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Ask HN: Is it worth learning Vim in 2026?

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Ask HN: Is it worth learning Vim in 2026?

#1

Post by zekejohn »

With everyone using Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, and the other 100 AI coding agents that i missed, I’m wondering how much editor mastery still matters like w/ Vim

Being honest the real reason i wanna learn Vim is to boost my ego & assert my dominance, so i can tell people "i use vim btw", but also part of me thinks investing time could still pay off for speed, ergonomics, and working over SSH overall...

but a bigger part also suspects the marginal gains i would gain would disappear when more of the work is delegated to AI anyway, like why would i learn Vim if i'm just going to be prompting Opus all day?

For anyone who's been using Vim for while AND uses AI to code (i'm assuming everyone codes with AI to some degree) my question is: Does learning Vim still meaningfully improve your day to day productivity EVEN with AI, or is it mostly personal preference at this point?

Re: Ask HN: Is it worth learning Vim in 2026?

#2

Post by colesantiago »

What happens if?

1. The LLMs are down, and you're on call and you need to fix a bug immediately (no mistakes)

2. You're working over serial (The LLMs aren't there to help you and only vi and emacs are available)

3. You're working on an old computer for some esoteric reason.

4. You're going in an interview and they (temporarily) forbid you to use an LLM to check your knowledge on using these tools (as well as programming tests)

If you cannot use these editors without an LLM, (Vim has navigation keys 'hjkl', G/g and so forth which many such tools have adopted), then it isn't a good look.

You don't have to 100% master them but knowledge of them will help when the LLMs have an outage, and there WILL be outages.

Also be careful not to keep relying on these LLMs too much otherwise your programming skills will atrophy. [1]

So the answer is YES, learn Vim, not to boost your ego, but make it a muscle memory so your skills won't atrophy.

[1] https://www.infoworld.com/article/4125231/ai-use-may-speed-c...

Re: Ask HN: Is it worth learning Vim in 2026?

#3

Post by salawat »

Won't touch AI mate, so feel free to ignore me I guess. Vim is still worth learning. It's about the most basic editor short of old school vi; has a plethora of plugins that make it fairly usable and ubiquitous, and finally, learning to turn a plain text editor into an IDE is kind of a rite of passage for programmers. Btw. It's Free. Why wouldn't you want to learn to do more with Free?

Re: Ask HN: Is it worth learning Vim in 2026?

#4

Post by zekejohn »

colesantiago wrote: post #2

What happens if? 1. The LLMs are down, and you're on call and you need to fix a bug immediately (no mistakes) 2. You're working over serial (The LLMs aren't there to help you and only vi and emacs are available) 3. You're working on an old computer for some esoteric reason. 4. You're going in an interview and they (temporarily) forbid you to use an LLM to check your knowledge on using these tools (as well as programm…

ya i do definitely agree that learning Vim is gonna help my overall understanding for how things work at a deeper level and also fight back a lot of the “learned helplessness” that i did develop when coding w/ AI to your point also another thing that i was thinking is that yes short term (maybe the first few months?) i wouldn’t see any benefit… but it would definitely help in the long term and that my coding ability is not just directly tied to whatever the latest model is capable of

Re: Ask HN: Is it worth learning Vim in 2026?

#5

Post by speedgoose »

Not everything in life is about being more productive.

I think it’s worth learning vim, or emacs shortcuts, as an intellectual exercise.

I still save time by editing little code thanks to vim, or vim mode in my ide. And it doesn’t take that long to know the basics. Is it worth it in terms of seconds saved over a career? Perhaps not anymore.

Re: Ask HN: Is it worth learning Vim in 2026?

#7

Post by hxugufjfjf »

Don't think so much about learning Vim itself. Learn vi(m) motions and apply them everywhere. Look for software that supports those vi keybindings, for example Vimium in the browser or the vim keybindings plugin for VSCode if that is something you use. You'll arguably be faster at navigating a computer in general, and if not, you can still get enjoyment of how fast you'll feel. If you decide to go down this route, check out vimtutor.

Re: Ask HN: Is it worth learning Vim in 2026?

#8

Post by flamboyant_ride »

I would say I'm maybe marginally more productive with Vim. But as you said, with advent of tools like Claude Code, where one hardly types, I don't think it really matters.

FWIW, I think it's one of the last areas of the software world that gives me true joy. I would suggest to give a try for simple that reason.

Re: Ask HN: Is it worth learning Vim in 2026?

#10

Post by 7bit »

Vom is extremely overhyped, to the point that some developers feel that they're not true devs if they don't use it. Don't fall for it.

While vim produces efficiencies for developers, that's not the single highest goal in programming.

If you ask this question, I believe you also fell for this narrative.

Learn it, if it intrigues you. But don't feel bad if you don't have any motivation to do so.

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