100%. The guy is leaving something behind that doesn't fulfil him in pursuit of something that does, and what do the best minds of HN have to offer? "Well actually"
> Around the 30 second mark is a scene where the protaganist rat is waiting for a train to arrive at a packed platform. I recently had a sobering realisation while standing waiting at the platform for the Waterloo & City Line: this had become my life.
He calls himself, and by implication those around him, rats in the rat race. Whether you agree with him or not, the clear implication is a negative one.
>Those editors also let you use shortcuts without having to switch through different modes making you more efficient.
The modes are what makes editing in Vim efficient.. you don't think Vim users are out here swapping through modes looking for the one that lets them paste a line do you?
Yes. Instead of just control + v they have to switch out of insert mode and into normal mode, then do a command to paste their clipboard, then have to do a command to go back to insert mode. It's overcomplicated.
I do have a grasp on Vim. Even if I didn't the fact you used the term grasp shows that it is overcomplicated. A text editor should have such good ui that one instantly grasps it.
It sometimes seems like a lot of the Vim, ew crowd think that the sole reason for using Vim is gaining some kind of god-like ability to physically pump out and manipulate characters. Sure, maybe that's possible. For me, it's about being efficient with my keystrokes. Standard shortcuts (Ctrl+_) are pretty unpleasant for my hands - saying this having already mapped CAPS_LOCK to LEFT_CONTROL (and LEFT_CONTROL to ENTER). I like running commands using sequences of letters - it just feels physically easier to me than sequences of multi-key-presses (e.g. Ctrl+Shift+T). That Vim has other smarts around that is just a perk.
Editing text using Vim, once you've built the muscle memory, really feels super natural and effortless. I really hate reaching for the mouse; it just irks me in a way that's hard to describe. Similarly, editing code without Vim feels tedious in a similar way. Imagine scrolling a long article by pressing the down arrow over and over, or clicking the down button at the bottom of the scroll bar.
Another complaint I see is that remembering the commands is too hard an ask. I moved from QWERTY to Workman at the same time that I was learning Vim and it was interesting because I learned that I -- and probably most people, but I'm speculating -- don't associate commands or actions with letters after they're initially learned. It's all muscle memory, just particular movements of select fingers. The Vim stuff you use day-in-day-out just sticks in your brain and you don't think about anymore than you think about which fingers to activate to type words.
Of course, some people probably just prefer to edit text like they do in almost all other text-editing contexts. They can already edit text; without some kind of perceived extra value, there's no motivation to change, or seemingly even try to understand an alternative. For me, it's the pleasure of feeling efficient and doing dev pain-free.
Yep there are many more reasons than "typing fast" for using Vim. For me the main motivator to dive into Vim was to not use the mouse at all because it constantly gave me RSI. It worked great. I never again had RSI since I switched to Vim for all my coding.
I think part of the benefit of vim for RSI is that there's not much chording - pressing two keys at once.
When not using vim you often need control characters on the left hand. Ctrl-C Ctrl-V Ctrl-X Ctrl-A are all on the left. Also, for bash, Ctrl-R and Ctrl-E. I've been training myself to use the right ctrl key for all these, because for some reason I was chording with the left hand.
I've also tried to learn to use caps lock for all-caps, but with less success.
I would like for any article insisting I adopt any practice to put a little more effort into doing so. This seems to amount to "it's good", "I should have done it sooner", "it's not so bad, trust me", and "smart people like it, too". Could have been a tweet.
FWIW a fellow who has published books on the topic calls Service Locator an anti-pattern[1]. I take no position here as usage of any pattern is contextual but it's worth a read.
I think it's sensible to be critical of the language used in our craft, especially when borrowed from the more physical world, because with it comes the baggage. For example, I have a pet peeve with the phrase "use the right tool for the job" used in the context of languages/stacks, because languages and stacks are more akin to building materials than tools (IMO). Selecting a building material and selecting a tool involve different considerations, and thought-terminating cliches like the above can give a false sense of clarity. So IMO, to look at software maintenance as the author has done, I think is fair and reasonable, even if just to render obvious that software maintenance is a special variety of maintenance that differs from most usages of 'maintenance'.
I also don't enjoy coming back to large sed expressions I wrote previously but I'm starting to write them in a way that makes that much easier. I'm on my phone so this will probably be syntactically wrong but hopefully the gist is evident. Basically, load the expression from a commented 'file':
sed ./target --file=<(cat <<-
SED_EXPR | grep -v -E '^\s*#'
# do a string replacement
s#target#replacement#g
# then do something else
..
SED_EXPR
)
