Why, oh why, do those nutheads use vi?

vi exists on pretty much every *nix machine out there. The only way this makes sense is if you mean "Windows computer", and even then extremely few of them have a text editor more complex than Wordpad, which has so few commands that yes, anyone can use them if they know ctrl+c/v and a couple of other things.

Example 2: If you press dW it deletes the whole word. which would be the entire entry.key().equals(qk.key) string. dw would delete up to the period. d2f) would delete up to and including the second right paren from where you are. I personally use delete whole word a lot.

Example 3: the di> would delete everything inside the brackets even if they spanned multiple lines. you also can be anywhere inside the bracket and this will still work. This also works with other types of tags. di) would do the same for the current level of nested parens.

Example 4: really only offering one way to do granular navigation vs. many different ways that might work for a particular situation. learning them is not that hard when you take into consideration the mnemonics involved. you need to learn some verbs to be effective: d is delete, v is visual, c is change, w is word, f is find, t is find unTil, p is put, y is yank, a is after, b is back, etc....

Example 5: There are plugins that can do this automatically in vim too. The larger, more interesting thing is the ability to do entire operations on text blocks and I think that is more important than the particular case of automatic indenting.

Example 6: you can also get a plugin that does the highlighting automatically.

The fingers on the home row is pretty awesome. there is a cognitive load to navigation to precisely put your hands on the arrow keys correctly. To get back to normal mode you can either slap the escape key(not as good) or remap escape to jj(or some other not commonly used key sequence) while in insert mode.

The macro system in vim is excellent. everything is text so you can look at the macro commands and edit them if you made a mistake. There are a lot of registers(basically named clipboards that you can use to copy and paste text the " is the default clipboard when you don't actually specify a yank target.)

Your point was that the ide is great and can do all that vim can do, but you only showed that aside from some special case things with snippets and auto indenting. After you have gone past the special case stuff that your ide can do you have to resort to hunting with the arrow keys.

You can be productive in macvim quite quickly as it affords all the fun copy and paste stuff like you are expecting to have at the os level but still have all the vim goodness underneath. at the end of the day go for whatever you feel most productive in but there really is a reason that after you get competent with vim/emacs you are extremely productive.

A few finer points are missing, but overall I can wholeheartedly recommend it. (missing: put last deletes in number registers)

There is also the free VsVim, though.

I am only pointing out that all the author's examples are achievable in most IDEs, you just have to learn. There's nothing special or magical there.

And IDEs have other advantages. The phenomenal amount of code completion VS does for me means I generally only ever have to write a variable, function or method name once and from then on the first 2 characters will pretty much finish it off for me as VS is totally context aware. Not in a file, but in an entire project, in an entire solution made up of many projects. For all the imported libraries. Contrast that to basic auto-completion which can only take you so far.

Snippets make anything boilerplate fairly trivial. Using statements are included at a ctrl-. enter as VS recognises the desired namespace. You can write function calls without them existing, ctrl-. enter, and VS will add them for you in the right file which you can then jump to after you've finished the line by pressing F12 and immediately start on the new function or object method, which already has the correct parameters.

Maybe Vim/Emacs can do all this too, but it's just demonstrating that you can pump out 100s of lines of code in very little time if you really want to. But it's rare for anyone to keep that up because that's not real coding. Maybe if you'd written the program before. Real coding is thinking or physically writing in a notepad for a while, then writing at most probably 20 lines and then pondering and then writing a few more lines, pondering some more, then maybe another big burst, then some more tweaking.

At least that's how it is for me.

For example the answer for VS to this video question of 'can your editor do this' http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pCiVCiku3cM is yes. It can. But how often do you actually do crap like that?

But there's no good videos I can find demonstrating the famed Vim or Emacs power that gushing articles like this profess which I've been able to find. And almost every single time with the examples these articles provide I find myself thinking 'but I can do that in the same number of key presses in VS'. Often even less key presses.

This time I thought I'd demonstrate exactly how.