Comment by kcoddington
2 days ago
Learning an entirely new editor is a barrier. Documentation or not, that's brand new muscle memory you have to develop alongside the actual task of coding.
I get that using vim typically includes obsessive forms of efficiency, but some people just want to focus on coding in a way that's comfortable to them. Sometimes that means having a side panel.
>Sometimes that means having a side panel.
I do not even need that. Modal editing is enough to keep me away from all the VI clones. I hate it with a passion.
I have a fully customized Emacs that I use for anything Lispy and it's great for that purpose but everything else is just "ok".
I try to use Zed but since it is a commercial offering it is just a matter of time until it gets entshitified too.
Vscode is/was really good but it seems to get worse and it's Microsoft.... I run out of editors it seems.
Honest question, what is it that you hate about modal editing?
I tried Helix and Kakoune too. They all have the same problems.
First. It adds friction. Every damn time I need to write, I forget to enter insert mode. You have no idea how many times I ended up with a strange buffer. Hopefully there is undo. But it gets boring fast. I need to write as soon I enter the editor. I don't need to move the cursor to read the text that visible on the current page.
Second, how the hell I'm supposed to make small movements when I'm in insert mode, with the arrow keys? Like move cursor to the left by 3 chars. Do I enter normal mode, press l 3 times. Or delete the whole word and rewrite it?
Third. Why some movements are symbols? Like, line ending is $. Beginning of line is 0. so much so for home row movements.
Fourth. Could never remember if f or t includes the char I'm looking for.
Fifth. How cumbersome is to press ESC on the top left corner every damn time. Yes, there exists Ctrl+[. But still. So much so - again - homerow movement.
Not directly related to modal editing.
Sixth. I could not make copy/paste work reliably in remote a linux server from a Windows machine via SSH. Hell, I could not make it work with WSL2.
Sevent. Debuggers sucks. There is no comparison to JetBrains Debugger GUI. Not even VSCode come close to it.
Sorry for the rant.
2 replies →