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Comment by farresito | Hacker News Reader

I personally am a fairly lazy person, so moving my hands away from the keyboard all the time to reach the mouse is just too much, and I get tired fairly fast. That's the main reason I use vim.

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This was what originally attracted me to Vim, but I found it similarly jarring to jump all the way to the Esc key every time I wanted to switch back to execute mode. I couldn't fathom why such a poor choice was made for that key until I saw the computer it was created on: http://www.catonmat.net/images/why-vim-uses-hjkl/lsi-adm3a-f...

My .vimrc now has "inoremap jj <Esc>" in it, and that was the final missing piece to get me into uninterrupted-productivity mode with Vim. Since you seem to have similar preferences, you might find that a useful optimization.

ETA: Apparently whoever I got this idea from got it from the Vim tips wiki. http://vim.wikia.com/wiki/Avoid_the_escape_key

I do the exact same thing, but with the 'jk' keys. It works really well. I also have 'JJ' (insert mode) mapped to create a new line on top of the current line and go into insert mode, and 'jj' (insert mode) to create one line under the current line and go into insert mode. It seems like it makes no sense, but I have gotten used and works wonderfuly (I could finish writing the parameters for a function inside the parentheses, press jj and simply open the braces that make the function's body, instead of having to go to escape mode or having to press ')' and then enter to get out of the parentheses and go to the next line.

Thank you for the tip anyway :-)

I don't understand neither of you two. Why bother with jj or jk when there is <Ctrl-C>? There are few cases when it differs from how <Esc> works, but those are rare and make changes big enough to justify jumping to <Esc> anyway.

It's faster, in my opinion. Using ctrl is one of the reasons people end up with the pinky things in emacs. jk is in my home row. I would rather avoid having to reach the ctrl key. I think ctrl-[ does the exact same thing as ctrl-c. It's just a matter of preference.

I don't really have occasion to press the ctrl key in the course of normal typing in vim, so it's much easier for me to hit jj. In particular, jj is right under my right index finger which makes it one of the easiest key-combos to hit without too much travel or thought.

Same, though I don't know if tired is the best word for me. For me, its just like, whats the point? Being able to use a computer without having to move my arms more than an inch or so is kind of...relaxing?

Maybe what you need is the AlphaGrip[1]!

[1] http://allthingsergo.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/gri...

I've got one, the mouse leaves a lot to be desired.

An upgrade I've made to my Alphagrips (with the optical trackball) is to use either a stainless steel ball or a teflon ball instead of the cheap plastic trackball. Edit: Just remembered I also replaced the tiny balls holding the trackball with teflon balls. I think the biggest improvement was just from replacing the main trackball though, I rarely have to clean the sensor/rollers anymore.

My biggest issue other than that is the behavior of Shift doesn't match other keyboards :\ Can't shift click to select ranges of text.

Where did you get them to ensure the right size? I'd be really interested. I tried to mod mine with an IBM trackpoint, with no success.

Ordered them from Mcmasters. I'll have to check exact dimensions later, but I want to say they were 1" and 1/8"

Extreme-Temperature Slippery PTFE Ball, 3/4" Diameter

316 Stainless Steel Precision Ball, 3/4" Diameter

Extreme-Temperature Slippery PTFE Ball, 1/8" Diameter

Hope that helps! I also tried the same stainless steel in 1/8", but that made the trackball loud.

Thanks!

Someone did a teardown a couple of months ago. Looks interesting.

http://www.reddit.com/r/MechanicalKeyboards/comments/2yfb7e/...

It's annoying, but one also loses focus. I'm also a huge fan of i3wm, which is a tiling wm that requires no mouse in order to be used, so I can move around without actually moving my hands off the keyboard.

What makes you think other editors would require you to us a mouse??

Nothing.

I just chose vim because I know it does let me move around without a mouse. I wouldn't mind using nano if it gave me the same thing vim gives me.

I'm open to try new things if they are worth it. I've tried many things, and for now vim, although not perfect, is superior to the rest of things.

I bought a thinkpad keyboard with a trackpoint for just that reason.

I prefer not using the mouse at all, and rarely do when I'm using emacs, but for any other apps and most websites it's unavoidable. The trackpoint is right there under my index finger and the mouse buttons convenient for thumbs. Far better than reaching for a mouse or even moving your hand down to a touchpad.

I do have a Thinkpad, as well, and I also use the Trackpoint :-). Very convinient, indeed. It's one of the things I cared the less about when I bought it and now it's one of the things I can't live without.

That's not lazy.

Lazy is preferring to move your hand over to the mouse instead of spending weeks learning an obscure editor called vim.

I have a beef with using the word "lazy" wrong like that. Lazy is undisciplined. The undisciplined will not become good programmers.

It takes a lot of discipline to learn vim.

It takes a lot of discipline to automate mundane operations.

How many lines of code do you type in a day?

It's not about the amount of lines I write, since vim would barely give me any benefit. It's moving around, for example, when you really feel the difference. And it's not only vim, but other stuff that I also have configured to not have to use the mouse (like firefox, through vimperator, or the wm, through i3wm).

Don't get me wrong. I don't have anything against IDEs. I've been playing around with neovim's msgpack (the thing that would theoretically allow neovim to be embeded inside Intellij, for example) and if I get some time, I might start implementing an Intellij plugin to allow me to use neovim (ideavim is very buggy, unfortunately. I really appreaciate the author's effors, though, but the way to go in the long term is through neovim).

Okay, so you basically want to interact with your UI using only using keyboard shortcuts. I would agree that it does indeed provides a productivity boost.

I still believe that if you are productive in an IDE like, for example, Intellij, there is no point to really go to vim. What I often recommend is that people give it a try, even if it's sublime's vintage mode or ideavim, which is pretty good out of the box (but very buggy if you get into customizing). At the end of the day, vim is another tool, and tools are there to help us be more productive. I don't work with very large projects nor do I usually do any sort of refactorings, so vim works very well in my use case, but I very much understand when people complain that vim doesn't do what they need. I run a very customized version of vim (15 plugins or so plus around 400 lines of config in total), so, as you can expect, it's very hard for me to leave it :-).

Sometimes it's not just LOC.

I use vim and git to manage my todo lists. I use vim to take meeting notes, and leverage pandoc to produce aesthetically pleasing pdfs to mail out. I use vim when writing my documentation in Markdown and/or reStructured Text. Vim is my default text editor for pretty much everything.

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