Comment by atrettel
2 years ago
I'm a heavy Vim user but I agree with your sentiment. I learned Vim during some down time in my first job out of college. It is a great skill to have in my opinion. It helps me complete complicated text editing quickly and easily, especially operations that I otherwise would never have attempted without it, but I never would have had the time or energy to learn it later in my career. I don't think learning Vim or Emacs is a waste of time but I can see how it is definitely not a priority when you have so many other things to do and little time to do them.
I am a life-long vim-er and I only use probably 30% of its features and thats ok. I learn new things all the time, sometimes adding them to my repertoire, sometimes not. There's so much time that can be wasted if you mess around with configuring tools but either fail to remember to use them or fail to get them set up. I wanted to set up ctags and tried a few times, but fell short of memorizing the forward-back shortcuts and got frustrated at the delay when it goes off scanning my HDD instead of the local code 1-2 directories away. so I just gave up.