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Comment by 000ooo000 | Hacker News Reader

Here come the "[..] anyway I'm happy with VSCode" comments

Technical moncultures are bad. The VSCode people ought to at least tolerate VSCode refuseniks as a kind of endangered species, worth keeping around out of a mixture of sentiment and insurance against memetic stagnation

I've grown up on vi and later emacs, but VSCode is no joke. It does almost everything, and most of it better, and more intuitively. There's no reason to torture yourself with counting characters, words or lines in order to get the delete command correct in one go.

The single most intuitive ah-ha moment I’ve had in Vi was the change verb. Change In <object>: ci( means “change the text within parentheses.” Change unTil <object>: ct& means “change the text until an ampersand.” And so on. It just makes sense.

VSCode never had moments like that for me. It’s fine, sure, but it wasn’t anything special.

No, it isn't, but that's perhaps the point: it's so direct. It rarely gets in the way. Sure, some things are easier done in emacs, but that's when you just copy the text to emacs, do your thing, and copy it back.

What VSCode isn't, is elegant. I think the OP likes that very much, and VSCode has forsaken that in favor of simplicity and a kind of free-for-all extension mechanism.

You may love to learn then: Those aren't part of change.

"i(" is a selector (see ":help object-select"), and it also works with "y" or "d" or even in visual mode. Likewise "t" is a movement that can even be used on its own.

There's also a sibling to "i", "a", that includes the delimiter used, and "t" is a valid delimiter for HTML or XML tags.

> There's no reason to torture yourself with counting characters, words or lines in order to get the delete command correct in one go

No one proficient in vim does this. Just use relative line line numbers or delete words in full with ciw.

That's such an overtly bad characterisation of Vim editing that I can't take your reply seriously.

It's --however-- the take of the article.

Vim feels equivalent to a horse carrier in comparison to vscode to a modern car.

To me, vscode feels like a huge truck with too small an engine, and vim feels like a sports car.

Also comes with all the downsides of a modern car (ads, random BS, blackboxes, etc...)

I feel like those trying to teach me Vim are the same who refused to learn to use VsCode.

Once configured, I can do the same than Vim. With more features.

> Once configured

is doing some heavy lifting here. "Once configured" vim can do the same you can do in VsCode. Editor wars are really the dumbest nerd fight.

You do you, but I'd be curious to hear what you think you can do in VS Code that you can't do in vim - what these "more features" are. Vim, and Neovim, have an expansive plugin culture. They are designed to be very configurable and customisable, so that the software fits around you and what you need to do. What features do you find missing?

Also, I get that you feel vim users are being a bit evangelical - "trying to teach", as you put it - but I can assure you that I, for one, have used VS Code plenty (including using vim keybindings), and it's just not very good for me. It doesn't fit me.

It's slow, it's not as configurable to my needs. I sometimes have nothing more than my iPad Pro (and magic keyboard), with me - I can mosh/ssh into a dev box, tmux up a session get to work easily, I never found a nice way to make VS Code work in this pattern.

What's the point in being a software engineer if you can't have software that fits you? Yes, vim has a learning curve, but then I get to make it my own and make it fit what I need. Same with tmux, my shell, and so on. In my experience, VS Code forced me a little more to fit to it rather than the other way around.

Like I say, you do you, but don't think all vim fans are talking from a place of ignorance.

I find VSCode to be sluggish and buggy, especially plugins, and also gave up on figuring out how to rebind jk to Esc. I also don't trust the telemetry flag, so I'd rather not open any proprietary projects in it.

It also can't run in a terminal, as far as I know.

Such a bad take as once configured Vim can do everything VSCode can and more.

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