[btschaegg]

I'm in two minds about this. Yes, wpm aren't everything (see the other discussion in this thread) and the same goes for the full range of your editor's functionality.

On the other hand, tools like Vim, Kakoune and Helix shouldn't be treated like your average Java IDE, for example, which shifts the line of what I'd say is reasonable learning investment. What you're dealing with there is a programming language for text manipulation. If you're fluid enough in it, you open your mind for solutions you'd never have considered before. I'd say you'd need at least intermediate Vim skills and should know macros until that effect kicks in.

I have quite some anecdotes about e.g. creating integration tests where my colleagues wouldn't test something properly just because doing so would involve 10 minutes of drudge work in their simplistic editors, instead opting for "deploy & pray" when the task was totally doable in a couple of seconds with a Vim macro. I find that at least in this regard (as for all programming languages), Benjamin Lee Whorf's quote certainly holds true: "Language shapes the way we think and determines what we can think about."

That's why I also think GP had a point. I would probably be much more in your line of thought if we were only talking about the usual contestants like refactoring snippets etc. here, although even having them handy will already influence how many of us work with our code.

Edit: As another analogy, I feel that modal editing has about the same effect on thinking as switching from roman numerals to arabic ones. The reason why it hasn't completely caught on is just that it's less intuitive and text manipulation is not as fundamentally important as calculations for our civilization.

[dmitriid]

> would involve 10 minutes of drudge work in their simplistic editors, instead opting for "deploy & pray" when the task was totally doable in a couple of seconds with a Vim macro.

I really very much doubt this. Sounds like an application of rose-tinted glasses and wishful thinking to some one-off task that then is extrapolated to all tasks.

[btschaegg]

Hey, I didn't say I do this every day. But I've had enough of these conversations that I can assure you that this low a bar is needed for some people to skip important jobs. If your doubt applies to the usefulness of knowing the system, I don't really know what to tell you -- if you can't take someone's word for it, I don't think anything less than you experiencing it yourself would convince you, anyway.

As for one-off tasks: Yes, that's what Vim bindings are good for. Just like AWK-Scripts are great for throw-away scripts. Being able to perform simple one-off tasks quickly is, incidentally, a skill I find to be far too rare even in programmers. I mean, I would've thought at least us techies see the benefit in knowing how to teach the computer to do the menial tasks for us.

[dmitriid]

> But I've had enough of these conversations that I can assure you that this low a bar is needed for some people to skip important jobs. If your doubt applies to the usefulness of knowing the system

No. My doubt extends to "omg vim is so amazing that these tedious tasks take seconds unlike in these primitive text editors".

Because my experience at work has been consistently the exact opposite: vim users routinely take longer time for most tasks precisely because it's a rather primitive text editor, and not a code assist tool.

[btschaegg]

Well, I'm not really sure if we're talking about the same thing. If you're talking about language integration, I've got no quarrel with that (see my earlier comment). The experiences I was referring to are more along the lines of text manipulation in general, not "rename class", "extract method" and the like. If you're talking about features like that, I'd readily agree with you: Trying to do the same thing with Vim macros is just picking the wrong tool for the job.

I won't beleive your assertion, however, that this invalidates the benefits of learning Vim bindings (especially since respective emulation layers are at least passable in pretty much any editor or IDE worth its salt).

If you're talking about normal minute-to-minute text handling and creation of text files without language assist (scripts, cucumber tests, any programming task not blessed by your IDE's refactoring integration) on the other hand, we're at the point where I have trouble believing you.

[MrJohz]

I get what you mean, but "minute-to-minute text handling" for me is pretty much always covered by my IDE's refactoring integration. Like, in the last few weeks, I've written a whole load of Python, Rust, and Typescript, where the IDE covers pretty much all my needs, and then maybe in total a day or so of fiddling with Dockerfiles and config files? None of which were really long enough or complicated enough that I needed anything complicated in terms of editing techniques, most of my time was spent waiting for builds to run and then trying something else out.

So yeah, you're probably right that Vim techniques are far better when you're editing those sorts of files, but those really do make up the tiniest fraction of my time, and everything else is covered by IDE refactoring tools. And if I had the choice, I would always rather have the better IDE tooling than the improved text editing, so this doesn't really sell me on the whole thing.

I would like to try Vim-mode for VSCode at some point, because I can imagine that being a kind of "best of both worlds" thing, but I've not really got round to it yet.

[dmitriid]

> If you're talking about language integration, I've got no quarrel with that

I am. Because we are talking about these mythical Java programmers who couldn't do something that Vim would have done in seconds

> I won't beleive your assertion, however, that this invalidates the benefits of learning Vim bindings

And the reason to learn them is because there's a fairy tale of some programmers not doing the job that we're led to believe could be solved in seconds in vim.

> If you're talking about normal minute-to-minute text handling and creation of text files

Are we? Let me remind you: "I have quite some anecdotes about e.g. creating integration tests where my colleagues wouldn't test something properly just because doing so would involve 10 minutes of drudge work in their simplistic editors, instead opting for "deploy & pray" when the task was totally doable in a couple of seconds with a Vim macro."

Oh look. We're literally talking about programming.

> we're at the point where I have trouble believing you.

Let's start with your fairy-tales before we come to believing or disbelieving what I wrote.

[btschaegg]

Ah, so we're arguing in bad faith. In this case, I won't try to keep some semblance of a useful discussion going. For your interest, most of our integration tests are written in a cucumber dialect and contain very verbose "business-y" messages passed in and out of the system under test.

But then, I'd guess from your tone that this won't stop you from misreading another comment of mine and accusing me of lying, so I'll just wish you a nice weekend instead.