[dlsspy]

It took me years to consider using vim over plain vi. After fifteen years or so of vi I ended up switching to emacs.

I've worked with really awesome people who are completely lost without [insert proprietary single-platform editor here].

[efsavage]

> I've worked with really awesome people who are completely lost without [insert proprietary single-platform editor here].

And this is bad why? I'd rather be 100% productive for 10 years and then retool than 80% productive all the time.

[dlsspy]

This is bad because he was 0% productive for many days because he couldn't input text on the computer where the problem was because it didn't have his editor.

[efsavage]

We're 0% productive most of the time. Sleeping, commuting, meetings, lunch. Adding a negligible amount more for tooling is not really an issue.

I'm essentially dependent on Eclipse when doing Java. It takes me < 1 hour to get it set up the way I like it. For the next 2-3000 hours before I need to set it up again, I will outperform and produce better quality code than anyone using vi or emacs, guaranteed. Sounds like a fair tradeoff to me.

Back when I was on a Civil Engineering path, an elderly engineer said "I bet you don't even know how to use a slide rule, what do you do when the power goes out", to which I responded, "I go home, same as you, unless you've got candles in your desk too, and let's not even get into air conditioning".

[crag]

I can't use vim. God, I've tried, and tried. I'm too old. I just can't do it. So I stick with a big IDE (or Sublime 2 which I'm liking more and more).

I had to telnet into a Centos box recently and the only thing I could find was vi. Took me a few minutes but I managed. I was proud. ;)

[dlsspy]

I bet you can. But can likely use emacs as well. I think if I had to pick one piece of software to live with on my desert island, it'd be emacs (assuming I had a reasonable boot loader and a filesystem to sit under it).

[jamii]

Choosing emacs is cheating, it contains every other program you might ever want to use.

[njharman]

> I had to telnet

Knowing/using ssh way more important than vi/vim.

[crag]

I do use ssh. I call it telnet since ssh is just telnet on roids.

[bostonvaulter2]

I'm curious, how long did you spend trying to use Vim?

[crag]

A few days. I must admit, I was resistant from the start.

[crag]

Ok you've shammed me. I'm gonna start learning and using VIM. Even if it kills me.