Re:Everyone Who Tried to Convince Me to use Vim was Wrong (2...
by saurik on Thursday April 04, 2013 @01:04PM
(#5493729)
I really like Yehuda, but I must say that I always found this article personally annoying: I was one of those people trying to convince Yehuda to use vim (going way back to like 2006 when we lived in the same town and I was consulting for a company he worked at), and was probably one of the earlier people to really argue with him about using vim, and I can guarantee I wouldn't have said any of the things in this article.
I can be certain of that, as I still use actual arrow keys to this day: I started using vim well over a decade ago, maybe almost two, and I simply never got around to using hjkl. There is thereby no chance in hell that I would have told him to turn off the arrow keys (although we both know someone who probably did, who worked with him much more closely, but he has a personality type that requires him to "whole hog" everything he tries ;P).
It also has taken me forever to get around to learning even things like "cw", which I only just integrated into my behaviors a year ago. It's even a running gag on the IRC channel I spend most of my time on (and where Yehuda used to hang out) that vim is something that everyone knows some barely overlapping subset of the keyboard behaviors for ;P.
It is true that I would have been telling him to use console versions of vim, but my definition of "console" has always had "mouse support" as a key requirement: until just about two years ago I always had "set mouse=a" turned on by default, which gives you the ability to click around in both command and input modes, the ability to click and drag to automatically enter visual mode, and (in particular) fully operational mouse wheel scrolling support.
I thereby can only imagine that Yehuda simply got such strong pressure from some subset of the people who were talking to him about vim that it got him so generally angry about the whole situation that is "use vim" that by 2010 he got to the point where it just seemed like "everyone" was telling him to "whole hog" vim; I thereby can happily appreciate why this article got written the way that did.
However, I think people repasting it around now may end up with the wrong impression of "people who use vim" as a whole by going back and looking at Yehuda during this one moment from 2010 and then using this article as a guide to something important today about that community. (Which explains why I didn't ever comment on the original article, but if people are going to bring it back, I feel the need to do so ;P.)
I can be certain of that, as I still use actual arrow keys to this day: I started using vim well over a decade ago, maybe almost two, and I simply never got around to using hjkl. There is thereby no chance in hell that I would have told him to turn off the arrow keys (although we both know someone who probably did, who worked with him much more closely, but he has a personality type that requires him to "whole hog" everything he tries ;P).
It also has taken me forever to get around to learning even things like "cw", which I only just integrated into my behaviors a year ago. It's even a running gag on the IRC channel I spend most of my time on (and where Yehuda used to hang out) that vim is something that everyone knows some barely overlapping subset of the keyboard behaviors for ;P.
It is true that I would have been telling him to use console versions of vim, but my definition of "console" has always had "mouse support" as a key requirement: until just about two years ago I always had "set mouse=a" turned on by default, which gives you the ability to click around in both command and input modes, the ability to click and drag to automatically enter visual mode, and (in particular) fully operational mouse wheel scrolling support.
I thereby can only imagine that Yehuda simply got such strong pressure from some subset of the people who were talking to him about vim that it got him so generally angry about the whole situation that is "use vim" that by 2010 he got to the point where it just seemed like "everyone" was telling him to "whole hog" vim; I thereby can happily appreciate why this article got written the way that did.
However, I think people repasting it around now may end up with the wrong impression of "people who use vim" as a whole by going back and looking at Yehuda during this one moment from 2010 and then using this article as a guide to something important today about that community. (Which explains why I didn't ever comment on the original article, but if people are going to bring it back, I feel the need to do so ;P.)