Vim: Takeaways from One Year of Typing • Hacker News Board

Re: Vim: Takeaways from One Year of Typing

#11

Post by Karunamon » Mon, Aug 03, 2015, 3:55 PM UTC

imakesnowflakes wrote: post #7

One year? That is like "Takeaways from riding a Superbike in first gear, for one minute - Verdict. Super bikes are way overhyped!"

So let's assume that, by using vim as the primary editor as a coder, the author used it roughly 8 hours a day for 5 days a week. That's 1,920 hours.

I daresay it's impossible for someone to not use a tool, however complicated, for nearly 2000 hours and not become quite familiar with its operation.

This is also 1/5th of the (disputed) "magic number" of 10,000 hours to master a skill.

Re: Vim: Takeaways from One Year of Typing

#12

Post by DarkTree » Mon, Aug 03, 2015, 3:57 PM UTC

The thing about Vim is that I cannot imagine creating it and thinking, "This will be much faster and easier than a mouse eventually". But, I also wouldn't think that I could learn how to type fast without looking at the keys if I just stumbled across a keyboard, but both are undoubtedly true. Like anything physical, it requires practice and muscle memory. Would you rather go back to looking at every single key to type? That's how vim users feel about regular text editors. Try it out.

Re: Vim: Takeaways from One Year of Typing

#13

Post by andresmanz » Mon, Aug 03, 2015, 4:00 PM UTC

viebel wrote: post #9

The great advantage of vim is that it forces you to use only the keyboard. No mouse at all! Mouse is slow. Keyboard is fast (once you get used to it).

Exactly. Recently, I switched to i3[0] and Vimium[1] and it's just wonderful. Now I'm way faster than before and hardly ever use the mouse.

[0] https://i3wm.org

[1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/vimium/dbepggeogba...

Re: Vim: Takeaways from One Year of Typing

#14

Post by FreeFull » Mon, Aug 03, 2015, 4:02 PM UTC

farresito wrote: post #3

vim overhyped as an editor? It might be overhyped as a programming tool (you won't write 2x the same amount of lines in a day; you will not be 5x more productive), but as an editor, it deserves every single bit of hype that it has. No other editor stands next to vim. A lot of people dislike editors. It's fine. There are a million tools out there that help people become more productive programmers. You might enjoy Int…

I've switched from vim to kakoune some time ago. vim does have the advantage of a bigger ecosystem, but I do believe it is possible to have an editor better than it.

Re: Vim: Takeaways from One Year of Typing

#15

Post by mixedmath » Mon, Aug 03, 2015, 4:02 PM UTC

For what it's worth, the author (sankho) mentions that he uses other editors for project-wide find and replace. This can be done in vim too (although I do not --- I'll return to this). You can check out the typically great vimcasts post on this: http://vimcasts.org/episodes/project-wide-find-and-replace/

For whatever reason, I find it easier to use commandline tools to do large search and replaces. I do embrace the vim-as-text-editor within the larger Linux-program-composability philosophy, but I understand that not everyone else does. So I use ack and perl, as mentioned in this StackOverflow post: http://stackoverflow.com/a/8744108/1141805

(Actually, sometimes I distinctly do things the wrong way. I open a scratch buffer, `:r! ls` to get my file names, restrict to those that I want, create a macro that does what I want on the file under the cursor, and then repeat the macro. I am not proud.)

Re: Vim: Takeaways from One Year of Typing

#16

Post by engi_nerd » Mon, Aug 03, 2015, 4:03 PM UTC

sankho wrote: post #5

test_userz_001 wrote: post #2

seriously? no one gives a flying fuck you learned how to use a text editor that has been around since 1979. how the hell does this qualify as front page news?

I decided to start blogging again (first post) and I put it on hacker news, and other people upvoted it. So to be accurate, YOU don't give a flying fuck, anonymous account guy. But, thanks for your opinion and in the future hopefully I'll write something that you like as well.

Your post is relevant and interesting. Don't let that person discourage you.

Re: Vim: Takeaways from One Year of Typing

#17

Post by mixedmath » Mon, Aug 03, 2015, 4:06 PM UTC

JD557 wrote: post #10

> Relax! No other text editor has as many developers working on plugins than VIM. What about emacs?

I thought this too when I read the article. Then it occurred to me that I don't have any idea how many developers work on plugins for either. Looking naively at github files by type is unreliable, since so many people do things like keep their .vimrc and .vim files on github which artificially inflates the number of .vimL repositories.

What I do know is that if there's something I want done, I suspect there is a plugin that does it. So at least morally, there are sufficiently developers for both emacs and vim (in my experience).

Re: Vim: Takeaways from One Year of Typing

#18

Post by ethanbond » Mon, Aug 03, 2015, 4:06 PM UTC

DarkTree wrote: post #12

The thing about Vim is that I cannot imagine creating it and thinking, "This will be much faster and easier than a mouse eventually". But, I also wouldn't think that I could learn how to type fast without looking at the keys if I just stumbled across a keyboard, but both are undoubtedly true. Like anything physical, it requires practice and muscle memory. Would you rather go back to looking at every single key to typ…

Doesn't vim (or similar schemas) predate the mouse?

Re: Vim: Takeaways from One Year of Typing

#19

Post by mixedmath » Mon, Aug 03, 2015, 4:07 PM UTC

andresmanz wrote: post #13

viebel wrote: post #9

The great advantage of vim is that it forces you to use only the keyboard. No mouse at all! Mouse is slow. Keyboard is fast (once you get used to it).

Exactly. Recently, I switched to i3[0] and Vimium[1] and it's just wonderful. Now I'm way faster than before and hardly ever use the mouse. [0] https://i3wm.org [1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/vimium/dbepggeogba...

As a slight aside, how did you choose i3 over the other tiling window managers?

I chose xmonad at one time, but it was more or less by chance --- someone else used it that I knew, and so I tried it. But I haven't actually compared any.

Re: Vim: Takeaways from One Year of Typing

#20

Post by farhaven » Mon, Aug 03, 2015, 4:07 PM UTC

viebel wrote: post #9

The great advantage of vim is that it forces you to use only the keyboard. No mouse at all! Mouse is slow. Keyboard is fast (once you get used to it).

It can be used with the mouse though, through `:set mouse=a`. I sometimes use it for quick jumping, because yeah, `45G6w` will also get me where I want to be but if the cursor happens to be near where I want to end up, clicking is just easier.