I was extremely resistant to learn new things when I thought my current way of working was perfectly fine.
It’s only retrospectively that I realise how limited I was.
I was extremely resistant to learn new things when I thought my current way of working was perfectly fine.
It’s only retrospectively that I realise how limited I was.
I've tried to get into vi and emacs but I honestly never found a good use case for them, even as a developer. When I edit files, the changes are usually very small and I spent most time thinking about what to change. The time it takes to execute that change is negligible. If I need to process large files, those are usually in some kind format that can be manipulated with other tools much more easily. And when it comes to programming, modern IDEs are far superior.
I don't doubt that you can be very productive with these editors but the "it's more powerful" argument always seems to mean "look how I fast I can manipulate large unstructured text files with some keyboard shortcuts magic", which is irrelevant to me.
It’s not the OS’ job to lecture users about their tools of choice. The Web is full of “vim is the dog’s bollocks” articles, if anyone has a modicum of interest to look at more complex tools.
Now, we have to just set EDITOR in the dotfiles for each new student we get starting their MSc project. They have 6 months to do quantum chemistry stuff, not winning flame wars about whose editor is best. And they have already a lot of inane idiosyncrasies to learn in R and the usual Python libraries.