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Vim is built different
(lemmy.ml)
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this post was submitted on 09 Jun 2025
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Me:
Be in a professional job, have to use crappy corporate software that takes weeks of training to use because it's UX is absolute trash.
Decide, 'fuck this, why would we waste all this time training people to use unintuitive interfaces when we can just make intuitive interfaces?', spend months teaching myself coding, convince my company to pay me to write scripts so I can do it full time.
A few years later, finally transition fully into the world of software development by taking an intermediate dev job at a well known major company.... only to find my colleagues building our dev environments around VIM and not seeing an issue with it :/
Are you guys actual programmers? What's wrong with using Vim for development?
Yes, ones who value time and efficiency.
Why would you waste time teaching your devs a series of arcane commands to accomplish basic tasks that GUIs make obvious?
I get it when you're a sysadmin or embedded hardware dev who needs to access the file system in CLI only environments, but outside of that it's just waste of training time and resources to build your standard dev environment around unintuitive tooling when stuff like vscodium exists.
You don't grok vi.
That's fine and you don't need to. But don't knock it if you haven't even taken time to learn it.
Yesterday I needed to insert a tab character on every line from 2 to 31,000 something. I made the line selection keystrokes in Cursor - it immediately crashed so hard I had to restart my PC.
Vim did it in a few milliseconds.
Oh. I'm going to go practice some of that now. Thanks for the link.
The literal entire crux of my point is that core processes at a company should have intuitive software that doesn't require weeks of training.
So yes, I will knock VIM if you decide to use it as your company's baseline coding environment. It raises the floor for no reason and forces everyone through a bunch of training when they don't need it to actually do their job if their software was intuitive.
If you want to personally use it to do something powerful I have no issue with that, same way I have no issue with devs writing themselves bash or node scripts, what I have an issue with, is using it as the baseline. It literally requires training just for most devs to be able to exit it, and again, this is when tools like VSCodium have existed for years and are perfectly capable of handling large files.
You always have to learn the processes in a new company, this is just part of that. And if they don't give you the explanations, training and time to learn, that's a good sign you wouldn't want to be at this company.
Maybe also speak to some of your new colleagues, whether they had similar trouble and see if you can improve the process for the next person.
This thread seems entirely filled with people who seem to not grasp my core point.
Yes you do, but in most cases, no you shouldn't have to. Software should be intuitive. If it's not, it's more efficient to write software that is, rather than waste time constantly training everyone on inefficient software. This is literally one of the core tenants of the agile manifesto.
I agree with your core point, but no software is intuitive.
Most people can intuitively both exit VS Code or edit and save a file with it.
Saying that no software is intuitive is a false equivalency or overbroad generalization.
I am 100% confident that your claim is factually wrong.
Devs
What makes stuff like the [X] button on the corner and Alt+F4 intuitive?
Multiple years of having used MS Windows and similar looking software as a student.
They got the marketing part right here, at least.
But if we are being inclusive, nothing really is intuitive.
I have seen BTech graduates struggle with installing software using the Wizard that is so omnipresent on Windows, so I don't expect anything to be intuitive at this point.
We grasp the core point: vim is not typical. This is not insightful.
What we care more about is the link to the jobs portal of the company there will be an opening at soon that uses vim as it's standard dev tool chain.
You can learn enough Vim to be productive in it in about 3 minutes.
You can install some plugins; your experienced coworkers have probably figured that out for you.
It's ok to be a junior, but you should investigate things from time to time. You may even surprise yourself.
But you do you.
I'm a vim novice. I basically know just enough to save files or quit, paste with formatting, and "insert" changes. I think I used to know how to find within a file, and I'm sure I could learn again in an instant, but I haven't had to do that in a long time for my noobish tasks. I know it is way more capable than that, but I haven't had to learn more features yet since I use it at a 'nano' level.
I agree it only takes 3 minutes to learn these things, but personally it took me a bit longer to make them muscle memory.
I get it if someone were to be annoyed that things they knew how to do in another program they had to re-learn in vim, but this kind of thing it seems like you would just accept that you're going to be frustrated and then put in the work to learn it so you can work more easily with your coworkers or whatever. Like you said, vim has serious advantages, and it seems a little short sighted to not be willing to learn from people that want to train you up in a tool to be more effective.
Last post from me. I have given you accurate information in good faith. Since you've decided to become aggressive and hostile, I can tell that you're an unpleasant person and I'm glad you're not on my team.
Good luck and have fun out there.
Vscode definitely can't handle large files like vim can. I can open files that are multiple GBs in vim without issue. Vscode definitely cannot.
What do you mean "build our dev environments around vim"? If you mean they write dev tooling in vimscript and explicitly require everyone to use it, I actually agree with you. I don't believe employers should really ever force any particular editor or IDE if the work is getting done. I would be equally annoyed by a workplace forcing me to use vscode instead of vim. It would slow me down way too much.
If you are just complaining that they build dev tooling as a CLI, hard disagree. That is absolutely what dev tooling should use because it's actually universal and can be used regardless of your editor choice.
At my workplace, our dev tooling is done via CLI and our developers use vim, emacs, and vscode. Because it's all CLI, it's easy for individual developers to add their own scripts to automate parts of their workflow as they see fit (and if such automations are deemed useful by the group at large, it will get merged into our shared devtools repo). We even have some editor-specific stuff in there people have written that they find useful, but it's entirely optional.