The Efficiency of Vim

I’m not convinced; I have met a lot of people who were very high on vim and spent a long time furiously typing keystrokes and planning out their changes without realizing how much time they were spending on that thinking bit.

(Personally it also competes with the working memory of changes I am trying to make, but I am willing to concede that could go away with years of practice).

Simpler abstractions like sublime-style multiple cursors have almost the same power without the complexity of programming your editor live. I wouldn’t recommend new people spend time on vim, unless you like, expect to find yourself in freshly initialized Linux boxes or developing on minimal hardware often.

Just to confirm though - when you 'just click there', you're taking your hand off the keyboard, moving your arm and hand to the mouse, moving the mouse to the position you see, hopefully clicking exactly where you want to go on the first try, then returning your arm into position and hand on the keyboard, right?

Everyone should do what works for them, but with e.g. flash it takes 3 keypresses in most cases to go to any position I can see on the screen, without taking my hands off the keyboard. I was relatively late to Vim but I would never go back, even just for the improved physical ergonomics of not having to move my arm repetitively back and forth between mouse and keyboard.

It feels a little like people that swear that they can type perfectly well with 2 fingers - I have seen some very fast 2 finger typists, but in truth they're missing out on efficiency and comfort in the long run because they don't want to face the short-term pain of learning the better technique (and it is pain).

You gotta do you! I cannot survive without vim and despite having used tons of editors and ides nothing comes close to my distraction-free-ness as vim. Next best thing for me is vimbindings.

Again even if you are productive in notepad nothing wrong with that! Also typing speed is not an indication of actual productivity.

I'm in university right now and am working on a semester long group project with a few other folks. It's written in C. Most (all?) of the rest of them use VS Code, I use NeoVim. I've observed that, while VS Code isn't a major limitation in writing code, Vim is a lot faster at editing code.

Changing designs, data structures, similar logic across several functions, copying existing files to new locations and making minor edits. These and other tasks are so much faster with visual mode selections, Quick file-wide find and replace/ignore, freaking recording a macro and then executing it 100 times in a handful of seconds -- this is a real difference, and it scales.

Maybe it's just that I'm much more familiar with the ins and outs of how to use Vim efficiently for this purpose, and maybe VS Code can be equally efficient. But when you learn Vim, these are things that you will learn -- or at least learn about -- very soon. With VS Code, you will reach a plateau you don't even know about because these are not the features that VS Code differentiates itself with -- namely, fast in-editor documentation, jump to definition, visualize file structure, etc. Useful things when writing new code fast, sure, but not necessarily editing en masse.

what exactly do you mean by "traditional editor"? vi(m) has been around for many, many years, and in the case of vim supports mouse, and of course keyboard?

I jump back and forth between using keyboard & mouse when working on a IDE and vim when working on terminal.

While I could just hook up a vim plugin that is present on almost all IDEs, I debilatery chose not to because they feel ucanny since many vim bindings conflict with the IDE default bindings and their intregation don't work well. It's better suited as standalone application.

To jump around without mouse in vim I usually turn off highlight search by default, or make it a more subtle color and just search a few letters, or % or f and a letter within the line. Can still use the mouse if it is something like a brace on its own surrounded by 5 others. It may be a mode switch but most of the time when I jump somewhere I'm deleting and moving a word or replacing it with cw or C the automatically switches to input mode and overall much faster than going there, shift arrow to select the word and cut paste or typing to replace. There are shorthands like ctrl+backspace but lots of ctrl reaching for multiple things often feels like having to enter a mode over and over or something unless you have them all in mind and dont let up, or need to let up to step the cursor one character with the arrow keys.

VS vim gives you a good mix too and basically while in insert works like a regular editor when that is more natural. But you miss out on piping lines to unix commands and stuff and a common thing of searching all occurrences of an identifier and opening all the files in vim, which warns on exit if you forget to look over all of them. Also ctrl+p to complete to nearest previous occurrence is broken in it.

Overall just much less reaching around for modifiers and arrow keys or home/end but the default placement of ESC is a pain. Switching caps lock to that can help but makes it not great for muscle memory when using other machines.

Ctrl+[ is an alternate for ESC I'll use sometimes but usually only if Ctrl is in my next command. That can be a bit more ergonomic if you change capslock to ctrl instead of ESC and then less chance of messing up in other apps with an errant ESC.

Overall most of the time when I click somewhere I'm deleting/transposing/replacing and not just immediately typing something, and that is much more awkward in a vanilla editor. Maybe with a four button mouse you could have a button to click somewhere and automatically enter insert mode at the same time, without it emitting keys to do it and messing up other apps.

Overall I think vim is much better for RSI, so much stuff is home row, and especially with numpads usually being on the wrong side of the keyboard makes mouse reaching unergonomic. The only main thing keeping me on numpads is Blender, but Blender is surprisingly vim-like as well, in a good way.

It's more like people are simply refusing to learn it because they think VSCode is somehow good enough.

> My experience with modality is that almost every time I want to do something I'm in the wrong mode.

Vim tells you the mode though!

Insert -> Normal/Visual: ESC, Ctrl+c, or Ctrl+[. You could also do something like, while in Insert mode press Ctrl+o to do "one movement" (e.g. "i234[Ctrl+o]^1[Ctrl+c]", or maybe, "ihelo world[Ctrl+o]2Fll[Ctrl+o]$![Ctrl+c]" -- don't type the "[" and "]").

Normal -> Insert: well... it depends on where you want to insert.

> But in practice I can't count so I cut the wrong number of lines

Sometimes you don't need to keep track of the number of lines. But, if you really wanted to, you could do something like:

    :set relativenumber

If it's code or text you could also use sentence ("(" and ")") or paragraph ("{" and "}") movements like "5d)" (delete the next 5 sentences); "d{" (delete up to the previous paragraph). There's a bit of jank when it comes to code though, but there's some support for it (or maybe I'm just doing it wrong).

> then I have to look up how to undo because obviously Ctrl+Z doesn't work

"u" for Undo, Ctrl+r for "redo". ":help undo" goes into _way_ more detail, and it does get complicated. I don't think I've needed anything past section 2.

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

The "efficiency" comes with investment, which you can get with any editor.

> If you tell me I'm supposed to spend 4 weeks reading VimTutor to gain efficiency in Vim

I didn't go through vimtutor for a very long time. You can become a reasonably okay Vim user, but it does take some investment. On the order of weeks is probably correct.

But honestly, VSCode is fine too. Notepad is... probably fine.

> My experience with modality is that almost every time I want to do something I'm in the wrong mode.

The key is to almost always be in command mode. I am only in insert mode briefly to add or change text. The power of Vim comes from its terse command language, so you want to be in command mode most of the time. I find myself reflexively hitting Esc or Ctrl-[ in other programs because I have drilled this into my mind.

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

I did not see the efficiency myself until I witnessed a Vim master do some extremely complicated bit of text editing in seconds. I think that most people will not see the value of Vim until they witness something like that.

> 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.

I personally found Vimtutor boring, if I recall correctly, so I did not use it to learn Vim. I just started to use Vim for all of my coding for several weeks during a slow period at work. I had a printout [1] with all of the keys next to my monitor for several weeks. That was necessary to get muscle memory for every action. I also read a lot of "Learning the vi and Vim Editors". That helps you get into the mindset about how to use the Vim command language. My point is that there are many ways to learn Vim and you can pick which way works best for yourself.

[1] http://www.viemu.com/a_vi_vim_graphical_cheat_sheet_tutorial...

Smalltalk Environment - the dawn of IDEs - "Don't mode me in"

"Novices are not the only victims of modes. Experts often type commands used in one mode when they are in another, leading to undesired and distressing consequences. In many systems, typing the letter "D" can have meanings as diverse as "replace the selected character by D," "insert a D before the selected character," or "delete the selected character." How many times have you heard or said, "Oops, I was in the wrong mode"?"

https://archive.org/details/TheSmalltalkEnvironment

For your specific counting problem you can use relative line numbering which shows line numbers relative to your cursor.

However the larger attempt and redo problem you highlighed is mitigated in a modal editor that does selection first (not vim) instead of action so you get a preview of what you will delete before hitting it, you can also expand it.

I did give up vim for the same reasons, but I am happy with Helix.

I won’t deny that I still make lots of errors, I still use vscode for other features like folder search and replace, easier diff comparisons

Almost any time that you might use a number to count lines or words or whatever, I just use visual mode. It's very fast and eliminates the "oops wrong number" kind of nonsense.

There are other ways of navigating next besides just counting characters/words/lines as well (text objects and the like).

Vim does have a big learning curve. If you don't want to invest in it, that's perfectly fine.

I agree !

For browsing/reading code, I don't see how vim can be much more efficient than a properly configure IDE that support crtl+click, the back and forward mouse buttons and a command of the keyboard shortcut.

Nobody uses 5dd, you select what you want to delete in visual mode and then delete it.

Counting anything in vim is an antipattern.

    :set rnu
    :set nu

FWIW I would very rarely if ever use '5dd'; to me that is spelled 'd4j'. ':set rnu' obviously influences this, since the last line to be copied is labeled '4'.

Undo is 'u' and, yeah, you probably need to know that one before starting. Even after over 15 years using vim I still make tons of mistakes and change my mind, and a fairly robust undo system is crucial.