Thursday, February 17, 2011

Re: OT: Vim Humans are...

On 02/17/2011 01:43 PM, meino.cramer@gmx.de wrote:
> Hi,
>
> first of all: My interest and/or question, which let me post here, is
> neither intended as the initial spark for a flame war nor as anything
> _against_ someone or something. May be it is a kind of "exploring the
> psychology of the vim human". And: English isn't my mothers tongue --
> anything sounding harsh, badly or negatively results only from this --
> it is by far NOT my intention!
>
> The start of all this was the observation, that there are many
> editors out there, which are rated differently and often on a
> scale from totally bad to fantastic. Every kind of review result
> seems to exist.
>
> But with vim it seems (at least to me) a little different: Either
> you hate it or you love it and will not touch anything else your whole
> life long (I am exeggerating only a _little_ bit ;) )
>
> The reason for this observation -- the polarization into mainly two groups
> of people -- seems not only based on the properties of vim alone.
>
> I think (read: "I dont know for sure...") that there is a certain kind
> of perception of text and/or handling of text by vim people, which
> matches perfextly the way of text usage and presentation by vim itsself.
>
> May be I am totally wrong here -- so please understand this as a
> big question mark ... I am just only driven by curiosity.
>
> Is there a certain perception of text and text handling by vim people
> which may be distintive different from people who definetly dont like
> vim?
>
> And again: May question does not indent to judge over "the better way
> of the perception of text" !!!
>
> Is there a kind of vim psychology??? ;)
>
> I am interested in answers as I am interested in questions... :)
>
> Best regards,
> mcc
>
>

For me, initially it was the observation that if you have
a series of editing commands to do, it's very inefficient
to have only a single mode. In other words, let's suppose you
it's 15 editing commands to be done in a row:

modal editor: <esc> 15 keystrokes or so <back to insert mode>

non-modal (but powerful) editor like emacs: 15 keystrokes +
15 "escapes" like ctrl-x or whatever.

Therefore, you spend nearly twice the work to do the same
task, whenever you can combine many editing commands in
a row.

In effect, what happens is that in a non-modal editor you
end up working in a more inefficient way because "smarter"
combinations of commands are too complex/verbose. Go to
the open bracket in current line? In vim I'll do f(, in
a non-modal editor I'll most likely just hold arrow key
until I get there.

More commands means you can stay on homerow
for all editing tasks.

In the end, it's a question of initial investment of
learning time for a payoff of efficiency in the future.
If I'm a warehouse manager and I spend 5 minutes a day
typing, it would be bizarre to learn vim (except as
a fun / hobby project). If I'm a writer or a programmer
and I edit for hours every day, it'd be equally bizarre
not to learn a modal editor.

-Rainyday


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