No one's saying vim is superior. However, you need to have an open mind to understand the alternatives.

It's not like Vim is a paid product and by you not using it, Vim is going to die out soon or anything.

If you dont' like it, great? You are happy with the alternative, great. You seem like you just want to deliberately start an argument and then prove you are right, but why?

At this point, I feel like "I use Vim" is like "BTW I use Arch", said usually with an air of superiority as if choosing "the hard way" was somehow smart.

Modes are everywhere. My microwave has a defrost mode. Cars have reverse mode. Pill bottles have modes where the bottle has to be held differently to open it.

Modelessness isn't all it's cracked up to be.

I’ve used many editors on the Mac—BBEdit, SubEthaEdit, Chocolate, TextMate, TextWrangler and a few more obscure ones.

I switched to Vim and haven't looked back nearly 10 years ago because the "modeless" editors had limitations and issues I didn't like.

I used Emacs when I worked at MIT because that's what everyone used, but it never took for me when I had to use Unix.

What the author didn't mention is that when Ruby on Rails was the new hotness, so many of the leaders in that movement were Mac users, on TextMate. But when TextMate went into limbo, and then eventually died, that tribe needed a new editor and they essentially all moved to Vim.

Many of the early Rails videos were done on Vim; they were quite influential.

I wanted an editor I wouldn't outgrow in a few months and Vim fit the bill nicely.

And to this day, I feel like I'm pretty proficient with Vim but I also know I'm using like 10-15% of what Vim can do and it's nice to know all that capability is there for when I need it.

I can't speak for other vim users but I think it's pretty obvious to us how other users work without vim and we know you can be productive without it.

Personally I make a point of not telling people to learn vim but equally I think, for example, not having a shortcut to repeat a complex visual selection is a pain.

I never feel the need to enter a thread about IDEs and point out this missing feature (especially if it's a program I don't actually know well and that might not be the case).

However I often see people that don't know vim well make statements like "vim can't do x" without actually checking if that's true.

Then we look "superior" when we point out how to do it in vim.

It's hard to win because your argument sounds like an emotional one.

So if you undo something a few steps and try something different but decide you want to go back you can’t... but you can in vim with g+ and g-

If you add the Gundo plugin you can visualise this as a tree of diffs in a side window.

I’m sure that’s been added to IDEs as a plugin but in vim it’s standard.

It also persists undo state to disc if you want so if you return to a file on another day it’s still all there.

You select some text, either via keyboard or mouse. You realise you’ve missed a bit at the start of your selection.

In vim without having to start over you press o and it moves your cursor the other end of the selection and you can now extend it.

Deselect accidentally and want the selection again? Press gv.

I’m sure these little features are available in other editors but not always or not always by default.

WTF is a standard editor and standard shortcuts? Would that be ISO or ANSI?

Isn’t that just another way of saying I can’t do these things but don’t care? The Blub argument effectively.

I think the popularity of learning vim might be similar to what jiggawatts mentions as the 'perception of speed', especially for tools in the UNIX world, as well as being 'the hard way' like you mention. But I think there is value in learning how to use vim. I see the advantages of learning vim are programming language agnostic. Vim is focused around words and text, treating them as objects, and creating a mental map of keystrokes to modify those objects. I think it's somewhat analogous to typists that hunt-and-peck vs touch typists. Opens up a lot of productivity, but it's definitely not needed to be a writer.

I agree vim has many limitations. It has a not so great language for scripting, no out of the box setup for stuff like refactoring or renaming symbols in your codebase, GUI feels like a second class citizen (IMO, compared to the terminal version). In a lot of ways, it might not hold a candle to the likes of VSCode, Atom, Visual Studio, XCode, IntelliJ, Eclipse, etc.

The nice thing is that you could add a vim-like plugin to any of those IDEs/editors to match the spirit of vim, at least in terms of navigation. It's not like you need to stay in vim to reap the benefits of the mental model.

I think that's where a lot of the power and appeal of vim is. Vim is still drawing a new generation of programmers, artists, and hobbyists to learn this strange text editor, with its unique but powerful way of interacting with text.

As a 30-year Vi/Vim/NeoVim user, I can confidently say, "No, you can't."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wlR5gYd6um0