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by brandonmenc 3477 days ago
It is not worth it.

I used vi for a few years then switched to emacs, which I used for around 15 years. I "lived" in emacs - terminal, web browser, email. Everything.

Now I only use JetBrains IDEs, and have no desire to go back.

At some point, you realize that software development involves way more thinking than it does typing.
2 comments
lfowles 3477 days ago
I somewhat agree. I'm proficient enough in vim that I do most non-IDE file manipulation in it, but I haven't gone into much depth about what commands I have available. For example, duplicating a line is ddup. yyp would probably be better, but I already have that in muscle memory and it's good enough for what I use vim for. Like you, I've also switched to Jetbrains for most programming, it's much easier to find the one off commands I know I used last year but can't quite remember how to repeat now.

(Although, some of the reason I switched from vim is that I have been using an Alphagrip keyboard for a while now and mouse/arrow keys are always available _right now_. It really changed how I interact with software.)

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mettamage 3477 days ago
This is what I'm discovering as well. For the past month I've been learning node.js, express.js and everything that comes with it.

I'm an (inefficient) vim user. I learned vim because I didn't want to ssh into a terminal and type nano. For this purpose learning an editor that is shipped with every (?) unix-system is amazing. I don't know if emacs is also shipped with every unix-system, but learning the basics for the sake of configuring servers is quite handy. I also loved Sublime Text, so I combined using vim and Sublime Text as my main editor.

However, when learning node and writing good javascript I noticed that my debug cycle was very slow. It was so slow that I noticed that I was debugging 80% of the time and writing code about 5 to 10, and thinking about code 10 to 15. So in my case getting a good debugger was a lot more important than having an editor with which I can whizz through text.

So for node.js I switched to Visual Studio Code.

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