Why I Stopped Using Vim After 2 Years Of Using It

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Chapters:

0:00 - 0:32: Intro
0:32 - 1:22: Vim Setup Process
1:22 - 2:11: Is Vim Actually Faster Than VSCode?
2:11-3:17: Customizing Vim (pros and cons)
3:17 - 3:47: Why you should still learn vim
3:47 - 4:45: The secret reason why people use vim

[ThePrimeagen]

Good video. I do not customize anything but installing plugins. Almost all my keybinds are the defaults. Only when there is no default provided do I do something. I do not have a custom font, it is my system font.

I am on your team. Customizing is a huge waste of time.

[tabafication]

As strong neovim supporter I say: it's ok bro, what's right for me doesn't have to be right for you, the important thing is to be happy with your tools. Keep on geekin' man!

[darksinge]

It ONLY took you 3 hours to get vim on feature parity with vscode? That's impressive.

[namahshrestha]

Ive seen experts on both vim and emacs. They were so fast with everything. Multiline edit, text replacement, switching between tabs, wizzing between line numbers, ..everything basically. They were working on servers so no vscode. To me these were the two reasons i wanted to learn either vim or emacs. Speed and portability. And now after 5 years in the industry i still use vscode 😂. However I still plan on learning vim.

[wallblade]

I was actually surprised finding out that people use Vim to be faster. I always thought people used it because it is a great tool to use in environments with no graphical interfaces (like remote servers)

[odometric]

I use VIM but I don't heavily modify it. I'll use tags to help browse source code, but it's really useful when looking at log files. I can just use any and all command-line commands on the VIM buffer like grep, cut, awk, sed, perl, etc. What's nice is I get nearly the same features over any SSH connection or on any embedded system or live OS. VIM works for me because I'm a completely different use case than most who use VS Code.

[whitetiger]

You already invested time configuring vim, and then you decide it was too much and dropped it? It's like buying a Ferrari and then burning it because it costed too much money XD

[sheep]

I'd just like to address a few of the points with my own case (however much it doesn't matter), for a long time I was developing on an old laptop, and the difference in speed between vscode and vim wasn't just "a few seconds, " but dozens of seconds, for everything, and vscode would continue causing problems by nearly maxing out my memory at all times, and whenever I'd type a character or open a file, it'd start devouring my CPU as well, making not only vscode very difficult and slow, but also every other thing on my computer, so in my case it did make a massive difference, which was simply impossible for me to overlook

but in terms of set up, I personally don't mind the amount of time it takes, since it's really a one time thing, I think it actually took me upwards of probably 15 hours across two days, because I was messing around and having fun, googling all the things I might want to add (although I was also stingy about adding things I wouldn't use) and writing my own scripts to add things I wanted that didn't exist, had a great time, and now whenever I want to set it up on a new machine, I just bring my little flash drive, copy some files, run a couple commands, and it's set up in 5-10 minutes

I can imagine some people not wanting to put in the time for that, but obviously you can spend much less time than I did, and it still is only a one time thing, so in the long run I don't think it's very substantial unless you really *need* an editor *right* now and can't have any delays, which I don't think is the majority of the time, but in that case I'd probably opt for just a bare vim install myself, which is pretty much what I had on my old laptop for ages anyway, not even vim felt snappy on that thing

although I do agree that for anybody with a computer that can reasonably run vscode (which is probably the majority), the speed difference is probably fairly minimal, and now that I also have a computer that can run vscode, I just use nvim because I like vim and I'm used to it

[fraelitecagnin]

What do you think about Astro Nvim? Even if I'm a beginner to programming (even if I studied programming for 2 years, I haven't done any big project) I find myself hating VS Code: I have a 2015 MacBook Pro 13 and it has very poor performance and it often lags when moving between tabs/windows. I installed Astro Nvim with minimal effort and it's configured with lots of useful plugins (it also comes with a very nice theme)

[mondo]

TLDR; pick the tools that you are most productive in.

Any professional engineer doesn't really care what editor one uses. If you are more productive in VSCode as opposed to Vim it doesn't matter. The customer doesn't care about the editor an engineer used and they shouldn't.

Personally though for me its more fun to code in Vim than VSCode. It's fun learning vim motions and more comfortable for me.

P.s. a bare repository for ones dotfiles is very useful in persisting vim config from machine to machine ;)

[dmitriyobidin]

I think it's a subjective POV, but for me it really does mean a lot. I like my every day tools to be snappy and fast, especially considering the fact that when you operate with hotkeys, you really feel the difference in ui responsiveness.

[encyclpedia-]

Don't buy a bicycle if you want a motorcycle. You can manually add on everything you need to make your bicycle into a motorcycle, but it's not really a bicycle anymore. You're not using Vim because you never really wanted to use Vim in the first place; you wanted VS Code and added so many plugins that your Vim wasn't really Vim anymore.

My vimrc is about 2KB, but that's all the modification I've done: mostly just keyboard shortcuts and a few preferences. No plugins outside of the vanilla Vim package. The beauty of Vim is you can learn new tricks years or decades afterwards. It's "bare-bones" on the surface but it really isn't as featureless as it seems. I'm pretty sure people use Vim because it's a powerful tool, not because it makes them "cool."

[amineneggazi]

You do know that you can save your config right? And never have to worry about it ever again.

[Rockem]

I always experience this flow, everytime I want to pick up emacs. Emacs is cool -> let me customize it from scratch -> hmm, maybe I should use it for everything! -> nope this is not possible -> wait, vim is simpler -> I should use vim for everything -> let's customize vim from scratch -> Maybe I should create a new type of editor, that would be cool -> arghhh it's taking way too long to configure these things -> Hey, intellij has everything that I need

[NyscanRohid]

1. Vim setup process
- ``sudo apt-get install vim``. Done. If you want to customize it, you can add plugins.

2. Is vim ACTUALLY faster than VsCode?
- VsCode has Vim bindings available, so this is a moot point. You can code in VsCode and still use Vim.

3. Vim is TOO customizable.
- So is VsCode.

"You know the mouse was made for a reason, right?"
- I don't have a problem with people who use a mouse, but since becoming a programmer, I've transitioned to working mostly with just the keyboard to get things done. Having to jump between mouse and keyboard is aggravating to me, and I don't know how it's supposed to help when I can do all the same things a mouse does with just a few key strokes. The mouse is only really useful in wysiwyg applications, and even then, document processor applications are moving away from icons and ribbons to Quick Search, which means there's even less of a reason to use the mouse for anything but media and graphic design.

[DarioVolaric]

I think it also depends what language you are using. As a front-end developer it's far more practical for me to use VScode.

[meleu-dev]

The editor doesn't matter that much. As long as it has vim keybindings I can be productive.

[sumitkumar-fzif]

Dude I agree with you so much. a lot of us forget about coding and just optimizing the tool that we forget the important part.

[Oswee]

I had never a single thought that "i am cooler because I use Vim". Never. Quite the opposite. Modern IDEs does magic. You can get way more out of IDE if you truly commit to it than out of Vim.
I think, my key driving factor was to eliminate mouse use as much as I can. And... privacy. I don't want some shady plugins or what not to sneak around. Yeah... I think these are main 2 drivers. Mby also resource usage in some cases.
And because I work with systems, most of the time I live in the terminal. Remote servers. Tmux this, Tmux that, etc. And Electron absolutely does not fit in this my workflow.
Also batch text processing feels way more efficient in Vim than in ANY other IDE. You don't need to touch mouse at all. And with post-RSI that's a huge thing.

Also... over time other tooling piles up. For example, note taking, task management, etc. If I would use things like Obsidian, Notion, whatever... that would mean that I need to "context switch" to other kind of tool which is primarily mouse oriented (those Vim extensions are awful). That breaks my overall workflow.

About the customization. That is a fun initial stage getting into Vim. But over time... I just wiped everything. Currently I use just a plugin manager and like 20 or more plugins with almost no customization at all. Bare minimum. As more custom your setup becomes, as harder it gets to maintain. Single plugin update can break everything. Or you can't figure out why Vim is behaving weirdly. Or... you want to read documentation... but your setup is too convoluted to follow the docs.

[Boxing_Gamer]

With the introduction of LSP vim and emacs is now on par with ides when it comes to understanding code.