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Helping a Million Developers Exit Vim

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Re: Helping a Million Developers Exit Vim

#451

Post by cryptoz »

kazinator wrote: post #352
cryptoz wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Me too. I once helped organize talks at my school, and helped with bringing Richard Stallman to give a talk one time. I was a vim user, but I did a little bit of prep and refreshed my emacs memory etc. So we're setting up the room for the talk, and we're talking a bit, and some people start to arrive. He asks one if they've ever used emacs, she says no, so I said, "we should start an emacs tutorial here, we can teach…

Hmm, it might have just been because "things like C-x C-c and stuff" sounds kind of dumb, not because it refers to quitting Emacs. Like imagine: B. Kernighan: have you ever used Unix? Student: No. You: Hey, how about we start a Unix tutorial here; we can learn all about dollar-sign-1, and stuff. B. Kernighan : * roll eyes * :)

Surely that is possible too! Either way, it was not my proudest moment.

Re: Helping a Million Developers Exit Vim

#454

Post by sirfz »

icc97 wrote: post #198
sirfz wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That looks more like emacs behavior though, vim rarely (never?) prompts the user for anything. You enter a command, you get a reaction (either an action like quits vim, or a message indicating something happened) -- which I personally prefer much more than getting annoying prompts.

You get a prompt if you try to exit and you haven't written the buffer to file

Actually you get a prompt when you try to save a file that has been modified in a different session or when you switch to a similarly modified buffer. But those are pretty reasonable and don't happen that often.

Re: Helping a Million Developers Exit Vim

#455

Post by thomastjeffery »

marssaxman wrote: post #450
thomastjeffery wrote: post #448

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A lot of the vim "religion" centers around keeping your hands on the keyboard, not using the mouse, carpal tunnel and speed. That's a nice side effect, but it's not why vim is "better". "Normal mode" in vim ties composeable​ functions each to a separate key. The "." key repeats the most recent function. You can record a string of keystrokes to a macro, and even edit it as plain text. Vim is fantastic for editing te…

Editing text is maybe 9% of what I do. Most of my work consists of reading text, thinking about it, running tests, reading the results of those tests, thinking about what I've read, discussing what I've been thinking about with coworkers, reading more text, and thinking some more. It has been this way for most of my career. This is what I see most of my coworkers doing, too. Editing text more efficiently simply would…

Personally, I don't care about "efficiency". I care about usability. Having a tool designed to edit text let's me focus on everything else. Sure, there is a learning curve, but you don't need to be an expert to find the tool useful.

Re: Helping a Million Developers Exit Vim

#456

Post by rebootthesystem »

marssaxman wrote: post #450
thomastjeffery wrote: post #448

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A lot of the vim "religion" centers around keeping your hands on the keyboard, not using the mouse, carpal tunnel and speed. That's a nice side effect, but it's not why vim is "better". "Normal mode" in vim ties composeable​ functions each to a separate key. The "." key repeats the most recent function. You can record a string of keystrokes to a macro, and even edit it as plain text. Vim is fantastic for editing te…

Editing text is maybe 9% of what I do. Most of my work consists of reading text, thinking about it, running tests, reading the results of those tests, thinking about what I've read, discussing what I've been thinking about with coworkers, reading more text, and thinking some more. It has been this way for most of my career. This is what I see most of my coworkers doing, too. Editing text more efficiently simply would…

That is precisely my point. To devote any effort at all optimizing this is to go after the wrong optimization target. Just buy or use a good IDE that helps you with tasks beyond text entry and move on. There is no value to be gained doing anything else.

Re: Helping a Million Developers Exit Vim

#457

Post by rebootthesystem »

thomastjeffery wrote: post #455
marssaxman wrote: post #450

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Editing text is maybe 9% of what I do. Most of my work consists of reading text, thinking about it, running tests, reading the results of those tests, thinking about what I've read, discussing what I've been thinking about with coworkers, reading more text, and thinking some more. It has been this way for most of my career. This is what I see most of my coworkers doing, too. Editing text more efficiently simply would…

Personally, I don't care about "efficiency". I care about usability. Having a tool designed to edit text let's me focus on everything else. Sure, there is a learning curve, but you don't need to be an expert to find the tool useful.

vi wasn't designed to efficiently edit text. It was designed to deal with shitty keyboards of the time. And now it is a cult.

I challenge anyone to prove that a non-trivial project, say, a year of work for a team of five developers, would get done any faster, better and with less bugs because of the single act of adopting vim vs. a top grade IDE.

Re: Helping a Million Developers Exit Vim

#458

Post by rebootthesystem »

wtetzner wrote: post #433
rebootthesystem wrote: post #404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In all of the discussions on HN about vi/m this is probably the most intelligent question I've received after posting my opinion. I've been coding for 16 hours straight and have at least another four in front of me (have to deliver tomorrow AM) so I don't have a ton of time to answer this. I'll use today as my example of how irrelevant (and counterproductive) vi/m can be. I'm working on a large Django project and cra…

> It's silly, really. Take the entirety of a project and multiply typing time by, I don't know, 1.25. It would still be insignificant when compared to the overall project time. I mostly agree with you, but I think there is value in fast text editing for software development. The advantage of being able to edit code quickly is that typing doesn't interrupt your train of thought as much.

If someone's train of thought is interrupted by the difference in code entry time between vim and a good IDE or code editor --which is milliseconds-- they have a real problem requiring medical attention.

Forget IDE's for a moment. Look at an editor like Atom. It's fantastic. You type "for" and it expands the for loop automatically for you and it understands languages. And, more importantly, you have to spend exactly zero minutes configuring that behavior.

Let professionals make great IDE's and tools. Focus on the real job in software development, which is not being a text entry machine.

Re: Helping a Million Developers Exit Vim

#459

Post by rebootthesystem »

alexvoda wrote: post #431
rebootthesystem wrote: post #404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In all of the discussions on HN about vi/m this is probably the most intelligent question I've received after posting my opinion. I've been coding for 16 hours straight and have at least another four in front of me (have to deliver tomorrow AM) so I don't have a ton of time to answer this. I'll use today as my example of how irrelevant (and counterproductive) vi/m can be. I'm working on a large Django project and cra…

Since you mentioned using a trackball due to carpal tunnel when using a mouse I thought I should share my setup. I don't really suffer from these issues (with the exception of scrolling) but it pays to prevent them. I only use a mouse when I use many monitors (3+) and the desktop surface area is significant. In all other cases I prefer to use a very customized touchpad setup. I use a business laptop because it has bu…

This is very interesting. Since the trackball worked well for me going back nearly twenty years I stopped looking for other solutions. I coded for 20 hours yesterday and I'm perfectly fine today.

Re: Helping a Million Developers Exit Vim

#460

Post by rebootthesystem »

bobwaycott wrote: post #413
rebootthesystem wrote: post #404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In all of the discussions on HN about vi/m this is probably the most intelligent question I've received after posting my opinion. I've been coding for 16 hours straight and have at least another four in front of me (have to deliver tomorrow AM) so I don't have a ton of time to answer this. I'll use today as my example of how irrelevant (and counterproductive) vi/m can be. I'm working on a large Django project and cra…

Everyone always makes fun of my thumb-operated trackball.

It's kind of funny watching people who've never used one try to adjust to it. My kids grew up with them and wouldn't use anything else. They have them on their laptops too. I hate laptop touch pads, the single worst UI ever put on computers.
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