I set all 376 Vim options and I'm still a fool

Learning modal editor - vim, nvim, emacs is like skiing or snowboarding. For anyone uninitiated this whole endeavor may seem dumb - you have to spend so much money, time and effort, so you can just descent from a mountain peak to its base on a piece of wood? Absurdly bananas.

Some may even try hitting the greenest, flattest, most beginner-friendly slopes with great confidence, only to find themselves face down in the snow minutes after getting on the lift. They try again. Sometimes, falling for the fourth or fifth time reinforces their belief that it's really is dumb and they just quit at that point.

Some newbie skiers, after a few successful runs, get overly excited and head to the lift for the steeper slope, only to regret their decision. If falling all the way down doesn't make them quit, they may eventually start enjoying it.

At some point, they'd gain so much experience - their movements become smooth and graceful, their speed intimidating. Suddenly, they'd discover an enormous, indescribable feeling of joy. There's so much tacit - emotional, mental and physical enlightenment that is almost impossible to convey to another soul who's never experienced it or rose to that level.

Then there's a spectrum of differences - some still fall all the time yet enjoy it nonetheless, and they enthusiastically discuss with other beginner skiers how awesome they feel. Some, after mastering the most difficult carving techniques, somehow forget their own beginner's journey and become apathetic toward rookies.

So, then why ski [vim] at all? Well, it is truly one of the most efficient, fastest, healthy ways of getting back to the base [dealing with text]. But most importantly it's tremendously fun. Often, in quite indescribable ways. I'm afraid you would never understand the appeal until you do try it. But even then, it's never guaranteed you'd find that thrill; then maybe skiing [vimming] isn't for you. Even though these activities literally for everyone (unless they have physical/mental barriers).

I honestly can't take seriously any programmer who doesn't know the basics of vim - doesn't that suggest they've never used sed, less, or read through man pages? Have they never had to ssh to a remote machine in the terminal? I do though get it, when people say "I tried it and ain't for me". I suppose, it just means they've never hit the spot that inspired them to keep going.

Over time, you may discover one of the biggest truth about computing - the immense (and sadly disregarded) value of plain text¹. Code is nothing but structured text. The cardinal job of a programmer is text manipulation.

I'm reading this thread in my editor. Why? Because I'm dealing with text - browsers are great for presentation of text, not so nice for manipulating it. What kind of manipulations? Well, I can find, sort, group, narrow, collapse/expand, translate, extract summaries for paragraphs, find all the URLs (including matching a pattern), etc. Good luck doing all that in the browser - even with the extensions.

Most developers don't even get annoyed by seemingly small things. Like how often do you need to bring the url of a given browser tab into your editor? Simplest thing, yet do it dozens of times a day and it gets vexing. For me - it takes milliseconds and a keypress - it even extracts the URL description and converts the link to markdown (if needed).

Or another example - whenever someone's screen sharing, or I'm watching a video and they show a piece of text (let's just for consistency say a url). How would you normally extract it? e.g, for your notes. For me - it takes selecting a region of screen and a keypress - my editor calls a CLI OCRing tool and voila. I don't really care that the source isn't "technically speaking" text - if I can read it, then computer for sure can "read" it too, am I right? That's text manipulation.

There may be dozens (if not hundreds) of such examples (including coding-related) in my workflow that work on top of the idea of manipulating plain text.

Once you grok the cerebral virtue of the idea of having complete and total control over text, you may find that modal editors - nvim/emacs/etc. - are the best instruments to achieve that control.

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¹https://graydon2.dreamwidth.org/193447.html