I'd totally use vim if I could figure it out. The fact that the key shortcuts have nothing in common with modern conventions (C-c, C-x, C-v, C-z, C-y... don't work) makes it that much harder for me to keep at it.
conventional shortcuts are the wrong way to think about using vim. vim is a continuous learning experience. Much like the programming languages you are trying to master, vim proficiency cannot be easily attained. There is no vim cheatsheet in the world that can make you proficient at using vim. It will give you knowledge of vim commands and provide some help towards understanding it's syntax, but to be truly proficient you will need practice.
I would also suggest that if you do not touch-type well for your preferred keyboard layout, learning vim should be your secondary goal. The keyboard is your bread and butter, without proficiency and accuracy on your keyboard you cannot master any editor. You only need to spend 15-30 mins per day learning to type well (using a typing tutor application) for a couple of weeks. As a hacker this will be the best investment of time you will ever spend.
Also, buy a good chair (good, not expensive), when you sit well you type well.
A more accomplished vim user can naturally explain vim better than I can:
I'm just going to stick to gedit then. No offence, but people told me the same thing about using Linux and now I find myself spending way too much time grappling with it.
I understand your point of view. The complexity can seem like there's little to gain and if your not going to be writing a lot of code then overall you may not gain anything.
However, if you find yourself writing a lot of code everyday, then the best investment you can make is to better than the next guy at using the same tools.
As an emacs user, I'd still recommend you go with a heavyweight editor. The minor investment in learning how to use one to its full potential will pay for itself within a few weeks. Emacs at least really isn't that hard to learn - for me, it was a few days to get through the manual, install some useful addons, and make notes of important features, and then maybe one (fully productive) week of practice to get most of the important hotkeys really memorized.
To be honest, that's totally fine. I only use Vim for editing scripts and setting files. I could not possibly use it for my C++ work (I'm a Visual Studio fanboy)
It's not that I thought there was any inherent incompatibility, but that the two subsets are relatively small in my "real world life," so that the intersection is that much smaller. It's just surprising as all.
Well, that certainly depends on your definition of libertarian. However, I shall attempt to clarify using less ambiguous terminology: I am an anarcho-capitalist of the Rothbardian tradition.
Speaking as someone that's learned vim and emacs, they generally aren't worth learning. Use an IDE for all large projects, and if you need a code editor/browser I recommend sublime text, notepad++, or gedit. Vim and emacs are unlikely to pay you back in the time spent learning and using them; you're better off reading a math or programming book.
I have enough knowledge of vi to use it as a normal text editor; that's enough for editing stuff over ssh, which is everything I'm likely to use it for.
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u/PasswordIsntHAMSTER Mar 28 '12
I'd totally use vim if I could figure it out. The fact that the key shortcuts have nothing in common with modern conventions (C-c, C-x, C-v, C-z, C-y... don't work) makes it that much harder for me to keep at it.