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by thiht 1279 days ago
That holds on paper but I'm not sure I agree.

I've used Notepad++, Sublime Text, Atom, and Visual Studio Code. Each of these has introduced game changing improvements (ST has popularized the command palette, Atom allowed high quality, well integrated, and easy to write extensions, VSCode improved upon Atom with way better performance, brought LSP, and drastically improved the remote dev experience). They have in common that switching from one to the other is extremely easy. When VSCode dies, it's because something better has emerged, I'll just have to install the VSCode keybindings on this new editor and I'll be good to go. Because this new editor will adopt the common conventions that everyone use, unlike Vim.

I've used Vim for a year, became pretty efficient with it, but it always feels like it's playing catch-up with other editors. And the modal editing feels more like a gimmick than something really improving productivity. I sometimes open Vim to do some data cleanup, because Vim moves make it easier than writing a script. But when writing code I never think "damn, typing 3dd would be so much faster than selecting 3 lines and hitting delete"

2 comments

Agree with improvements available in other editors.

But disagree with this:

> I never think "damn, typing 3dd would be so much faster than selecting 3 lines and hitting delete"

I actually do think that all the time, and get annoyed when I have to take the second or so to move away from the keyboard to find the mouse/trackpad.

Need to delete three lines, starting with line 54 at the top of your screen? 54gg 3dd

I would never reach for my mouse for that unless I had to.

This. Only thing is I dont even "think" about "3dd" and just do it. Great thing about VIM (and possibly emacs too) is that all the things the others improved can be brought to VIM and usually is. Writing plugins is O(1) no?
Yeah I disagree with the shade on vim motions. I'm trying to use them everywhere and even went looking for a vim and slack integration.

In fact I believe the motions are way more universal than any particular editor's key bindings. There's plugins and extensions for vim motions in almost all editor's I've used barring some database specific UIs.