Not necessarily -- you're universalizing your experience.
I learned vim in the nineties and still use it daily. I can play it like a piano.
There is simply no substitute for deep-trained muscle memory. I don't futz; I just sort of want and the cursor is there and the paragraph is changed, etc.
The risk, though, is that I have to protect this muscle memory like a precious investment. I actively avoid tooling that prevents me from using it, or will create a bunch of conflicting habits. I'm effectively married to vim, and, to be more specific, the extremely dialed-in neovim config I use.
Like a pianist. Because musicians aren't the only ones who need an HD realtime uplink to their minds.
I agonize over shortcut changes and consider long-term impact on typing speed, because typing speed -- like website loading speed -- is conceptual fidelity, and can make the difference between capturing an idea and losing it forever.
I'm always surprised that other engineers don't notice this, but then again, I didn't really notice it either, until I got severe carpal tunnel for a year or two back in the mid '10s.
Not necessarily -- you're universalizing your experience.
Perhaps I was overly terse; I meant to do the opposite, with regard to the limited perspective represented in the previous comment!
I don't futz; I just sort of want and the cursor is there and the paragraph is changed, etc.
Our strategies are very different, but it sounds like our experiences feel much the same. I don't really think about editing at all; my fingers just do what years of practice have trained them to do, while my conscious mind works on the actual problem.
I made my own quirky commitment to keyboarding speed: I learned to touch-type very young, using the Dvorak layout, and I've been cruising along at 100 wpm ever since. I have never learned QWERTY at all, so a normal keyboard cripples me - I become a slow, clumsy, two-fingered hunt-and-pecker, for whom getting any text into the machine represents a significant labor. (This is the primary reason I rejected vim, twenty-odd years ago - the Dvorak layout scrambled its command mode into anti-ergonomic chaos.)
In that way, I very much agree with your belief that typing speed matters! I have simply found it in a different layer of the stack.
I’ve been using IntelliJ since version 2. It is the best tool I’ve ever used. It’s grown with me throughout my career, and supported almost every language and change that I’ve needed. I had to resort to using Xcode because I was doing iOS development. I tried AppCode, but my iOS days ended soon anyway. I am completely content and happy paying Jetbrains for the software. It’s high-quality, it’s awesome. I remember people trying to get me to use Eclipse back in the day, that’s a piece of garbage slung together.
I think IntelliJ is great, but there is no doubt that it's a massive resource hog. I work on a legacy project that is probably doing many things wrong, and IntelliJ is sometimes using so much memory on it that the OOM killer just kills my IDE.
There are still people happily using XEmacs and it's not like the pace of development was breakneck for GNU Emacs itself or of upstream vim until there was neovim to compete with.
I'm sure VSCodium could survive as an editor even if Microsoft got bored. There's certainly at least enough community support to port it to newer OSes and maintain stuff like OpenVSX
I guess we'll see, lets hope we're alive and in the industry long enough to see the outcome. I'm very hesitant to trust any corporate sponsored product to continue after the company has lost interest.
Comments
Yes, there is a crisis. The "Atom" editor is a good example of what happens when your editor is maintained by a business.
The majority of people are investing in tools that wont be around in 20 years time. Emacs and vim are likely safe, not so sure about the rest of them.
Tools come and go. I can't even easily remember the names of all the editors I've used over the decades. It's just part of the process.
Not necessarily -- you're universalizing your experience.
I learned vim in the nineties and still use it daily. I can play it like a piano.
There is simply no substitute for deep-trained muscle memory. I don't futz; I just sort of want and the cursor is there and the paragraph is changed, etc.
The risk, though, is that I have to protect this muscle memory like a precious investment. I actively avoid tooling that prevents me from using it, or will create a bunch of conflicting habits. I'm effectively married to vim, and, to be more specific, the extremely dialed-in neovim config I use.
Like a pianist. Because musicians aren't the only ones who need an HD realtime uplink to their minds.
I agonize over shortcut changes and consider long-term impact on typing speed, because typing speed -- like website loading speed -- is conceptual fidelity, and can make the difference between capturing an idea and losing it forever.
I'm always surprised that other engineers don't notice this, but then again, I didn't really notice it either, until I got severe carpal tunnel for a year or two back in the mid '10s.
Perhaps I was overly terse; I meant to do the opposite, with regard to the limited perspective represented in the previous comment!
Our strategies are very different, but it sounds like our experiences feel much the same. I don't really think about editing at all; my fingers just do what years of practice have trained them to do, while my conscious mind works on the actual problem.
I made my own quirky commitment to keyboarding speed: I learned to touch-type very young, using the Dvorak layout, and I've been cruising along at 100 wpm ever since. I have never learned QWERTY at all, so a normal keyboard cripples me - I become a slow, clumsy, two-fingered hunt-and-pecker, for whom getting any text into the machine represents a significant labor. (This is the primary reason I rejected vim, twenty-odd years ago - the Dvorak layout scrambled its command mode into anti-ergonomic chaos.)
In that way, I very much agree with your belief that typing speed matters! I have simply found it in a different layer of the stack.
Fascinating -- I too once had to choose between my mastery of Dvorak and mastery of vim.
I choose vim, but I agree that I was forced to choose by how hecking terrible it is to use vim under Dvorak.
If anyone who is reading wants a cool project, make a kakaoune-like Dvorak-specialized text-mode editor!
The time I save using jetbrains today is well worth the "risk" of having to learn a new tool sometime in the next 20 years.
I’ve been using IntelliJ since version 2. It is the best tool I’ve ever used. It’s grown with me throughout my career, and supported almost every language and change that I’ve needed. I had to resort to using Xcode because I was doing iOS development. I tried AppCode, but my iOS days ended soon anyway. I am completely content and happy paying Jetbrains for the software. It’s high-quality, it’s awesome. I remember people trying to get me to use Eclipse back in the day, that’s a piece of garbage slung together.
I think IntelliJ is great, but there is no doubt that it's a massive resource hog. I work on a legacy project that is probably doing many things wrong, and IntelliJ is sometimes using so much memory on it that the OOM killer just kills my IDE.
There are still people happily using XEmacs and it's not like the pace of development was breakneck for GNU Emacs itself or of upstream vim until there was neovim to compete with.
I'm sure VSCodium could survive as an editor even if Microsoft got bored. There's certainly at least enough community support to port it to newer OSes and maintain stuff like OpenVSX
I guess we'll see, lets hope we're alive and in the industry long enough to see the outcome. I'm very hesitant to trust any corporate sponsored product to continue after the company has lost interest.