Ask HN: Is Vim still worth learning?

My workflow for years has been using vscode for editing code only and completely ignoring most of its plugins and other features.

The work-issued machine may run windows or macos, but my dev environment always matches the testing/production environment and that's linux (usually ubuntu).

I always have several terminals open for git, docker, tailing logs, watch scripts, etc. Vim is really the only sensible option for editing configuration, writing git commit messages, _viewing logs_ ... can't stress that last one enough. What are you going to do when you need to do more than just grep a single log file? You need an editor that doesn't blow up opening massive files.

Yes it's absolutely worth knowing. Everyone who uses it needs it and everyone who doesn't eventually will.

> I'm somewhat experienced using linux and the terminal, and would be curious to dig deeper into more terminal-based workflows.

Then yes. Learn Vim because you're interested and because it makes text editing fun. If you don't enjoy it, stop. In the worst case, you've still learned the basics of a useful skill.

Yes; 100% yes. I'll make three pitches here:

1. Vim has almost certainly staved off RSI for me. I've probably got > 10k hours physically programming under my belt. From time to time I've felt small pangs, but my worst RSI has been when I was using a mouse. Vim will also let you remap whatever you want, so you can adapt it to whatever your changing physicality is.

(Side note: I know a lot of people talk about their muscle memory, but even I as a person who can't always tell you how to do what they do in Vim have adapted here and there; most recently: Neovim changes what 'Y' does, which is ABOMINABLE DO YOU HEAR ME NEOVIM DEVS I CURSE YOU--but I adapted in like a week)

2. You can adapt Vim to help you think, and get out of you way when you're on a roll. This is more important than you might think. Vim will help you avoid blunders by letting you use whatever combination of linters and checkers you want. Vim will also let you edit code so fluently that it's close to the speed of thought.

3. Vim is open source. Not everyone is as Marxist as I am, so I recognize that this might not resonate with everyone. But as SWEs, SREs, etc., our major community is the open source community. This is our garden, our house. We should be building, using, and improving our own tools. A world in which all our tools are corporate built and owned, and used solely for the purpose of doing their bidding sounds pretty bleak. It sounds like every house is a McMansion leased from Zillow and decorated from AirBnB-approved home furnishing warehouses delivered by Uber Eats. I know that's pretty far down the road from just using VS Code, but when you think about the corporate strategy behind it, what else could it be?

Vim is basically the only editor you can safely assume to be available on any machine you’ll ever interact with. In my opinion, this fact makes it a requirement for virtually any developer to be able to confidently use vim during a production incident to, say, fix a broken config file while being connected to the machine through (multiple hops of) SSH, without any ability to use your editor of choice.

Once this basic-but-crucial skill level is mastered, using vim more proficientely as a daily driver is entirely a matter of taste. Personally I prefer using a fully-fledged IDE for anything that goes beyond a simple script.

I don't think that's true. There are precious few UI guidelines that persist, and GUI design has been on the forefront of many fads. Looking at the touch-first UI of today, I have very little confidence that a GUI will look anything like it does now in 10 years.

Meanwhile, I can use vim over ssh from an iPad if I need to - my tools have come with me.