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Comment by quanticle | Hacker News Reader

The real problem is that the most popular Linux distribution (Ubuntu) and one of the two most popular window managers (Gnome) are going in exactly the same direction as Apple and Windows. These two projects are so busy emulating what Apple and Windows do, they can't see that they're going to go right off the usability cliff for desktop users.

That, more than anything either Apple or Microsoft does is what worries me about desktop Linux. We have met the enemy and he is us.

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As a strangely pertinent anecdote: I've been a Windows "poweruser" for a long time, and have never used much of Linux. I never had a real need for it. But I've been doing rails development lately and Windows kept getting in the way, and so many people are using OSX and I can't afford a Mac... so I tried Ubuntu.

I'm using 12.04, and it's the first significant amount of time I've used spent with Ubuntu. I can say that a month in, I'm digging it. It beats Windows for me in a number of ways but I actually like the level of ui polish -- it's smoother than Windows. (That and it renders fonts far better than Windows, for some reason).

Rails on Ubuntu is also far, far easier. Terminal beats every pretend version on Windows, rvm and bundler work the way they're supposed to, and I really like gedit more than Notepad++.

> I really like gedit more than Notepad++

gedit is available on Windows too. If you really want to harness the power of Linux, run Vim. You'll see at least an order of magnitude in productiviy improvement.

Well, to be fair, it depends on whether you're willing to spend a week or so getting the hang of it. That level of investment isn't necessarily for everyone (even developers).

Not to mention VIM has been available on Windows for many years, so the gp has probably already eliminated it as an option.

I keep hearing this. I can do basic Vim (i.e use it as a standard text editor) but for "serious" programming tasks I mostly use Eclipse.

What advantages other than freeing up screen room and RAM would I get from using Vim over eclipse that would give me an "order of magnitude" productivity increase?

I know vim has a lot of keyboard shortcuts, but there are also quite a few in eclipse.

See my other reply: http://hackerne.ws/item?id=4101878

I've heard this a lot -- in fact in a recent Stack Overflow "best rails IDE's" thread, Vim was near the top of recommended answers. I've been using gedit with a few add-ons installed to make working with rails a little easier.

I also grabbed RubyMine but I haven't spent any significant time there yet as I already have the terminal->gedit workflow down and fighting through RubyMine modal menus to setup BitBucket git pushing started to get old quickly. Terminal is easy. I just push.

What does Vim offer that gedit doesn't? I guess I don't understand the main difference.

I would really like to get some code suggestions/completion features, certainly not a need but I think it would help cut down on my occasional stupid mistake.

> What does Vim offer that gedit doesn't? I guess I don't understand the main difference.

It's about the modal editing. It's a completely different paradigm for text editing. It changes the way you interact with your code.

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