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Discussion on: Vim: from foe to friend in 9 minutes

 
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Florian Rand

The key question here is, why do modal editors exist in the first place? In the early days of Unix before mouses were widely used, all the editing was keyboard-driven, from moving the cursor around the document to more complex operations, like string substitution.

This answer

if Vim is so awesome, how come no other editor has adopted some of its capabilities?

Because when mouses started to be widely used, there was no point in modal editors. But again, there is a reason why vim or emacs survived all these years, they are incredibly powerful.

As for modern editors, well, actually there is Oni.v2.

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omerxx profile image
Omer Hamerman

I get that, I do. But the thing is that while it isn't explicitly mentioned, mouses are convenient but are key in making us lazy, slower and thus less productive.
Heck, even arrows are "banned" in Vim...

So yeah, a mouse is easier, and if you don't want to learn too hard it's obvious why would you use it.
But for those of thus that care about productivity and satisfaction, it can't be achieved with other IDEs, no matter how familiar you are with their own set of shortcuts. In Vim it's a philosophy translated into concepts, rather than a few nice keyboard shortcuts.

This is all IMHO of course...