[robomartin]

> For all that name dropping of the vast and expansive techs you've worked with, you seem to be extremely close minded on this issue.

It's exactly the opposite. All of that has given me perspective that seems lacking on some entering into these religious conversations. I don't even know how many code editors I have used over the years. I probably couldn't list them. I've even had to write some of my own. The point is that across all of those technologies, platforms and years, this has never mattered. The text editor has never --ever-- played a significant role in the factors leading up to the quality, schedule, success or failure of a project.

If you like using vim and messing with it. That's OK. I use it too when I work on Linux. No issues there. Now, to go to the extreme to say that one is not a professional programmer if one does not use vim (I claim I have seen many times) is, well, nonsense.

In addition to that someone chose to call me a fool who does not know what he is talking about. I felt the incomplete list might be a reasonable superficial qualifier. Not enough? My email is in my HN profile. Shoot me a note and I'll provide you with my Linkedin profile.

My primary objection to the "vim religion" is that newbie programmers are almost intimidated into wasting their time with such an utterly insignificant aspect of the job. This is particularly true of someone who wants to be an entrepreneur as opposed to a data entry clerk. There far more important and useful places to spend your learning hours than learning to use a shit editor with a shit UI that originated at a time keyboards had half the keys they have today, GUI's did not exist, monitors were terminals that displayed 80 x 25 characters and mice were nowhere to be found.

In the context of starting, launching, growing, evolving and maintaining a tech business spending any time to get into something like vim is an absolutely irresponsible waste of time and effort.

[ken_railey]

> In the context of starting, launching, growing, evolving and maintaining a tech business

Possibly, but some people are not starting, launching, growing, or evolving anything but software - and a text editor is where 99% of that work happens.

[robomartin]

That's interesting. I would say that somewhere between 50% to 75% of my time when creating a software product is devoted to documenting requirements, analyzing the problem, studying candidate solutions, working out such things as state diagrams with, yes, paper and pencil and, in general, thinking and planning.

I haven't measured it but I'd venture to say that actual time typing code is probably somewhere in the order of 15% to 30% of a project, if that high. In fact, I really doubt that initial code entry goes much past 20% of my time.

Then there's testing, debugging and source control/management. If the project requires media a substantial amount of time might also be devoted to the creation and management of image, video and sound assets.

One interesting thing is that as the years went by and I became more experienced I quickly spent less and less time debugging. My code is largely bug-free due to the fact that I devote a lot of time and effort to initial planning before I even think about firing-up a text editor at all.

So, yes, your claim that 99% of the work in creating a software product happens in the editor is something that can only be true for an absolute rank newbie. I don't know many experienced programmers that, for a non-trivial project, just launch into an editor and spend 99% of their time there.

Don't take my word for it:

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2006/09/when-understanding-...

http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/93302/spendin...

[LinXitoW]

Its nice for you that you're advanced in your carrier that coding is such a small part of what you do, but its obvious that theres enough people that arent quite as godlike as you. Good for you.

Personally, the one thing vim(and Linux) have taught me is that mastering your tools is hard in the short but entirely worth it in the long run. Do really never learn shortcuts or concepts or the tools you use? A language is just as much a tool as a text editor.

How much of your time did you waste here, religiously debating religious vim users? At least from here(the internet can distort things) it seems you're just as religiously anti as they are pro.

[robomartin]

There's a big difference. Now I have the luxury of time. That was not the case ten years ago.