Programming is a unique field: if you're doing it right, it should never be dull. Frustrating? Draining? Rage-inducing? Sometimes. But not mind-numbing. Why? Because we can build our own tools. If we find ourselves doing repetitive work, we can build a tool to automate that work. This automation is itself likely at least somewhat interesting. What isn't repetitive and that can't be automated should be interesting as…
This is why no matter how much sense it makes to use something like vim or emacs as your primary development editor, I could never justify the amount of time it would take me to actually be totally comfortable and start seeing benefits (beyond just using it for small quick edits at the command line). Typing speed is never the bottleneck. You could double most developers' typing speed when they code and it'd probably…
Re: Typing Practice for Programmers
#171Wha, what? vim and emacs aren't about typing speed, they're about action speed. 99% of the reason I love using vim is because I can do exactly what I can do with a combination of mouse and keyboard actions, but without leaving the keyboard. And many IDEs have, for example, vim extensions so you can get the best of vim without manually building up your vim environment and extensions (although learning e.g. PyCharm is no different than learning and building my own vim env -- I use both).