alt Hacker NewsI consider my vi/vim skills to be extremely minimalist subset, and probably horribly inefficient, since they were developed to work accross a broad range of UNIX systems (SCO, Solaris, HP-UX, OSF, AIX) and I rarely add anything to my vim configs on top of that other than syntax highlighting.
But I'd still rather use it than just about any other text editor, just for the simplicity of that muscle memory alone. I have way more stuff to keep in my head than I have room for and I can't afford to expend more than about 0.0001% of context on a text editor.
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I never edited the default config much.
But then I discovered https://www.lazyvim.org/. Turns your copy of NeoVim into an IDE.
I still haven't edited the default config much, actually. But now I'm probably 2x to 3x as productive in vim (nvim, now) as before.
P.S. If you decide to check out the LazyVim config, I highly recommend reading https://lazyvim-ambitious-devs.phillips.codes/ all the way through. There's a lot of new keybindings to learn, but Dusty Phillips's book gives you a gentle on-ramp to learning most of them.
I think that it's wrong to assume that vi is the only route to deep muscle memory. Heavy mouse users develop blindingly fast Fitts’ Law targeting. And if you need essential simplicity, they have far fewer commands.
Bill Joy, the original author of vi, saw the vi commands as a problem, not a solution [1]:
The fundamental problem with vi is that it doesn't have a mouse and therefore you've got all these commands. In some sense, its backwards from the kind of thing you'd get from a mouse-oriented thing.
> that muscle memory
Once in a while I will mistakenly dump a string of keystrokes into insert mode or another application. That literal output always amazes me because the construction of those strings is so far removed from my brain's "main thread".
The inverse is if I try to write a helper function or explain to someone else how I did something they observed and I need to methodically document each action. It's like trying to describe how to walk or something.
Likewise, I'm also not very demanding of my text editor. I used vi on any *nix systems and Notepad (the original one, not the new bloated monstrosity) on Windows for most of my work. Navigation, basic editing, and searching are probably all I need.
Same. I barely edit default configs. I also mostly use emulators provided by whatever ide I use.
> I have way more stuff to keep in my head than I have room for and I can't afford to expend more than about 0.0001% of context on a text editor.
I can't say I agree. To me this is equivalent to saying "I have way more music in my head than I have room for and I can't afford to expend more than about 0.0001% of context on a piano". The tool you use for 8+ hours a day is extremely important and even small gains will pay dividends over the long run. The more efficiently the text editor allows you to do tasks, the more time you have to think about other tasks.