[photon_collider]

Strangely, I've noticed mixed opinions from developers about whether learning vim is a productivity boost. Some people believe it is while others disagree.

I'll admit my FOMO was what originally got me to start learning vim. I still barely know the basic motions but I'm starting to think it could lead to a productivity boost once I get over the learning curve.

[TheRoque]

The productivity boost is highly subjective, it depends a lot on your work. Do you edit files a lot or spend more time thinking ? Do you use some graphical tools on the side that forces you to grab your mouse anyways ? With AI tools now, where you can now basically select a file and prompt "rewrite all in snake_case" in VSCode it's becoming even less evident. I think the biggest gain from vim is simply if you're more happy using it or not.

[znpy]

> The productivity boost is highly subjective

There is a quote from Apple UX designers/engineers about testing the keyboard vs mouse for doing stuff in the OS.

Apparently the test subject always reported that they keyboard-driven controls were faster, but the timing measurements showed that mouse were faster.

Chances are the keyboard feels faster, rather than being actually faster.

I'll add another point of view I developed while observing many LaTeX vs Word or Excel vs SomeObscureCoolThing(tm) threads: people will happily waster thousands of hours over many years to learn vim/emacs/LaTeX/SomeObscureCoolThing but will plain refuse to spend 20-200 hours (again, over many years) to properly learn how to use Jetbrains' stuff (IntelliJ etc) or Word/Excel/PowerPoint (or the LibreOffice equivalent) or some other mainstream tool.

I've seen countless time web-apps being developed in months that could have been an excel sheet developed in a week. People wasting weeks on their documents because after a software update LyX would not open the documents anymore. People (particularly in university) being super-stressed, wasting precious time and occasionally missing deadlines because they waster too much time fighting LaTeX to align tables or images because they refused to properly learn how to use Word (or the LibreOffice's equivalent, writer).

And don't even get me started on the plumbing of various tools together. Most vim/emacs user (and I say this as an emacs user) can only integrate other tools as long as there is some copy-paste-ready code, but they can't go much further.

So... Yeah productivity boost is incredibly subjective. And chances are it's also fake.

It's not too much of a big deal (meh) but I'm annoyed by the fact that all this isn't even acknowledged.

[dvdkon]

Maybe it comes back to the feeling of fun mentioned by GP? I also enjoy working with Vim, while LibreOffice Writer is clunky and Word is not much better (though I have no love for LaTeX). I could make a spreadsheet in under an hour, but if it'll make me feel like I'm hacking together something buggy in an inadequate tool, I'd rather spend more time making a web app or a Python script.

Likewise, mandating a file per each class in Java is no big deal on the surface, but having to create and juggle so many files for small classes feels terrible to me, so a seemingly small detail turns me off the language.

I think we should examime these feelings, because they ultimately drive (some part of) our behaviour, and I'd guess they're not just random preferences but are rationalisable.

[znpy]

> I could make a spreadsheet in under an hour, but if it'll make me feel like I'm hacking together something buggy in an inadequate tool, I'd rather spend more time making a web app or a Python script.

Congrats you missed the point entirely and provided me with a perfect example case:

Have you ever spent a considerable amount of time learning Excel, the very same way you did for python?

It’s very likely that excel is perfectly adequate and not buggy at all, you’re just and ignorant (in Excel) and can’t go further than “hacking a spreadsheet together”.

So, have you spent time properly learning other tools or are you one of those everything-expect-what-i-like-sucks ?

[dvdkon]

The whole "data and (hidden) code mixed in a seemingly-infinite matrix" concept offends my engineering sensibilities. It's not about bugs in Excel, it's about the bugs my spreadsheets will have since I forgot to fill in that one cell, overran the area used by some formula elsewhere, didn't set the format correctly, so visually all looks good but it breaks a sum...

To get back to my point, working with spreadsheets feels bad (from my experience) because I have to juggle all the things mentioned above. In my favourite programming environments, mistakes of this sort are generally directly evident in the form of errors.

If I had more spreadsheet experience, I would get better at avoiding these mistakes. But I choose to use Python, where they are handled by design.

[orwin]

It was a comparison between keyboard shortcuts and quick access bar, on a graphical tool.

And anyone who has ever played MMO or RTS games will know that early on, quickbar are faster and more precise than shortcuts, but later on clearly, no one mouse-click if they want to stay competitive.

[stvltvs]

The real productivity boost happens when you become fluent and it feels like a second language that describes actions on text objects. At this point I can do most things as fast as I can think what needs to be done. It's like being bilingual.