Just use Sublime Text (Why Vim is bad by design)

https://delvarworld.github.io/blog/2013/03/16/just-use-sublime-text/

by verroq • 12 years ago

3 2 12 years ago

delvarworld.github.io

z1mm32m4n• 12 years ago

"For the first 1-2 years of your Vim usage you will be much less efficient than your current editor because of the odd yet lovable key bindings."

Can confirm: starting using vim for freshman year of CS this year, noticed appreciable productivity enhancements within weeks.

Vimballs might have been the way to go before, but most of the mainstream, widely-used plugins have long since moved to GitHub and pathogen.

Also, a lot of the complaints this article raises about vim arise from the fact that he's trying to use vim like emacs, when vim is meant to be used as a complement not a replacement for standard terminal tools.

gregjor• 12 years ago

Here we go again. Vim sucks because I think it sucks, and I think it sucks.

For the first 1-2 years of your Vim usage you will be much less efficient than your current editor because of the odd yet lovable key bindings. After about 2 years you will be proficient.

I know a lot of vi/Vim users and none of them needed two years to become proficient. I learned vi in a couple of days, but I was coming from line-oriented editors. If you've been raised on GUI IDEs that do everything for you Vim will feel like a step back, but if you need more than a few days or maybe a week to learn your way around Vim you're doing something wrong.

The argument that Vim is more efficient is dubious and untestable.

Not dubious or untestable, though I don't know that anyone has ever done the tests. In my anecdotal experience with the many editors I've used (including Sublime) and watching co-workers struggle with Eclipse et al. I think Vim is at least as efficient as any other editor. A big part of efficiency, for me, is an editor that gets out of the way. I'm a touch-typist so going for my trackpad (MacBook Air) is better than reaching for a mouse, but still not as good as keeping my fingers on the keys. It's not the time it takes to move my fingers I care about, it's the mental switch from one mode of cursor movement to another and back again.

After dismissing the idea that Vim is more efficient as "dubious and testable," i.e. a matter of opinion, the author says This is all especially scary because Vim out of the box is awful. I can’t stress how bad of an editor vanilla Vim is. Surely that's a matter of opinion. Out of the box Vim works great for me and for many other people.

Plugins are essential to make Vim usable.

Not in my experience. In fact plugins make Vim worse. By trying to make Vim work like some other editor with plugins and customizations you lose one of the main benefits of Vim: it works the same everywhere. You may prefer your own car to a generic rental car, but a rental car isn't unusable just because it doesn't have the same stereo and seat covers as your own car. If you think you need to "fix" the rental car before it's usable you have a problem.

Most experienced Vimmers I know don’t know any Vimscript.

Same here. Why bother? If you aren't trying to turn Vim into Sublime or Eclipse you don't care. Most experienced programmers I know don't know how to write a compiler, but that doesn't prevent them from writing code.

Vim is missing an incredible amount of core functionality for modern editing.

What is "modern editing?"

Things like ctag integration, project management, project browsing...

ctags work fine for me, didn't need to do anything special, just map a couple of keystrokes. Project management, project browsing? There are hundreds of solutions for that, take your pick. The file system works fine for me, and if you use a Unix flavor you have lots of file and project management tools just a :! away.

Now we need to find files. Let’s use Vimgrep! Oh wait, that sucks.

Not sure how it sucks, but it's not the greatest. I install ack where I can and use that, just point vimgrep to ack. Easy.

Finding the right Vim plugins is like being in an exclusive club.

All of this time searching for plugins trying to make Vim into a magical castle for development bliss. Now I see how the two years startup time happened.

Vim Is Bad By Design™ 1: Oooooollllld

Given what we had before 1976 I'd argue that vi is great by design. Even Vim was an improvement in 1991, when it was designed. If age is the criteria for determining bad design I guess I'm bad by design too. And so is C. So are your Knuth books.

Vim Is Bad By Design™ 2: GUI

Have you never seen the various GUI-enhanced versions of Vim, such as MacVim? I use MacVim and it's GUI does a lot more than support styled tabs. You're just out in the weeds now.

Vim is designed to run in a terminal. That’s why it’s explicitly linked to only monospaced font for the GUI. A terminal can’t draw a UI.

vi was developed to run on a dumb terminal because it predates PCs and GUIs. Vim however supports GUIs and different fonts. And terminals can indeed "draw a UI."

Vim is Oddly Bad at Indenting

The single example offered to demonstrate this terrible flaw worked fine for me in MacVim.

After four years of Vim use, 700 hand written lines in my .vimrc, and 45 plugins, I cannot in good faith recommend that someone start the Vim journey.

After more than 30 years of vi/Vim use, maybe 20 lines in my .vimrc, and 0 plugins, I can in good faith recommend Vim. I think you need to lighten up on the customizing. I see teenagers over-customize their cars to the point that the car is no longer reliable or comfortable, but that doesn't mean Chevy can't design a car.

Look kid, I love you and all, but just use Sublime Text.

Nope. I'd rather know one editor really well, an editor that is available on every platform and every server I ssh into. I don't want to make a huge editor context shift just so I can get my favorite font and colors on the screen or whatever.

Another example of how untreated OCD is the bane of IT productivity.

Just use Sublime Text (Why Vim is bad by design)

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