The Efficiency of Vim

I have been telling people for years that using an editor like Vim or Emacs makes you more efficient, but I have found that most people either do not particularly care, or worse still, think that the efficiency gains are surely marginal at best. I view this as an unspoken part of Vim's learning curve. You have to realize that it is worth the time to learn.

I only bothered to learn Vim after seeing somebody do some wizardry with it and wondering how they did it. But I didn't have the time to learn it then. I later had some downtime at work and was able to learn it. I imagine the learning process is similar for many people.

I'm probably going to cop a wave of negative comments, but personally I'm much faster with keyboard and mouse, traditional editor than vim.

25 years professional and going, I've given vim shortcuts a fair go. I learnt the ones I thought were making vim more efficient.

But the reality is, I look first, which then I click there and I'm there. I don't have to jump between modes, the cursor is typing words. I map pageUp and pageDown to paragraphs jumping and that's about the only non traditional setup I have.

I realise a lot will oppose to this reasoning, claim I don't know what I'm talking about, but maybe it's time to consider your RSI and effective speed, not perceived speed due on hammering keys, as a factor.

That said, I am jealous at times, watching vim people smack some keys around, feels cool!

Edit: I mostly use IntelliJ(CE) and Zed nowadays. I jump in vscode if I need to debug breakpoints on a language Intellij(CE) does not support.

I love Vim and use Vim bindings everywhere I can (Emacs, Firefox, Intellij etc.).

But I don't think it is actually more efficient than traditional editing, but rather just a different way of editing which may be (or may be not) more convenient to _some_ people (myself included).

Especially nowadays with modern IDEs and auto-completions and AI code helpers, it's not really about text editing anymore, it's not the bottleneck.

Off topic, but it's a little weird that people now call the common editors like VSCode "traditional editors", as if Vim and Emacs were released yesterday.

All these people claiming Vim is not efficient because they don't know how to use it well.

I committed to vim sometime in the 90's, and have coded on it full-time since. But I've had very poor tooling integration, until a year or two ago.

It's taken some time to grow into it, but I'm definitely enjoying having diagnostics built-in and having types helping me do autocomplete. Step-by-step debugging is fine, if not great.

One of the things that I'll credit as having made a huge different is switching to AstroVim ~2 years ago. It provided a bunch of helpful, sensible leader key bindings, and a little mini dynamic TUI at the bottom of the screen to show them off. AstroVim also has an excellent community repository of ready-to-go preconfigured plugins. I'd been loath to get deep into configuring my own vim, felt overwhelmed by setting up LSP, but having these community packs ready to go has really opened up a broad interest in exploring, in seeing whats out there. Whatever language you work in, there's probably a pretty good ready-to-go setup to get good LSP support! https://github.com/AstroNvim/astrocommunity/tree/main/lua/as...

I'd done some years with Eclipse & Eclim, doing Java, long long ago. And knew there were some really important, key dev tools I was missing. Just having separate debugging programs going (or falling back to printf-style debugging), versus that being something I could do in vim was a huge sign to me that while I could edit reasonably well, I was behind the power curve of where I wanted to be in coding, in what I expect from an IDE. It's been nice to very rapidly gain ground these past couple years.

I don't see anything here that tells me how is Vim supposed to be efficient. My experience with modality is that almost every time I want to do something I'm in the wrong mode.

I thought Vim could be efficient because if you just learn all these codes you can instantly cut 5 lines of code 5dd. But in practice I can't count so I cut the wrong number of lines, then I have to look up how to undo because obviously Ctrl+Z doesn't work, and the end result pretty much every time is that I'd be more efficient with VS Code or even Notepad than with Vim.

I just can't see where this "efficiency" is supposed to be at all.

If you tell me I'm supposed to spend 4 weeks reading VimTutor to gain efficiency in Vim, I could probably become more efficient faster in VS Code by learning all of its keyboard shortcuts. Btw Ctrl+/ comments the current line, but I always just press home // because that feels faster. It works with multiple lines, but I just use Alt+Down key in that case to create multiple cursors.

I enjoy using neovim.

Though I'd argue most of the programming time is spent on thinking what to do, not on typing it. It's different when you write prose or transcribing something. Then typing speed matters way more.

That said, having keyboard controls for editing actions is definitely making editing experience more convenient. Same goes for the modes switching and ability to express commands for the editor like you'd do in a shell.