I just watched DistroTube’s video “Vim Can Save You Hours of Work” [1] in which DT compared Vim to “traditional” text editors. This leaves us with a question: How does Vim compare to a “modern” text editors, such as VS Code?
In many text-editor discussions where Vim is involved, I saw a lot of focus on Vim’s features that the other text editor is missing, without mentioning features in the other editor that can make up for its lack of Vim-specific feature.
This video is not meant to be a competition; it is meant to highlight the different approaches these editors take to improve your editing experience. I would love to see similar videos showing these editing tasks with other editors I never used as well: Emacs, IntelliJ, Sublime Text, etc.
I wanted to emphasize that modern text editors, Vim included, all have the ability to save you a lot of time. But at one point, efficiency at editing text will come down to your own skills and familiarity, and not your choice of editor.
I’m an ex-Vim user (using Vim as my primary editor for over 6 years) and now using VS Code as my primary editor for 3 years. Still, I find myself using Vim a lot, and learning Vim definitely helped me level-up as a developer. In my opinion, learning Vim for me still is worth every effort.
References:
[1] DistroTube (2020), “Vim Can Save You Hours of Work”
→ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bshMXXX40_4
[01:48] “dmenu-edit-configs.sh”
→ https://gitlab.com/dwt1/dotfiles/-/blob/master/.dmenu/dmenu-edit-configs.sh
[15:24] Chris DeLeon (2015), “Coding an HTML5 Canvas Game with JS in 5 min 30 sec”
→ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KoWqdEACyLI
[15:27] flicknote (2013), “Vim Chorded Key Mapping (vim-arpeggio)”
→ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b9c30ZovKIo
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