Comment by softirq | Hacker News Reader

Comment by softirq | Hacker News Reader

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A person using Vim or Emacs has had best in class integration with the unix environment, modal editing, and remote development. Today, both editors have integration with VCS via fugitive or magit, fuzzy finding, LSPs, tree sitter, and code generation tools using LLMs. These tools have not stagnated, they've continued to evolve and stay best in class in many areas. So the "one tool is better than the other" argument doesn't really sway me. My point still stands that the community and open architecture are more important than any one editing feature.

> Equally, I can say purists or idealogists are so concerned with theoretical changes and breakages, and so afraid of the possibility of something changing that they miss out on game changing improvements to tooling.

Blindly following the crowd is also dangerous. Making choices based on principle is what allows good things like open source communities and solutions not swayed by corporations to exist, even though they might require more up front investment.

The problem with these tools is that despite having worked with computers for 35 years, I don‘t get them. My brain is not made for them.

I only use out of the box vim when I work on consoles (which is still a fair amount of the time), I can exit (hey!), mark/cut/copy/paste (ok, yank!), save, and find/replace if I must. Everything else is just beyond what my brain wants to handle.

A lot of Jupyter lab and some VSCode otherwise. I can‘t say I know all about those either.

The last IDE that I knew pretty well was Eclipse, in about 2004. I even wrote plugins for it for my own use. That wasn‘t too bad for its time, I don‘t quite get why it got out of fashion.

There are those of us that still use it :) productivity gains lie elsewhere. And running various maven and git commands from command line instead of clicking around... something about keeping the skills in better shape

> My point still stands that the community and open architecture are more important than any one editing feature.

No, it doesn't, because it's essentially a matter of opinion, not an objective fact that can be measured and proven. You prefer to have an open architecture and a community of enthusiasts. I prefer to have most of my editor features available out of the box, and modal editors just confuse me.

At the end of the day, developer productivity is not a function of their editor of choice, so what matters is that each developer is comfortable in the environment they work in, whether that be Vim, Emacs, IntelliJ, or VS Code.

Learning curves are uncomfortable, so by your logic we should all always take the path of least resistance and use the tool that makes things easy up front without considering the long term benefits of using something like Vim or Emacs. I find this to be counterproductive to having a great career as a software engineer.

Rapidly assimilating difficult to understand concepts and technologies is an imperative skill to have in this field. Personally, I find the whole notion of Vim being difficult to learn, or not "ready out of the box" perplexing. Writing some code that's a few hundred lines or less, where it's mostly just importing git repos, is easy. Vim has superb documentation. How hard must regular programming be if it's difficult to just understand how to configure a text editor?

It's not that configuring the editor is hard, it's that it's unnecessary—the only thing you've been able to identify that I'm missing by using IntelliJ is an ideology and a community, neither of which are important to me in a text editor.

If it matters to you, that's fine—use whatever you're comfortable with! I just don't understand why you feel the need to shame others for choosing to focus their energy on something else.

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