[chongli]

Yes, vim is not intuitive. It doesn’t teach itself to you. It takes hard work. I bought the O’Reilly vi/vim book [1] and read it cover to cover. I practiced a lot of things and was very deliberate about it.

To me, learning vim is like learning a musical instrument. You’re not going to get there without committing to it. For many people that’s just not going to happen: they have neither the time nor the inclination/energy to do it. That’s totally fine! There are loads of other tools for people to use and they get by just fine without vim!

I think my main complaint is that there aren’t a few more tools like vim. Almost all software is designed for people to be able to pick up casually and be able to get work done at a passable level of productivity without ever reaching mastery and flow state. Tools like that (easy to use but with no real incentive for mastery) are deeply unsatisfying to me for a lot of reasons.

I guess what I’m saying here is really just a restatement of “Worse is better” [2].

[1] https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/learning-the-vi/1565924...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better

[lll-o-lll]

This “worse is better” is very interesting. Are you suggesting vi/vim is an example of “the right thing”, vs a “New Jersey” style?

[chongli]

Yes, though that characterization is time-relative. I think vi would’ve been called “New Jersey Style” back at the time it was created, owing to its legacy as a minimal extension to ed for full screen interactive editing on a video terminal.

Today, the editing landscape is dominated by IDEs which have very basic (nearly minimum viable) editing functionality in support of getting the product out the door ASAP and letting plugins handle the fine details. This stands in marked contrast to a legacy tool like vim which gets editing right out of the box, allowing people to be productive even with a stock configuration (no plugins needed, though of course many are available).

We might call this an analogue of the Overton Window: the TRT vs WIB Window has shifted so far towards Worse is Better that we now consider UNIX an elegant tool. The old team at MIT must be really disappointed now!