After diving in and learning it this year, I fully believe learning Vim makes you a better developer and it should be commonly taught to developers. It has done far more for my dev skills than any single AI tool ever has, and I dont have to worry about it hallucinating.
Personally, I think Vim should be made into standard knowledge for anyone who consistently uses a keyboard for their work. A lot more software than I expected supports it, and it makes any form of text editting tremendously better.
I’d be curious to know why. I know just enough about vim that I can use it if I’m forced to (perhaps a barebones Linux system) but usually my default text editor is nano - what makes vim that much better for development?
For me, its the massive range of editting manipulation it provides, and the reduction of dependence on using a mouse. For context, I have some level of wrist injury, so my complaints around mouse usage mostly stem from that.
I would love to explain in detail what makes Vim great, but I think noboilerplate on youtube did it best with this video: https://youtu.be/sqm4-B07LsE
But if I had to explain one of my favorite parts of vim, its the fact that I keep finding new solutions to improve my ability to edit code with an ease I had never felt before. Using ‘vf’ in order to easily highlight from where my cursor is to whatever character I want to get to has saved me so much time when rewriting variables or cleaning up code. Ive barely learned about what EX mode can do, but being a lot of work involves correcting other code or duplicating it for use with a different part of the code base, being able to use the substring command is drastically more helpful than your standard ctrl+H will do. Easy example
:.,+5s/foo/bar/g
Colon is what puts you in EX mode. Period is the current line, comma indicates this is a range, +5 means the next five lines, s means substring which is the command that we are using. “foo” is the word to search for, “bar” is what “foo” will be replaced with, and g means to replace all instances. Drastically more robust and useful than what ctrl+H does.
Vim just makes it easier to manipulate text. Its drastically reduced strain on my wrists, and puts me in a flow state far more often than I ever experienced before I used it. Its kind of like aiming in a first person shooter with a mouse instead of an analog stick. Both will get the job done, but a mouse is drastically more capable at being accurate. Thats what vim feels like for coding for me.
I am either misunderstanding your post or you might be misunderstanding mine.
Vim is not the command line. It can be used in a command line, which is a nice feature, but I use Vim because it makes editting text a far smoother and more reliable experience than most text editting GUIs have provided.
I also would not say command line is superior to GUI. Both have their trade offs, and like you said, use the tool that works best for you.
As a developer though, I do fully believe devs should be taught how to use command line, and I believe they should be taught how to use Vim. Command line is near mandatory, because sometimes you cannot easily do something using a GUI, especially if that GUI is just buttons that run command line prompts like a lot of Git tools are. Solving Git issues without using command line frankly feels like a horrid scenario because you dont have the finer level of control required to unfuck yourself out of a Git issue.
Vim should be taught because it improves navigation and editting of text in much more efficient and faster ways than a GUI generally can. This is very useful in development, as editting code is often a bit tedious with a mouse and common keyboard shortcuts, and not needing to take your hands off your keyboard really lends itself to keeping focused on your code. It improves productivity while also being a useful skill to learn, as a lot of apps support Vim bindings that don’t necessarily involve code, such as Obsidian.
For other keyboard based professions, Vim would be useful but not mandatory.
If I misunderstood your post as bashing my post, then thats my bad. The way I read it felt like it was bashing my view of Vim by connecting it to the viewpoint of command line being better than GUI, which is not how I view Vim or command line at all.
After diving in and learning it this year, I fully believe learning Vim makes you a better developer and it should be commonly taught to developers. It has done far more for my dev skills than any single AI tool ever has, and I dont have to worry about it hallucinating.
Personally, I think Vim should be made into standard knowledge for anyone who consistently uses a keyboard for their work. A lot more software than I expected supports it, and it makes any form of text editting tremendously better.
I’d be curious to know why. I know just enough about vim that I can use it if I’m forced to (perhaps a barebones Linux system) but usually my default text editor is nano - what makes vim that much better for development?
For VIM development check out ctags (or LSP) with auto complete. It’s magic for large projects.
For me, its the massive range of editting manipulation it provides, and the reduction of dependence on using a mouse. For context, I have some level of wrist injury, so my complaints around mouse usage mostly stem from that.
I would love to explain in detail what makes Vim great, but I think noboilerplate on youtube did it best with this video: https://youtu.be/sqm4-B07LsE
But if I had to explain one of my favorite parts of vim, its the fact that I keep finding new solutions to improve my ability to edit code with an ease I had never felt before. Using ‘vf’ in order to easily highlight from where my cursor is to whatever character I want to get to has saved me so much time when rewriting variables or cleaning up code. Ive barely learned about what EX mode can do, but being a lot of work involves correcting other code or duplicating it for use with a different part of the code base, being able to use the substring command is drastically more helpful than your standard ctrl+H will do. Easy example :.,+5s/foo/bar/g Colon is what puts you in EX mode. Period is the current line, comma indicates this is a range, +5 means the next five lines, s means substring which is the command that we are using. “foo” is the word to search for, “bar” is what “foo” will be replaced with, and g means to replace all instances. Drastically more robust and useful than what ctrl+H does.
Vim just makes it easier to manipulate text. Its drastically reduced strain on my wrists, and puts me in a flow state far more often than I ever experienced before I used it. Its kind of like aiming in a first person shooter with a mouse instead of an analog stick. Both will get the job done, but a mouse is drastically more capable at being accurate. Thats what vim feels like for coding for me.
deleted by creator
I am either misunderstanding your post or you might be misunderstanding mine.
Vim is not the command line. It can be used in a command line, which is a nice feature, but I use Vim because it makes editting text a far smoother and more reliable experience than most text editting GUIs have provided.
I also would not say command line is superior to GUI. Both have their trade offs, and like you said, use the tool that works best for you.
As a developer though, I do fully believe devs should be taught how to use command line, and I believe they should be taught how to use Vim. Command line is near mandatory, because sometimes you cannot easily do something using a GUI, especially if that GUI is just buttons that run command line prompts like a lot of Git tools are. Solving Git issues without using command line frankly feels like a horrid scenario because you dont have the finer level of control required to unfuck yourself out of a Git issue.
Vim should be taught because it improves navigation and editting of text in much more efficient and faster ways than a GUI generally can. This is very useful in development, as editting code is often a bit tedious with a mouse and common keyboard shortcuts, and not needing to take your hands off your keyboard really lends itself to keeping focused on your code. It improves productivity while also being a useful skill to learn, as a lot of apps support Vim bindings that don’t necessarily involve code, such as Obsidian.
For other keyboard based professions, Vim would be useful but not mandatory.
If I misunderstood your post as bashing my post, then thats my bad. The way I read it felt like it was bashing my view of Vim by connecting it to the viewpoint of command line being better than GUI, which is not how I view Vim or command line at all.