[DigitalSea]

A really good read, however one of the points of waiting for an editor to load doesn't really make sense to me given the fact I use Sublime Text Editor and it loads instantly, I've never had to wait for it to load even when there are 30 tabs for it re-open. The liveReload plugin for Sublime eliminates the need of hitting F5 to refresh a page because as you make changes and save using this plugin the page refreshes: https://github.com/dz0ny/LiveReload-sublimetext2

Unless you're an old school Vim user, I see it as somewhat pointless to learn it in 2013 as a new user, considering Sublime can be just as powerful (support for shortcuts, mapping to compilers and script generators) we've got a better array of fast and feature-packed editors that offer Vim like power without requiring a read of a user manual just to edit some files and compile them to save a few mouse clicks. I can see why people who know Vim would never leave, it's a powerful and besides the self-satisfaction of mastering a highly complicated editor, those I know of who use it can code like the wind. It's amazing seeing them racing about the keyboard doing things I do in mouse clicks with sometimes long keyboard shortcuts they just know off of the top of their heads.

The bane of my existence used to be documentation, but through a few simple self-disciplined changes I ensure that I document every variable, class and function so I can automatically generate documentation (well most of it) without wasting hours documenting hundreds of lines of code and files.

The article raises some very good points though. The smaller things like waiting for a project to compile, waiting for your browser to open, compiling your LESS stylesheets, refreshing your browser and heck even leaving your desk to make tea and coffee all add up when you tally the time up times a 5 day work week and are things we really don't focus on.

[johns]

Before Discourse Sam was at Stack Exchange, which is all .NET/Visual Studio. I assume that's where he's coming from on editor load time.

[taude]

Even coming from .NET/VS, I don't see why opening an editor was a big deal. You do it once day/week when using a big IDE. Having a quickly opening text editor matters more when editing one-off files. And a .NET workflow doesn't involve opening single files. You work on multiple projects in a Solution that you waiting for 20 seconds to open when you started your work week/day.

[DigitalSea]

Ah, of course. Well in that case, I can see why Vim is a massive upgrade compared to what he was used too. Sort of reminds me of a time when I used Eclipse for a while, horribly slow editor that tonnes of people used to use (still used widely for Java development, specifically Android).

[Executor]

Don't forget Python, C/C++, and PHP!

[sams99]

Yes, that was the background. Vim vs Sublime just boils down to personal taste both are awesome editors.

But... when you compare either to VS ... well startup time is not its strong point, just launched my old VS 2010 copy and it took 5 seconds.

[sophacles]

VS is really neat if you're doing C# dev, but yeah slow as heck to startup. It takes nearly a minute from a cold start on my windows dev machine, and 30s on warm start (has recently been closed). And this machine is a beast.

[sams99]

Its a fair point, sublime is an awesome editor, in fact I use it sometimes when I need to search through the project cause I very much like its search feature.

I can't put my finger on exactly what, but when I was using sublime even in vintage mode it just did not "feel" like vim, that and the missing plugins, rails.vim is a masterpiece as are most of Tim Pope's plugins.

[porker]

> waiting for an editor to load doesn't really make sense to me given the fact I use Sublime Text Editor and it loads instantly

I just timed it here on Windows; 5 seconds to load with 2 unsaved tabs open. That startup time of Sublime Text Editor is the bane of my life, a long time when trying to hold a thought in my head I want to jot down.

[eterm]

Is it windows? I'm on windows too and it feels like it takes forever to load.

According to the console:

plugin init time: 0.726977 loading bindings loading pointer bindings found 1 files for base name Default.sublime-theme theme loaded app ready pre session restore time: 4.48531 startup cache, total files: 94 cache hits: 94 startup time: 4.62067 (package setup was not run) loaded 837 snippets

So indeed around 5 seconds to load.

I'm using all default stuff apart from choosing a different theme. My machine ins't SSD but is up-to-date otherwise.

[taternuts]

I wonder if maybe your plugins are slowing you down? 5 seconds is an awful lot, mine comes up in under 2 seconds with 7+ tabs on a pretty weak corp Windows box

[amouat]

The other thing is it's really handy to know vi/vim when you're logged into a remote server and want to quickly edit a file.