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The stuff listed in this article are the places where Vim was trying to catch up with modern editors, not where Vim excels. Vim is an old editor, for modern features, Vim has been the one that's catching up, and luckily it did. But that has nothing do with why people love Vim. Vim, in pure code editing sense, has two unique advantages that no other editors have or dare to have: modal editing and ubiquity. Modal editing makes code editing absolutely DRY, as users can avoid any repetitive typing/clicking that they wish to avoid. It doesn't necessarily increase your code throughput much as a lot of the time you'll be thinking instead of typing, but it reduces the frustration of editing to almost zero when you do have to type, hence reducing distractions and cognitive load. Once you are familiar with Vim, its commands have close to one-to-one mapping to ANY ways you want to edit code. For example, you want to change the html text two lines above? kkcit. Then come back to the place where you left? g;g;. Re-indent the lines? =ip. They look foreign and unintuitive to non-vim users, but are actually muscle memories for vim users. This is probably why vim users swear by it, but non-users find it hard to love. Ubiquity is something you can only appreciate when you have to. If your work environment is Windows, this probably won't occur to you. But if you have to code in different OSes, or in SSH sessions, or in git commit, or in less/man commands, you'll find vim invaluable. After all, Vim is just a tool, a very good one. But if your work doesn't have the need for it, you won't find it useful. |