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A comment on The Efficiency of Vim. Parent comment

Re:The Efficiency of Vim by mattnewton on Thursday February 27, 2025 @11:50AM (#43196074)
Even with that skill, I am arguing that figuring out a regex for your find and replace operation, or a sequence of commands to jump to the next line, are cognitively demanding in a way scrolling the mouse until you see it, or clicking around a minimap, is not. People do not tend to actually wall clock the time they spend thinking about what to type. I would have this experience too- I would feel like a wizard having stitched together a sequence of multiple commands, and remember that, not the fact that I didn’t get anything done that day I wouldn’t have with sublime text or vscode.

I think there was a time when vim saved a lot of time over other editors, and it still feels like a powerful time saving when you kick off a macro, but I am not convinced it actually is saving time over modern editors with their far easier to use features and plugins.

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Re:The Efficiency of Vim by robenkleene on Thursday February 27, 2025 @02:23PM (#43197543)
I've used Vim for 10 years+, and I think this is a spot on summary. One thing you covered well that I'd emphasize is Vim feels really good to use, which is insidious. There's a game-like satisfaction to using Vim that I think makes it difficult to objectively evaluate as a user whether it's actually more productive since it's so cognitively satisfying to use.

Even with all that said, I think the type of productivity that Vim's edited language provides is overall pointless. E.g., it just doesn't optimize things that are actually hard and/or time consuming (at least relative to other similar solutions to the same problems, like multiple cursors). The one exception being really complex edits, per the macros you mentioned (e.g., `:cdo norm` is the most effective way to do a complex edit that isn't supported by a IDE refactoring command that I know of), but I don't think most folks in this thread are talking about that when they talk about Vim's productivity (e.g., stuff like `ci"` is cool, but come on who cares, it's not like making small edits like that have ever been a big deal).

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