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Comment by kayoone | Hacker News Reader

As long as my programmer idols Carmack and Persson use Visual Studio and Eclipse respectively to produce amazing stuff, i dont really care about changing to vim/emacs...besides i work mostly in statically typed languages anyway, so i would miss alot of the IDE features for refactoring.

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Just spent half of the day doing AS3 in Eclipse. That was nice… thanks to the Vrapper plugin. Once you go Vim, using any other editor is a nightmare.

Maybe that's just me but I would be incapable of choosing an editor/IDE/smartphone/perfume/car/whatever because someone I admire uses it. That sounds incredibly childish to me.

> Maybe that's just me but I would be incapable of choosing an editor/IDE/smartphone/perfume/car/whatever because someone I admire uses it. That sounds incredibly childish to me.

That is not what i was trying to say. I mean that when reading HN with all its Vim/Emacs hype one could get the impressions that you cant be an awesome software developer without using vim/emacs. But some examples like mine might help to check with reality.

Lots of what you read on HN is hype, be it vim/emacs, textmate, NoSQL, or some form of super cool javascript framework that is currently fashionable. Its good to know that there are still lots of devs in the real world, using proven tools and being as productive/awesome as the people using the latest buzz.

Thanks, this explanation makes more sense than your original comment.

I agree with you on everything. These days, the number of new Vim users who switched because of some misinformed and/or shiny blog post is staggering. People now seem to just jump from one ORM or VCS or editor or framework or DB or design pattern or language to another twice a week. I wonder what would happen if nobody was there to tell them what to do?

Being a good dev is totally independent on the tools: everything that matters is in the head.

I like Vim because it shortens the path from brain to code quite dramatically. But it's definetely not a pre-requisite for being a good dev (which I don't pretend to be, BTW).

I'm not sure that there is a large group of developers that "jump from one ORM or VCS or editor or framework or DB or design pattern or language to another twice a week" actually. I think there are enough developers around these days that when they occasionally try out new tools or technologies and blog about it, it creates the impression that everyone is switching all the time.

It's hard to measure this, of course. But I have a hard time believing that there's this population of developers out there that are constantly switching tools/frameworks/platforms/etc. and getting any work done at the same time.

This group of people is mostly a construction of my brain as a result of its exposition to reddit/hn's stuff. I have no numbers to back it up.

There's probably a silent majority, everywhere around us, who act as adults but that vocal minority… boy how loud is it!

Vim doesn't make me feel like John Carmack.

It just keeps me sane. It just saves me from "arrow, arrow, arrow, arrow, arrow, backspace, backspace, backspace, backspace, backspace."

Editing python it's fine. If I was going to write c++, I'm sure I'd pick up an ide. With a plugin for vim keybindings.

Not every textbox has Vim, so learn the basics of how to type in a standard Windows textbox.

Ctrl+<L/R arrow> moves one word to the left/right Ctrl+Backspace deletes the previous word Home takes you to the beginning of the line End takes you to the end of the line Adding Shift to any of the selection operators will select the word/line in question.

Now you don't have to press arrow,arrow,arrow,backspace,backspace,backspace anymore.

Every textbox should have the option of using Vi(m) bindings.

On my Mac every textbox has emacs thanks to OSX's NeXT heritage. On my Windows box every textbox has emacs thanks to XKeymacs[1]. That's one area where I think emacs users have a leg up on Vim users, our editing style can be configured to work almost everywhere you input text.

[1] https://github.com/fujieda/xkeymacs

> Once you go Vim, using any other editor is a nightmare.

Not really. I'm over a month into using Vim full time because it's the standard at my workplace. It sucks. I can't believe that the people around me insist on using this piece of junk. It has so many problems that I never had to deal with in Textmate. Huge step backward.

Not enough credit is given to Visual Studio's Autocomplete feature. It seriously is unmatched, and to me is one of the reasons why C# is very pleasant to work with.

Except when you're not coding C#. Then it ranges from somewhat usable to utter lunacy.

Have you tried VS2012 ? Give it a try for C++ and you will see that the autocomplete works great.

I did try it. It is certainly better than before. That is, it's usable now. Nowhere near Eclipse/Java, XCode/Ocj-C or VS/C#, though.

Usually, I tend to ignore it more often than I actually find it useful. Even some simplistic look-for-common-words-in-open-buffers in regular text editors works better in my experience.

That said, add Visual Assist X and it's a different ball game.

Just use clang_complete with vim

Also have you tried the PowerShell 3 ISE?

For me the post boils down to "learn how to do these six things when editing code". Which is good advice to IDE users as well.

Okay, indentation and auto-completion are rather trivial things to do in an IDE, but most IDEs come with powerful search tools and for most IDEs I don't know how to use them.

Indentation by itself can be tricky, too. Is your code correctly indented when you copy and paste it somewhere? Can it correctly re-indent code that got mangled for some reason? How well does indentation cope with non-standard language extensions (think Qt or C++ macros)? So I would not call that trivial.

Yeah: think time is typically >> than type time. The one thing that good hand-editor coordination is good for is not breaking flow: the faster one can do a brain dump (without having to micro-manage the typing/translation of mental pseudo-code image into real runnable source code) the better.

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