Re:What Is the Most Valuable Thing You Can Learn in One Hour?
by shantly on Tuesday December 31, 2019 @09:35AM
(#21921215)
> Most of what programmers do is a lot of navigation and text manipulation correct?
Possibly I'm a terrible programmer, but most of what I do is thinking and looking shit up. Entering or modifying code, and navigating non-linearly within one file is like... a couple percent of what I do on an average day? Maybe 5% tops? Some days it may get as high as 20% of my time. Maybe.
[EDIT] add "communicating", broadly, to the list of things I do a lot of at work that's not editing code.
Re:What Is the Most Valuable Thing You Can Learn in One Hour?
by benji-york on Tuesday December 31, 2019 @10:11AM
(#21921447)
Yes and no. Feedback cycles are important. It's better for a test to fail than to notice a bug in production. It's also better for you to be able to get that thought from your head to the file in 3 seconds instead of 10.
Most of what programmers do is a lot of navigation and text manipulation correct? In normal scenarios, what keys are available to us to do that? Just the arrow keys and modifiers (Ctrl, Alt, Command).
But what if we had essentially the entire keyboard available to us for either text manipulation or navigation? We could move around or manipulate text in more efficient ways because we have more keys available to us to do different things (like say "delete until the next closed parenthesis" rather than control shift right-arrow 20 times).
That's why VIM is useful for programmers or anyone who manipulates plain text all day.