Live data from Hacker News

The Loneliness of the Mid-Level Vimmer

johnwhiles.com

1–10 of 61 posts

Re: The Loneliness of the Mid-Level Vimmer

#2
> excepting those poor, sad professionals who have to write languages that can only be written with a special, hyper-bloated text editor [1].

> 1. I'm talking about C# and Java

I write Java in vim, and it's pretty usable. Coc.nvim and coc-java fix code completion. There are also plugins to make running tests, and the debugger usable too. I can't stand the start-up time of IntelliJ!

Re: The Loneliness of the Mid-Level Vimmer

#4
post #2

> excepting those poor, sad professionals who have to write languages that can only be written with a special, hyper-bloated text editor [1]. > 1. I'm talking about C# and Java I write Java in vim, and it's pretty usable. Coc.nvim and coc-java fix code completion. There are also plugins to make running tests, and the debugger usable too. I can't stand the start-up time of IntelliJ!

I'm happy you mentioned that! I didn't know one could use Java in vim. If I'm using Java again this is the way I'm gonna go. I'm not a great vimmer, but I survive.

Wanna be survivable in vim? I know of _the course_ that teaches you enough vim to be survivable in just a few hours! You think I'm selling snake oil? Nay!

On Mac/Linux type: vimtutor

Do all the lessons

Then a month later do all of them again

A few months later do them again

You're now survivable in vim and it only took you a few hours ;-)

Re: The Loneliness of the Mid-Level Vimmer

#5
I did 100% pair programming with a team that didn't standardize on editors or keyboards. We solved the issue in the article by just never using each other's machines. It was very rare that the navigator would want to type something but if they did, it was usually just a line or so, so we would "strong" pair, ie, tell the other person exactly what to type. If we wanted to switch the driver/navigator role, we would just make a WIP commit, force-push, then pull and `git reset head^`. It was only ever two people working on a branch at a time, so the force pushes weren't scary. We did this without issue for three years.

Re: The Loneliness of the Mid-Level Vimmer

#7

Long time on and off vim user. Stopped reading after the first obnoxious paragraph. Maybe mid-level vim users are lonely because they’re such jerks.

Yeah, you really don't _have_ to be insufferable. I use emacs and evil/vim mode, have done for years, and it's not like I bring it up all the time or whatever, or shame people for using vscode.

It is just a tradeoff, like anything else. Using a niche tool means that those not in the niche are alienated, but those in the niche are drawn to you/familiar.

Any time someone brings it up, I basically say "yeah, I use this tool, but it really is just a tool that I personally choose, and can see how someone would pick another one. Not everyone wants to fuss with their environment all the time to get their job done." etc. I both genuinely believe this and think its a disarming POV.

Really, at this point in my career, I have a massive quantity of legacy knowledge that informs my choices. Since I know emacs lisp, and have already expended the effort to learn and use it, it continues to be worth my while to work in this environment. For someone who doesn't have this legacy knowledge, their value calculations won't work out in the same way.

Re: The Loneliness of the Mid-Level Vimmer

#9

Long time on and off vim user. Stopped reading after the first obnoxious paragraph. Maybe mid-level vim users are lonely because they’re such jerks.

Funnily enough, the author says that "all the people who do use Vim are completely insufferable" in the third paragraph. Maybe the author was trying to demonstrate that.

Re: The Loneliness of the Mid-Level Vimmer

#10
I developed the finger memory for vi when I first encountered it - in 1987! - on a Unix system on which there weren't any other fullscreen editors.

Like with the Perl programming language, I probably understand about 5% of the capabilities of a modern vi implementation. But those are hardcoded into muscle memory for the rest of my life. ddp to swap a couple of lines or :e! to undo your edits and reload is fast when you don't have to think about it, and ditto is moving around with just alphanumeric keys - not having to move the hands to a an arrow pad. Probably vi appeals less to non-touch-typists.

But am I insufferable about it? Nope. I just like it this way. Just fine to drop into an editor of choice if someone else needs to collaborate. And I'm aware that my younger, more mentally elastic colleagues have all developed wizardly knowledge of Visual Studio Code... hmmm, maybe it has vi bindings...

Post reply on HN