 2026?

#38

Post by lenkite »

bgar wrote: post #34
Gooblebrai wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why Helix and not Neovim?

It’s one of those tools that’s well designed and you don’t need a thousand line configuration file to be productive. The modal editing style is also an improvement over vim/neovim because you do selection -> action rather than action -> selection. Lastly, it’s written in Rust, which is not a plus purely because of that but because it’s a lot easier to contribute code changes to or tweak a modern Rust codebase.

Hard disagree. It is not an improvement - it is a deterioration.

Repeat (dot command .) is far more powerful and general thanks to operator->action.

Much better composability with counts, registers, marks and operators with operator->action

Operator Pending mode has some unique advantages for swipe edits that are painful in a select first paradigm. Ex: `d/foo`. No fast equivalent in Helix.

Also, if you really want, you can select in VIM and do your job too. Use visual mode with `v`.

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