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The Loneliness of the Mid-Level Vimmer

johnwhiles.com

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Re: The Loneliness of the Mid-Level Vimmer

#21

Post by sodapopcan »

yoyohello13 wrote: post #17
clircle wrote: post #11

I think vim users highly overestimate their productivity and just like the way using hotkeys feels.

I would classify myself as a vim power user and I agree with this take. I think I'm probably equally as productive as a person that really knows their editor of choice. The productivity benefits mostly just come from knowing what things your editor is capable of. However, I subjectively feel a twinge of frustration whenever I need to take my hands off the keyboard to reach for a mouse. So using vim makes a massive im…

Ya, any carpal tunnel-type problems I was experiencing went away when I became proficient at Vim. I've never thought much about the productivity gains... I'm generally slow anyway, ha. But not having to move my hands away from the homerow much or reach for the mouse ever is important, and beneficial, to me.

Re: The Loneliness of the Mid-Level Vimmer

#23

Post by smabie »

clircle wrote: post #11

I think vim users highly overestimate their productivity and just like the way using hotkeys feels.

This is a realization I had after finally ditching Emacs / keyboard only life.

Keybindings seem to engage your brain in a different way and make the activity more fun, but I don't think it's actually any more productive.

Re: The Loneliness of the Mid-Level Vimmer

#24

Post by Cthulhu_ »

clircle wrote: post #11

I think vim users highly overestimate their productivity and just like the way using hotkeys feels.

I suspect this is the case, but have no hard evidence. I can see how being proficient at vim makes it feel gamified though - a clever series of commands resulting in a code change giving people that hit of dopamine.

Re: The Loneliness of the Mid-Level Vimmer

#26

Post by mkehrt »

clircle wrote: post #11

I think vim users highly overestimate their productivity and just like the way using hotkeys feels.

As someone who is a midelevel vimmer and has been using it for 20 years, that's probably true. But the muscle memory is there, and it's standard everywhere. I do get a lot of leverage out of macros and text objects, features which I'm sure have equivalents in IDEs and other editors, but I know how to use them in vim.

Re: The Loneliness of the Mid-Level Vimmer

#27

Post by PartiallyTyped »

sodapopcan wrote: post #5

I did 100% pair programming with a team that didn't standardize on editors or keyboards. We solved the issue in the article by just never using each other's machines. It was very rare that the navigator would want to type something but if they did, it was usually just a line or so, so we would "strong" pair, ie, tell the other person exactly what to type. If we wanted to switch the driver/navigator role, we would jus…

Unfortunately my employer doesn't allow force-pushing :(

Instead we resort to using jetbrains stuff.

Re: The Loneliness of the Mid-Level Vimmer

#28

Post by Barrin92 »

>But there is a downside to Vimming. It's a weird fringe interest, even amongst software developers who are already a weird fringe group

Is that even true though? The VsCode Vim extension has over 6 million users, pretty much every editor ships with a vim mode and if I had to guess most developers are at least cursory familiar with vi editing motions. The latest Stackoverlfow survey put vim at a respectable fith place[1] with 22% of devs using it.

I've never felt vim is some sort of fringe stumbling block, and that's coming from someone using Emacs day to day. (where a good chunk of people use evil mode)

[1]https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2023/#section-most-popular-t...

Re: The Loneliness of the Mid-Level Vimmer

#30

Post by roblh »

arandomhuman wrote: post #20

Similar to the author, Telescope really got me to stop using the file tree and really begin to prefer neovim over vscode (well that and the amazing language server support).

Telescope is great. I’ve been trying to move to full neovim (astrovim to start with) for while since I’ve been using vscode-nvim, but the part I’ve had the hardest time with is tab/buffer/window management. I never really know what’s going to happen when closing tabs or panes. Sometimes it’ll close but leave a weird empty tab in place, and I never know what closing something is going to do to the layout of panes. Also, all the actual little tabs at the top stay left aligned rather than attaching to the pane that they’re a part of and it’s always confusing. Maybe I’m doing it wrong, but it’s far better in vscode for now.
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