Vim users: stop using hjkl

> I'm glad you like your modern editors (there's lots there to love), but they are not inherently better than vim just because they're non-modal.

Yes, in point of fact, they are better than vi/vim because they are non-modal. When all is said and done, dropping vi's modes makes an editor better and more efficient.

> Like delete the next four words? How do I do that in a modern editor with a single keystroke?

You can't delete four words with a single keystroke. You can delete [N] words, but only after switching modes and choosing the desired number.

Source: http://www.lagmonster.org/docs/vi2.html#delete

Quote: "ndw : Deletes the next n words starting with current"

The above assumes you're already switched to the required mode, so a minimum of four keystrokes if the number [N] is a single digit. Then, to continue typing, you have to switch back to the mode you started from. Total five keystrokes minimum.

> In the end, two things sealed the deal for VIM for me. 1) it's on every remote server I have to access, and 2) I've put the time into it, so I'm quite efficient in it.

This is circular reasoning. The reason vi or vim is out there on all those servers is because of the number of people who haven't learned anything else.

I also switched to colemak but things are still good in vim. You got your n key under your right index finger, and I use searching for long range jumps. Vim was designed for qwerty not colemak, so you do have to compensate in some areas but I feel that just the efficiency colemak provides to typing english makes up for it.

I spent a good while reading your replys and one of the things you keep saying is cheat sheet. Now I dont use a cheat sheet because my fingers have become accustomed to the way vim works. The other thing you are saying a lot is that it takes time to switch modes. It does not. For most people you have to move your fingers off of the home key row to click delete or control so it is easier to just use the keys closer saving lots of time. The other thing you said is that modal editing has become obsolete which is simply not true because almost every IDE comes with a VI(M) mode and is not restricted to the non modal form. Also you say that hjkl are inefficient you have to move your entire hand to use the arrow keys but with hjkl you just have to keep it in the same place.

Of course, I do understand what you are saying. Now, also consider that your experience might not be common.

I am no stranger to 16 hour coding marathons. In fact, about 15 years ago I launched a company out of my garage. For the first nine months or so I nearly locked myself in the garage for 16 to 18 hours a day coding. The work required a combination of Verilog for the FPGA, C for the embedded processor and Visual C++ for Windows. Three different editor/IDE's: Xilinx ISE, Keil uVision and MS Visual Studio. Over the nearly nine months of intense 12+ hours of straight solid coding in that environment I could not give you one example of situation where having to reach for the "END" key, the mouse, the arrow keys or "Ctrl-F5" or whatever bothered me in any way imaginable. The IDE's and the text editors, for the most part, were relegated to background noise.

The things that slowed me down, caused grief and broke my short or long term concentration and my ability to maintain state have never, in my thirty years of programming, had anything whatsoever to do with the editor and the keystrokes I might have to use running it.

Anecdotally I will make a blanket statement and say that this is exactly the case for the vast majority of programmers. No, I don't have data other than to say that I have worked with lots of people over my career. Across platforms, languages, tool chains and editors I have never heard anyone complain about loosing state or concentration due to the editor. Until I started reading HN.

Is there a type of personality, a type of programmer that can loose state from something as insignificant to some of us as reaching for the mouse or the arrow keys constantly? Maybe, I don't know. I have yet to meet someone like that in person. If the answer is "yes", I'll have to simply take your word for it. I don't know.

It might be also important to consider for a moment that those who have NOT forced themselves to use vi/vim are perfectly comfortable with the keystrokes and commands typical modern editors use.

If you stick to Windows and even Linux GUI the vast majority of the navigational commands are the same that you might find in MS Word, Excel, Outlook and your web browser. The "Ctrl-C", "Ctrl-V", "Ctrl-X", "Shift-[down arrow]", "Shift-[end]", "[home]", "[end]", "Ctrl-[left arrow]", "Ctrl-F", "Ctrl-H", "Ctrl-S", "F3", "Shift-F3", mouse scrolling modes and other commands are part and parcel of this "muscle memory" a lot of vim proponents mention.

In other words, nobody thinks "oh crap, I have to reach for Ctrl-F again", it just happens. And, it happens with great uniformity across platforms, applications and tools. Various tools introduce a few (or a lot) of specialize commands, like "Ctrl-F5" for "compile and go" on an IDE, "Ctrl-B" to "build" or "F12" to launch your site on a browser on something like Dreamweaver. These are not and have not been problems for anyone with whom I have ever worked.

Here's what I find interesting. I was using real terminals and 300 to 9600 BAUD teletypes over real leased lines talking to mainframes towards the very tail of that era in the 80's. I even had a little bit of experience using Tektronix storage tube terminals (one of the few ways you could render APL characters at the time). All of these had crippled keyboards with half the keys we have today. Editors at the time were weird and had shit user interfaced due to the limitations of the hardware. Every single one was different. Either you had modal editors or editors with weird Ctrl-- keystrokes. When CPM and S100 computers came along you could get WordStar and eight inch floppies. Ctrl-K-X brother! I even owned a real DEC VT-100 terminal.

I think I can safely say that those of us who came up that route were GLAD to get rid of these shitty UI's and crappy contorted-command editors that were a pain in the ass to use and learn. As keyboards and peripherals evolved and we got things like "standard" keyboard with expanded key sets (Thanks, mostly to IBM and the PC revolution) things began to standardize around the newly available keyboards. No programmer in their right mind would write a text editor at the time and IGNORE all those extra keys. The only way you could even consider writing something like vi is if you didn't have any option but to write vi due to hardware limitations.

And so, what I find very interesting is that here we are, so many years later with better hardware, software, multi-monitor GUI's and computers with gigabytes of memory and direct DVI connections to the monitors and we have a class of programmers that insists that --to be effective and to be considered a professional programmer-- you have to use a tool who's only reason for being designed as it was thirty years ago is that the writer had a keyboard with half the keys, over a 300 BAUD modem, a crippled terminal, limited memory, no graphics, 80 x 25 characters and no screen buffers. Please understand how someone like me could see this as being nothing less than ridiculous. Even vi's author relates the story of having gone down the path of adding windows to vi but loosing the code in a crash and never going back to re-creating it (the implication being that vi was already on a path to become a totally different product).

Anyhow, at some level, of course, to each his/her own. My problem is with vim zealots who in places like HN tend to give newbies the idea that there are magical qualities attached to adopting the "cult of vim". From my perspective nothing could be farther from the truth. And, as I have stated, from a business perspective, there are far more important and significant levers and knobs in a business to focus on than which editor you are using.

I don't know what you are discussing. I am discussing the absolute fact that focusing on any real or imaginary gains that could be had by insisting on using any editor at all is ridiculous in the context of where the real problems are in developing software products.