VIM Pays Excellent Dividends: Learn it early, if you can
1–10 of 65 posts
Re: VIM Pays Excellent Dividends: Learn it early, if you can
#2Came here to make a comment about other utilities in the same vein...but the author already did!
> [4] Or, emacs. Or, really, any other tool that you 1) use constantly; 2) is almost universally applicable; and, 3) makes you more productive.
Nice to see consideration for other tools in a piece like this.
Re: VIM Pays Excellent Dividends: Learn it early, if you can
#3Came here to make a comment about other utilities in the same vein...but the author already did! > [4] Or, emacs. Or, really, any other tool that you 1) use constantly; 2) is almost universally applicable; and, 3) makes you more productive. Nice to see consideration for other tools in a piece like this.
Thanks!
I put VIM in the title because 1) it's got a recognizable identity to pull in readers and, 2) I use VIM. But, in a weird and almost recursive way, editor wars are kinda like language wars. If it gets you that 5% (or more) boost, great! But, the differences between them often washes out.
Re: VIM Pays Excellent Dividends: Learn it early, if you can
#4Came here to make a comment about other utilities in the same vein...but the author already did! > [4] Or, emacs. Or, really, any other tool that you 1) use constantly; 2) is almost universally applicable; and, 3) makes you more productive. Nice to see consideration for other tools in a piece like this.
Thanks! I put VIM in the title because 1) it's got a recognizable identity to pull in readers and, 2) I use VIM. But, in a weird and almost recursive way, editor wars are kinda like language wars. If it gets you that 5% (or more) boost, great! But, the differences between them often washes out.
Yeah, the most important thing is to know your tools of choice really, really well. vim never made me more productive—being able to do what I needed to in it quickly did. I could just as easily have used emacs (had I learned that first), or atom (had that been around back then) or .
Re: VIM Pays Excellent Dividends: Learn it early, if you can
#5This is a huge thing I've been thinking about lately.
Very recently I was a pretty staunch advocate for IDEs and thought the whole VIM situation was crazy. It is unintuitive. It doesn't come bundled with lots of useful tools. It takes some configuration if you want nice things (e.g. file tree on the side).
Over winter break I decided to really commit to becoming productive in VIM. I stopped using VSCode and I stayed away from other IDEs, even as I was learning Java Spark and digging into some Python projects.
I didn't notice it at the time, but VIM has made me much more productive, even with my very minimal knowledge (I learn new commands even for basic things all the time). Ultimately, the fact of the matter seems to be that the keyboard->mouse->keyboard transition is really slow. Going to Visual Studio (I'm learning Win32 and I don't want to do that without IntelliSense) after ~2 months in VIM is almost excruciating. I'll be loading up the VIM plugin pretty soon
The long and short of it is, and my advice for everyone who asks is, learn VIM (and other command line tools) as soon as you possibly can. I have no loyalty to the UNIX philosophy or ecosystem, but take it from me, you'll be glad you did.
Re: VIM Pays Excellent Dividends: Learn it early, if you can
#6> let’s say it makes you 5% more productive
> It’s an extra twenty minutes a day
Author presumes 100% of programming time is spent typing/editing.
Is this really the case? I'd wager it's close to 10% for most people.
Re: VIM Pays Excellent Dividends: Learn it early, if you can
#7Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thanks! I put VIM in the title because 1) it's got a recognizable identity to pull in readers and, 2) I use VIM. But, in a weird and almost recursive way, editor wars are kinda like language wars. If it gets you that 5% (or more) boost, great! But, the differences between them often washes out.
Yeah, the most important thing is to know your tools of choice really, really well. vim never made me more productive—being able to do what I needed to in it quickly did. I could just as easily have used emacs (had I learned that first), or atom (had that been around back then) or .
Yes.
The had-I-learned-it-first concept is something I didn't mention, but do think is important. And, often it works in an inhibiting way. With an IDEA-like rich IDEs -- which I think is a great tool, esp with VIM bindings! -- you get such a boost from things like good contextual auto-complete, that you never feel the need to learn it more deeply.
Re: VIM Pays Excellent Dividends: Learn it early, if you can
#8Came here to make a comment about other utilities in the same vein...but the author already did! > [4] Or, emacs. Or, really, any other tool that you 1) use constantly; 2) is almost universally applicable; and, 3) makes you more productive. Nice to see consideration for other tools in a piece like this.
Thanks! I put VIM in the title because 1) it's got a recognizable identity to pull in readers and, 2) I use VIM. But, in a weird and almost recursive way, editor wars are kinda like language wars. If it gets you that 5% (or more) boost, great! But, the differences between them often washes out.
This way you can also attract furious members from the church of emacs ;)
But learning Vi is extremely useful, because many editors/IDEs feature a Vi Plugin:
Visual Studio, Qt, Eclipse, Xcode, Atom, IntelliJ and of course Emacs. Learning the basic Emacs shortcuts is likewise useful for terminal (though some shells also have a Vi mode!)
Re: VIM Pays Excellent Dividends: Learn it early, if you can
#9> let’s say it makes you 5% more productive > It’s an extra twenty minutes a day Author presumes 100% of programming time is spent typing/editing. Is this really the case? I'd wager it's close to 10% for most people.
It's closer to 10%, but that just makes having a fluid and easy editing experience more important IMO. Editing tasks are interruptions at that level, and you want to make it as easy and quick as possible to get your mental models re-loaded into short-term memory.
Re: VIM Pays Excellent Dividends: Learn it early, if you can
#10I've used vim and emacs. I can't claim to be an expert on either, but I am somewhat comfortable with vim and it can be convenient for any unix straight out of the box. But I found it to be fairly overrated even with all these claims of boost in productivity. Just use Sublime Text in this day and age and use the spare time you would've had to learn vim and do something more useful.