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Comment by toprerules | Hacker News Reader

I've reached a level (staff engineer at MAANG) that I consider to be difficult to obtain using plain old Vim, and I've noticed that other high performers tend to still use Vim or Emacs. There's plenty of amazing developers who use VCode, JetBrains, etc. but I think there are certain personality traits - seeks out barriers to entry, likes to demagic tools through exploration, values completely open source, highly tinkerable community driven projects, etc. that explain this phenomenon more than feature set or ease of use.

When I read about how complicated VSCode's remote editing was (which I knew about before this article) it just made me want to use VSCode less. I can just ssh into a machine and use whatever editor is on the machine. VSCode's solution works, but it's also not nearly as elegant or universally applicable, and is more prone to breaking.

Also, Tramp is still quite awful, sorry Emacs users (netrw isn't any better).

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I agree that Tramp is not great, but there's a simpler solution that works much better: `watchexec` + `rsync`.

I can set it up to watch specific file paths, and sync exactly what I need. I'm still working on the local FS, so there's no editing delay, I can use all my local tooling, and the syncing takes milliseconds. I can also make it delete files remotely when they're deleted locally. And finally, I always have a local copy once I stop working on the remote machine, which is something I always needed to sync manually with Tramp. Plus, it's editor agnostic.

This VS Code feature would make me nervous, especially now that I know what it does.

I joined a new team that's very VSCode centric and I've been thinking a lot about why I still prefer vim. My latest observation is that I find all the toolbars and other content filling the screen to be visually noisy. I turned on Copilot and wow it's more toolbars and text is flying into where I'm trying to write. Vim just lets me looks at, think about, and write code. I can't get into "flow" with VSCode.

Oh and since people are citing age in sibling posts, I'm mid-30s. I used emacs in university and switched to vim at my first job. I used IntelliJ for a really gnarly Java project, but otherwise I keep using vim.

That's exactly what I dislike about vscode. It's so easy to trigger some pop-over that moves or obscures the precise thing you're trying to read.

The only thing really keeping me using it is copilot.

> likes to demagic tools through exploration, values completely open source, highly tinkerable community driven projects, etc.

I liked all this stuff when I coded as a hobby. Now that it’s my job, I like VSCode because I never need to tinker with it to any significant extent and I can focus on getting my work done. I fire up vim occasionally if I need to do some fancy regexp munging.

I don't tinker with Vim. I wrote my config many years ago and I touch it maybe once every few years. Otherwise it's completely rock solid.

I also find it highly amusing when people talk about needing to get work done and Vim, I mean I didn't get staff at one of the highest paying, hardest companies to climb at because I was sitting there tweaking configs instead of having impact. Vim lets me have impact by getting out of my way and letting me do precisely what I need to do wherever I need to do it.

I don’t doubt that Vim is an efficient tool for you. In the end it’s just a text editor. Editing text is not the hard part of writing code. I do not understand the impulse to judge people according to their largely inconsequential choice of editor (and I must say it seems to be disproportionately users of certain editors who are susceptible to it!)

The part of your post that I responded to talked about exploring highly tinkerable projects. I guess you’re saying that you like that Vim is explorable and tinkerable even though you don’t waste time exploring it or tinkering with it. That’s fair enough, but I hope you can at least see the sentiment that I was responding to.

The principal and distinguished engineers on my team used Vim and Emacs :P

I would imagine that is more due to age than anything else.

That is true

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