Tinkering is a way to acquire good taste

Most of the things I do with Neovim I could probably also do with VS Code (not sure about autocommands and macros though, I haven't used Code in years). I don't use a mouse much, I have a very keyboard-centric workflow. I was a Code user for years, but did most everything else in the terminal. I figured I would give it a try and I ended up just liking it. I like to tinker. I like to tweak my configuration. I like how I can set autocommands for things, pipe text into Vim and manipulate it, or record a quick macro for some repetitive task. I like that there are "Vim keymap" plugins for things like Firefox, so learning basic Vim keys has helped me outside of Vim. I like that I keep discovering new things Vim can do (and then promptly forgetting them most of the time, but still). I also like to spend 2 hours writing something to automate something that saves me two seconds.

It's absolutely not for everyone, though it looks like some of the pre-built configs (NvChad, LaZyVim, etc.) are decent enough of the box now that you don't need to go on the endless-customization journey if you don't want to. To me though, that's the appeal: tinkering, tweaking, refining. Generally when people ask if they should use Vim, I tell them probably not but try it for a few weeks and see if it clicks in your brain. I had a great VSCode setup, everything worked great, I was productive, but something about Vim just made more sense to me once I got over the hump of modes and all the keymaps you need to turn into muscle memory.

Edit: I also like that I can do abominations like:

("def" @keyword (#set! conceal "ƒ"))

("if" @keyword (#set! conceal "?"))

("unless" @keyword (#set! conceal "¿"))

("else" @keyword (#set! conceal "∶"))

("elsif" @keyword (#set! conceal "⁇"))

("case" @keyword (#set! conceal "⟨?"))

("when" @keyword (#set! conceal "→"))

("begin" @keyword (#set! conceal "⌊"))

to make Ruby look absolutely insane. Is it useful? No. Do people hate it when I share my screen? Yes.

There must have been something that drove him to coffee expert level.

For me, I get dissatisfied and then reach for something nicer and nicer until I hit a limit. I'm just very skeptical he'd still love cheap instant coffee. He was climbing a sort of dopamine ladder. Then he ran out of rungs to climb. Now he has to move to a new thing. Life is almost nothing but impermanence and dissatisfaction. Its a little odd to think you could somehow beat the system. The person who finishes the dopamine ladder would never have been happy staying at the most bottom rung, which was disintegrating for them hence pushing them along to the highest rung. Short of becoming a very serious practitioner in things like meditation and other monastic-type things to fight these urges, this is just a really tough thing to get away from.

Now job, new book, new video game, new movie, new friend, etc. We're almost always doing this in some way.

Maybe those examples are things you don't have good discernment with. For me, I can instantly tell when I have quality headphone speakers. I can hear a fuller range of music than cheap ones. Its almost always obvious and cheap ones are almost always annoying. I have yet to go deeper into audiophone territory and I might never, but I have affordable headphones with really nice speakers inside and I wont go any less quality than this. So maybe for you, you can't tell or don't value it, but there are probably other things you do focus on.

Some of the worse engineers I've ever interacted with had too strong of a "taste" for what they felt were right and were completely unable or unwilling to work outside of that. Developing a superiority complex because you think you have "taste" is a great way to torpedo your team.

Coding for others is not art, it does not have much meaning in of itself. Your users won't marvel at your choice of language or your usage of design patterns - they care about how the end product looks and works.

In a world like that where you have to work in a team, why you ever wear your inflexibility as a badge of pride? The ones who are the most useful are the ones who can code any way, any how, and can plugin anywhere - "taste" be damned. If you want to be a net positive on the teams you work on, stop thinking it's about you, because it's not.

Having a distinctive style is also going to become increasingly rare in the age of LLMs. I see it with people at work already. They have no style. They learn very little. They get something to work but have no ability to discern whether it is a “good way” of doing it or simply “a way” of doing it. They have little interest in how or why things are built. I get the sense that they have little or no enjoyment or interest in deep understanding.

As a concrete example I just reviewed a PR for a feature that someone wanted to add to a flask app. It had a ton of terraform code, an aws api gateway, a lambda, etc. then on the flask app frontend they added a page with a call to this new API. I asked why they didn’t just add a route to the flask app. Blank stare response.

I'll second the enjoyable parts of Neovim shared above, and add a few more of my own: - vi uses most of the same default keybindings, which is available across most distros (in busybox). Meaning I can use the same keybindings in a docker container, appliance server, etc. - With the conform[1] plugin, I can add any CLI code/text formatters that might not be available as a vscode extension. As long as it takes a file/stdin and outputs a file/stdout.

[1] https://github.com/stevearc/conform.nvim