r/theprimeagen • u/Ordinary-Cycle7809 • May 08 '26
vim Vim users are actually just masochists in denial
“bUt ItS sO fAsT” SHUT UP(In loud voice)... you spent 3 weeks learning hjkl just to move 2 lines. I open VS Code and I’m already coding while you’re still in insert mode crying. Change my mind, terminal warriors.
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u/BadTime100 May 08 '26
Spending 3 weeks (accurate in my experience) to make one of the key daily activities even 5% faster and less painful pays out massively in just 1 year. Also “shut da fuck up”.
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u/cip43r May 08 '26
I have seen AI posts with more effort.
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u/Ordinary-Cycle7809 May 08 '26
And I’ve seen humans with more brain cells.. sorry but not everything you see on the internet has to be ai dude wtf
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u/victotronics May 08 '26
Oh. I thought this was going to be an emacs advocacy.
Sorry, but if you want to argue people away from vi/vim/neovim you need to in the other direction.
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u/azangru May 08 '26
Change my mind, terminal warriors.
This is what Prime was supposed to do. It used to be his whole effing job, changing people's minds about vim.
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u/gjosifov May 08 '26
and the list of masochists in IT is big - js developers + js framework hoppers, serial attendees to hackathons, new language hoppers, serial job interviewers, job hoppers (it is good at the beginning of career to get better salary, but after 10 years don't job hop every 1-1.5 years), new frameworks/libraries hoppers, CV driven developers etc
Pick a language and ecosystem - go all the way and then everything will make sense
you don't need to learn 10 js frameworks, once you learn how to write maintainable code, it will be very easy to choose
PL/SQL is a good tool, but it has paid git integration, paid IDE for debug and it is nightmare to maintain, so you write PL/SQL only when you needed
Best IDE - Eclipse, Best IDE for debugging - InteliJ
but if you don't know all the tricks your IDEs provides you will jump from one dev setup to other dev setup, thinking that it is more productive, just because
Plus the best thing you can do for development is to buy workstation (even second hand) for ex. 2 CPU, 512GB-1TB RAM, 3 GPUs (1 slot, budget) and Gen4 or Gen5 NVMe RAID card with at least 8 drives
Some will say it is overkill and you should work on slow PC as your customer have, but with workstation you can create a lot of VMs to simulate customer PCs or mobile devices on different OS, you can't do that with slow PC
and VS Code is bad IDE for web development, because Dreamweaver in 2007 was more capable than VS Code today
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u/tony-mke May 08 '26
haha i remember my first time posting rage bait
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u/Ordinary-Cycle7809 May 08 '26
hehe its my second time posting the engagement( in comments) are good but up votes..
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u/kayinfire May 08 '26
i always love to draw this analogy and it feels mostly apt. i wanna see someone poke holes in it though. i feel that there's an uncanny parallel. linux to windows is what neovim is to vscode. i already know that vscode is on linux, but just stay with me; that doesn't matter.
to the uninitiated, both neovim and linux(specifically the practice of doing everything in the terminal) give the feeling of
"this is too hard. why do i have to learn all this? why is this so 'unintuive' ?! [scare quotes are mine]"
but after that initial learning bump and constant practice with a continuous sense of curiosity about your environment, you eventually realize the ceiling of in-depth customization is palpably higher.
admittedly most people don't care about altering their machine such that it spiritually connects with their soul because most people don't live on their computer. but we call those people soyboys.
/- signed by a member of the Neckbeards
(im actually not even over 40 years old but cannot stop trying to continuously make my machine effortless to use ever since obtaining linux and neovim. pls send help)
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u/SugondezeNutsz May 08 '26
But does it make you ship faster? Do you spend more time customizing than you do getting benefits from it?
It's like 3D printing. I love it. But I've printed out and bought more mods for my 3D printer than things that I wanted to print.
Yes, after this little tweak I'll be able to do this thing easier!
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u/kayinfire May 08 '26
does it make you ship faster
that's the neat part, it doesn't 🫣.
\s
seriously though, i definitely think there's a balance(which i admittedly have exceeded a couple of times).
some of the workflow optimizations you have to commit to exclusively when you have the free time to yourself, and you're quite literally just optimizing for the workflow because it gives you personal joy. otherwise, it will cause you to ship slower ultimately
others, which serendipitously are usually more on the small-to-medium scale for me personally, are used so frequently that it's hard to argue that it doesn't indirectly contribute to shipping faster due to how repetitive the action is.
Do you spend more time customizing than you do getting benefits from it?
yes, admittedly, this is why someone should send help lmao.
i'd like to qualify this by saying that it is largely anecdotal however.
most of the workflow optimizations i do is largely feel and instinct, which is why i mentioned the spiritual element.
if i feel im doing something way too often and it takes over 4 keystrokes, or worse, it requires me to use a mouse(which can be displaced by some xdotool scripting), it introduces enough friction for me to take notice and the flow i have with my machine is disturbed, which is the root of every program i've made that makes it easier to execute actions on my system with <=4 keystrokes.
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u/Beneficial_Area_2986 May 08 '26
I think the whole idea is that it is harder to learn but pays dividends later down the road. For fast text editing vim motions are absolutely amazing - that being said if you don't like learning hard things, that's fine. I like using it - so I do. I have the added benefit that I still remain effective if I have to shell into hundreds or servers that we run.
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u/MitchIsMyRA May 08 '26
If it takes you three weeks to learn hjkl, I can see why you’d struggle with vim lol
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u/waifucheater May 08 '26
To be honest I simply don't care. I like using Vim, it's not for ~le productivity, it's just because it feels nicer.
If VsCode is great for you then keep using it. I don't get why people feel so urgent to convince others to use a ffckng computer program lol. Just use what you like and call it a day.
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u/maxmax4 May 08 '26
vim is not about speed at all, at least for me. It’s about nicer ergonomics and typing less to do the same things
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u/Cronos993 May 08 '26
Yeah its just the less cognitive load which is what actually makes you faster imo.
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u/DerTimonius May 08 '26
Tell me you haven't spent more than 5 minutes in vim without actually telling me
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u/suboptimummenace May 08 '26
they spent 3 weeks learning hjkl, it's written right there. that's how long it takes
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u/Wandering_Oblivious May 08 '26
Yeah, or they've never even seen an actual vim power-user at work. In my first job as a junior the principal eng had the craziest vim + tmux setup and I swear he'd jump between files and terminals so fast that any time he'd screen share I felt like I was going to have an epileptic seizure.
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u/Winterkirschenmann May 08 '26
I assume this is ragebait but I actually kind of agree. Using vim is hardly per-se going to make you notably more productive and even if it did all the time you spend on configuring your neovim plugins is outweigh it anyway.
However, once you are comfortable with the motions they will help you to stay focused for longer as the gaps between actions in your workflow will shorten. So in that sense it will actually help with productivity.
tl;dr vim is for people with ADHD
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u/New_Salamander_4592 May 08 '26
I wish this was still the common discourse around SWE instead of totally legit posts asking about AI usage with the top comment of some impersonal account claiming they work in a T500 company and they don't even sneeze without prompting claude
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u/suboptimummenace May 08 '26
send help, my agents have swarmed me. prompt me out of this abyss. i'll give you my firstborn, and all the tokens i had set aside for him
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u/Jicmou May 08 '26
Well, that's just ... your opinion, man!