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this post was submitted on 17 Jul 2023
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I still don't get why people like vim. Like sure, I use it to edit config files and stuff that needs sudo permissions, but in all honesty, if I could use any gui for that, like Kate, I wouldn't see any reason for using vim. Why do I need to relearn years how to Ctrl+ f or exiting the editor? buT iT'S FaStEr. Really? You spend how long looking up guides and cheat sheets on how to use it and it's faster? I mean sure, use what you are comfortable with but can you really say it's that much faster than just any text editor out there?
It's like Dvorak. You can be ~5% faster once you get over the turly enormous learning curve. The problem is, for most people, that 5% does not justify the huge initial investment.
Why would it though? If performing an action through the terminal shaves off only 2-3 seconds who cares?
If I want to open firefox though the terminal I can do that, sure…or I can just point and click on my taskbar/desktop. The time difference is virtually unnoticeable.
There’s a reason GUIs blew up. It’s not just because of user accessibility. There are legitimate things that are faster or less of a hassle with GUIs and I feel like the Linux community forgets that sometimes. Like using the terminal somehow makes them superior.
I can't wait for "I use dvorak btw" to be the new thing. The final stage after you become a vim using Linux expert
I'm new to Linux, and pretty new to Vim, but for me personally it works because of a couple of reasons:
(i) speed. yes, it's faster once you spent a little bit of time getting used to it. Vim movements or motions just make so much more sense in my mind, and being able to do all of them with few keystrokes feels pretty good and saves time.
(ii) comfort / muscle memory. This kind of ties to (i), where I just feel comfortable with my hands staying roughly at the same place on the keyboard the entire time I'm editing or writing something. Jumping here and there, deleting and copy-pasting, search/search-and-replace, creating-using-erasing macros, etc; things just feel so crisp and effortless.
(iii) simplicity. It is a terminal-based text editor, and so for me it's distraction-free. I just want to open up a text file and edit some stuff or even do some bit of writing, and I don't really feel like opening up a GUI text editors just to edit some stuff, or even write some stuff! I use Vim to write almost everything and it feels really good.
But when it comes down to it, anything like Kate or Notepadqq or any generic text editor works just fine.
The only reason I like vim is because I've literally never seen a Linux installation that didn't have vim. As a result, I know like 5 whole vim commands so I can still technically function on bare-bones installations. And even then, I only learned those 5 vim commands the first time I ran into a computer that didn't have nano or pico
Additionally, vim key bindings work in some other places too - like
manandless(and most pagers I think). It also works in bash if youset -o viwhich by default uses emacs keybindings. Ctrl+x, Ctrl+e (Shift+V in vi mode) to open your current entered command in$EDITORwhich is handy for really long commands. Then save it in said editor, and boom - it runs in your shell.The keybindings (vim and emacs alike) is actually a feature of GNU's readline library that bash gets for free since it uses it, the same trick works in other places that use the same library like a lot of REPLs and
gdb(though those programs would need to expose their own way to change between vi and the default emacs mode).That itself is a very good reason to know some basics of how to navigate around emacs and vi[m]!
And now for the second time in my life, I'm tempted to learn a bit more about the old gods of text editing. Damn you! /s
THANK YOU.
I spent time learning vim and using a file manager (forgot which one) but after awhile I realized it’s less frustrating just using a damn GUI. I feel like the time difference isn’t too much discernible. More than anything vim is just frustrating.
When you master the tab key and the mouse cursor in a text editor, it’s a breeze.