Comment by submeta
9 hours ago
Yes, it’s super handy to be able to record an Emacs macro and modify large text within seconds, something that would take me half an hour. Yes, it’s super cool to navigate text at lightning speed.
But honestly, I have seen engineers who work with the mouse to navigate, and use nano to edit text in the terminal, and IDEs from intelliJ to navigate their codebase, engineers who were 10x as productive as I was. Why? Because in the end navigating your text is not what determines engineering success. It’s convenient, yes, but that’s not the core challenge. These days devs using VS Code can be magnitudes more productive just because they focus on the things that matter.
Edit:
Don’t get me wrong. I love my (mechanical) keyboard. I hardly use the mouse. I have a shortcut for everything using Keyboard Maestro, Karabiner elements, and I use Emacs for text editing, and all of that makes me super fast using my computer. But all of that does not make you a better engineer (I am not an engineer anyway). So spending time on other qualities (being able to do research, to solve problems, to manage knowledge, to communicate well, to document well) is way more relevant for your success as an engineer.
Yes people who talk about vim being more efficient, are in my opinion, misguided. For me it's very little to do with efficiency, and much more to do with creating a more pleasant experience writing text, especially text with an exploitable structure (code).
I really enjoy precision, and that's what vim provides. It's the same reason I'd much rather play an FPS video game with a mouse and keyboard, than an analog control stick. And the same reason I hate doing anything important on a touch screen.
Vim is not about speed. It’s about efficiency (less effort) and programmability. You can do the same or more editing actions with other tools, but with Vim (and also Emacs), you can make it effortless.
> Because in the end navigating your text is not what determines engineering success. It’s convenient, yes, but that’s not the core challenge.
That's true, but it's still very helpful.
I'd argue that programming isn't the core challenge either, but it would be foolish to dismiss it entirely.