Comment by palata
9 hours ago
I have been using vim for 15 years. I disagree with the idea that it makes me more efficient than someone else. First, because I have friends who don't use vim and are very fast. Second because most of my time as a developer is not spent writing/editing text.
No, I love vim because of its ergonomics. If I use a mouse for too long, my arm/shoulder starts hurting. Maybe I could improve the ergonomics of my mouse (having a vertical mouse already helped), but using vim and a tiling window manager allow me to drastically reduce my use of the mouse. It makes me more efficient than me when I use a less ergonomic setup, sure. But that's me.
It's all about ergonomics, and everyone is different. It's okay to be faster with a mouse or on an iPad.
I use vim to avoid the mouse-keyboard back and forth. I also happen to edit multiple types of file, which I find useful to have / learn only 1 editor/IDE.
I am also often, if not always, in a terminal.
Some people use vim to brag, some say it's for speed, for me it's because "it's there".
Do you modify your keyboard layout at all? I’ve tried Vim several times and many of the motions just feel awkward as hell for my fingers, but I’m on a standard wasd keyboard.
I have a qwerty keyboard also and all I have done to change my layout is remap caps lock to escape. Which is definitely vim relevant. I am a vim guy.
I don't. I like to keep it as close as possible to the defaults so that it just works everywhere. I don't want to have to import my vimrc whenever I SSH somewhere :-).
I am on a standard qwerty keyboard, nothing fancy here either!
And I almost don't use vim plugins: I enable syntax highlighting, relative line numbers and I add CtrlP as a plugin. That's all. Whenever I need more than that, I start an IDE (configured with the vim bindings of course :-)).