[sph]

People don't use vim because they enjoy puzzle solving. I don't even know how you got this conception. People use vim because they are effective at editing with vim, period, just like you are effective with Sublime Text.

People don't use Linux because they enjoy tweaking config files and everybody else has too busy a life to do that. That's a silly misconception and veiled attempt at feeling superior at those time-wasters.

> rather treating the flaws as if they are things to have a puzzle game to work around

Case in point.

Good tools are indeed invisible, but the arguments the article is built on are very shaky and honestly just sound from someone that didn't spend much time with other tools, but still has strong opinions about them.

[zaphar]

I do know quite a few people who use vim because they do enjoy the puzzle. So there are absolutely people as he describes. Saying that there aren't people like that just undermines your point.

[sph]

Geez, I’m not saying there are none. I’m saying it’s silly to characterise it as an editor for puzzle lovers. You knowing ‘quite a few people’ can’t be generalised to the millions that use vim daily.

[jt2190]

The article discuses that specific subset of users who are into puzzle solving, so we should ground this discussion around that point and not fall into the “tool x is good/bad” pointless debate.

[rrvsh]

It wholly does not. It in no way qualifies the statement that people who use tools with "more friction" (the unsound assumption under attack) because they view it as a puzzle game as a subset of the total users of that tool, and devotes zero time to discussing any alternative interpretetations of why someone would do so.

[jt2190]

> If people find vim, emacs, or whatever genuinely good and productive, I’m not going to criticize them for using it. People are most comfortable with what they know. But for the people I am discussing, that same familiarity blinds them to their tools’ flaws, and leads them to celebrate those flaws, flaunting them as games.

[rrvsh]

This reinforces my point. Even where they "qualify" their statement, they still reduce their mindset to a homogeneous "I like Puzzle "

[gingerBill]

> People don't use vim because they enjoy puzzle solving.

I didn't say that either nor even imply it, and you know that when you quote me afterwards. So huh?!?!

> People don't use Linux because they enjoy tweaking config files and everybody else has too busy a life to do that.

A lot of people, including younger myself, got into Linux and Android BECAUSE it was configurable and customizable. And even played around with all of the customizations because it was fun to do. But it didn't really make my general experience better because I was forever trying to correct something I should have to correct in the first place.

I am not sure how much clearer I can be in the article or in my replies to comments.

[zahlman]

> I didn't say that either nor even imply it, and you know that when you quote me afterwards.

You come across that way when you describe your interactions with Vim users talking about how they use macros. (Which, incidentally, doesn't match my experience at all.) More importantly, your comparison of "Vim users do this with macros" to "I could do this with (proper) multiple cursors" doesn't seem apt.

Perhaps it could possibly make sense if we had at least one concrete example of "this"; but the most obvious thing to do with multiple cursors is patterned editing of multiple matching text fragments, and Vim users would (or I would, at least) normally do that with a /g regex. To the extent that macro is useful, it's because multiple changes are done (such that the dot command wouldn't help), and if that's too complex to do easily with regex then I can't imagine that the simultaneous changes with multiple cursors could actually get it right anyway.

More importantly, though: the real point of a macro is that, having recorded it, you can persist it even across editing sessions. You also mentioned the possibility of writing a script; a macro is that, just in a very small, focused language.

> A lot of people, including younger myself, got into Linux and Android BECAUSE it was configurable and customizable. And even played around with all of the customizations because it was fun to do. But it didn't really make my general experience better because I was forever trying to correct something I should have to correct in the first place.

This doesn't match my experience at all. I play around with customizations because I understand that the default couldn't possibly have anticipated what I wanted. But more importantly: I use multiple user accounts on my system (all for myself; I did this on Windows too) and what I appreciate about Linux is that I can duplicate configuration files instead of having to navigate through UIs again and click a ton of options (perhaps following notes on what to click; I never descended to the AutoHotKey level of madness, though).