Comment by fullstackchris | Hacker News Reader

Comment by fullstackchris | Hacker News Reader

I'm finally gonna rant about Vim here. Gets way more credit than it is worth! ("but it's soooo coool! I'm superfast doing find / replace! You just gotta learn the crazy syntax, haha!") My response: "are you sure? I wouldn't rely on those fancy commands... best to use a statically typed language and rely on an abstract syntax tree for renaming tasks than an editor to do that."

Like everything in the software world, because some Google engineers used it, it became world wide famous. There's a saying in german that I love, basically amounting to, "they also cook with water". In short, there is no real tool that has "secret sauce" or is "super magical". It's an editor, that's all.

Say what you will but nano is is fine for me via SSH, VS Code for everything else.

Looks like many of the comments take a similar stance, which I'm actually surprised at.

> Like everything in the software world, because some Google engineers used it, it became world wide famous.

I'm skeptical to this claim because vi/vim's widespread usage predate google itself, by decades. It used to be the only way to really edit something in the 1980s on unix systems, unless you preferred ed.

Vim's modal system extends way beyond some special cases. The most time save I have using it are probably not fancy stuff but quick movement across lines and within lines.

I'll see your "are you sure?" and raise you one. :) Are you sure that vi/vim have many people who use them and that those tools are "world wide famous" because of such superficial reasons? Isn't it possible (and far more likely) that there is some substance to their reasons?

Use whatever tool works best for you. I use vim because it is far and away the most efficient way to edit text - especially code. Anytime I have to use something else it's amazing how sluggish and tedious it feels to do the most basic operations - it feels a lot like trying to run in knee-deep water. I've extensively used many (most?) of the major editors on the planet (including many obscure ones) over several decades. I had to be forced to use vim at first because it seemed so terrible. Believe me, it's not my editor of choice because of some randos at Google, haha.

Vi(m) predates Google by about.. 30? Years.

The rest of your post is fine though. You do you :)

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