[hbien]

I've been using vim (now neovim) for almost 20 years now.

In terms of efficiency/productivity/time saved, my guess is that it's not worth it.

In terms of happiness, I love it. I live in vim+tmux+bash. My setup is extremely personalized. If anything annoys me about my day-to-day activities, I can just change it. It can be a time sink, but I enjoy it.

[h0l0cube]

> In terms of efficiency/productivity/time saved, my guess is that it's not worth it.

For me, I wouldn’t be using vim if there wasn’t a productivity bump. When I became comfortable with vim I was appreciably faster, but it took maybe a year to get to that point. Not having to reach for the mouse is a huge benefit. Macros turn repetitive manipulations to a from O(n) to O(1). Using the dot key to repeat a change can be very powerful too

[vram22]

>In terms of happiness, I love it.

In terms of happiness, I agree. Productivity is not bad too (understatement of the year :). But as for any powerful tool, to get the most or even a lot from it, you have to spend some time. But IMO at least, the learning curve is shallow, for easy to medium tasks.

And anyone not knowing the basics of vi, can get started very quickly with my vi quickstart tutorial below.

I had first written it at the request of two Windows sysadmin friends of mine, in a company where we were working at the time.

They had been given additional charge of two Unix boxes, so, being busy people, as sysadmins usually are, they asked me to write a tutorial that would let them hit the ground running for common sysadmin text editing tasks. After reading it and using Unix for a few days, they told me that it was useful and met their need.

The tutorial is small, so it can be read soon and you can start applying it right away:

https://vasudevram.gumroad.com/l/vi_quick

It enables you to start with just some basic vi commands, and as you go, you can build more vim-fu by reading the docs, blogs, videos, practicing, etc.

Also be sure to check out this famous StackOverflow answer to grok the zen of vi:

"Your problem with Vim is that you don't grok vi.":

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1218390/what-is-your-mos...