Without a question, the one with text objects. Productivity is far greater with vim. Actually to be fair, Sublime's vim emulation mode implements a few text objects, but the proprietary source means no adding our own.
I don't agree with that at all. Vim is useful, perhaps, for a few text matching tricks but typing speed is rarely the bottleneck in programming. It's optimising for the wrong thing.
The only people advocating for vim are those who have already gone through the pointless pain of 5 years learning to use the thing. It's basically a cult, or at least a club. And frankly, watching these vim "power users" is usually quite frustrating - they struggle to do trivial tasks which can be accomplished in sublime with a simple right mouse click.
It is important to know the basic vim commands for when you are editing text via ssh but for everyday use sublime text is, IMO, superior in every way.
It takes several days, not 5 years, to train your muscle memory to the point where the vim editing model is much faster for raw edits than the default editor in Sublime [1].
> typing speed is rarely the bottleneck in programming
You're right, especially if you're using a language that doesn't require a lot of boilerplate. But between the UNIX shell and the normal vim add-ons, even higher-level editing tasks, i.e. those that aren't strictly about raw editing, shouldn't give vim users trouble.
As with negatmx, I'm convinced you haven't met people who use vim properly. Name a task on which you've either seen or you'd imagine a ST user to outperform a vim "power user". I'll let you know the logical way to do it in vim.
[1] To obtain solid proficiency with the vim editing model, just work through the interactive vimtutor, read up on text objects, and spend a couple hours acclimating yourself to using the following motions and commands in place of hjkl (sort of but not necessarily in order of usefullness):
> Name a task on which you've either seen or you'd imagine a ST user to outperform a vim "power user". I'll let you know the logical way to do it in vim.
Selecting code and copy and pasting it into a chat client for discussion.
Grabbing someone else's code from a chat client and editing it, then copy and pasting it back to show them my interpretation.
Copying an error message and pasting it into a web browser.
Installing or updating any kind of plugin or package.
Doing anything out of the ordinary (vim users will be googling for the arcane sequence of commands and don't try the "no true scotsman" defence for that - they all do)
Scrolling smoothly through a large file looking for a certain method you will know by shape.
Quickly navigating a tree of files at the side of the window.
Changing the font to something post-1980.
Make it look good (this willl take infinite time)
I could go on, and on, and on.
Anyway, I have no doubt that for some tasks it's possible to train yourself to be very fast in vim, and if you find that measurably speeds up some aspect of your productivity you care about, then more power to you. However, I haven't really observed this being the case.
It's sort of like Linux vs MacOSX on the desktop. Linux people can and do customise their machines to an amazing extent, all sorts of crazy window managers and weird shell extensions, all promising great improvements in window management and shell completion, etc. But at the end of the day, I don't notice linux-using programmers as being any more productive, as a rule, than mac users, who tend to not fetishize the tool so much and just want to get on with the job. If anything, it's the opposite. I admit I'm biased against vim because of how ugly it is, which is sort of why the linux vs mac analogy works for me. I love linux by the way and use it on the server, and I also edit on the server with vim : P
Anyway, I'm making much bigger a deal about the matter in this thread than I actually feel! I just don't think vim is a slam dunk, is all.
> Selecting code and copy and pasting it into a chat client for discussion.
Note, due to HN's treatment of asterisks as formatting characters, I'm going to represent a literal asterisk as [asterisk].
In gvim, selecting code to copy into the system clipboard is as easy as "[asterisk]y plus the motion or text object (e.g. `"[asterisk]y3}' for the next three paragraphs or `"[asterisk]yat' for the current HTML/XML tag). You can even configure console vim to copy into the X clipboard: http://vim.wikia.com/wiki/Accessing_the_system_clipboard
> Grabbing someone else's code from a chat client and editing it, then copy and pasting it back to show them my interpretation.
I run vim and irssi from inside GNU screen, so it's as simple as `C-o [' (my screen prefix is `C-o') to access the scrollback buffer, spacebar to start selection, use screen's vim-like selection commands, spacebar again to yank the selection, switch screens, and then `C-o ]' to paste. The whole process is instinctive and takes no more than five seconds.
> Copying an error message and pasting it into a web browser.
See the above two answers.
> Installing or updating any kind of plugin or package.
The vundle package manager takes care of that.
> Doing anything out of the ordinary (vim users will be googling for the arcane sequence of commands and don't try the "no true scotsman" defence for that - they all do)
No, they'd most likely use some combination of the brilliantly orthogonal editing language that is Vim and the brilliantly orthogonal computing environment that is UNIX to reach a solution in time that would amaze a Windows user. In fairness, most Sublime users I know would do the same.
> Scrolling smoothly through a large file looking for a certain method you will know by shape.
How would Vim and Sublime differ on this one?
> Quickly navigating a tree of files at the side of the window.
Vim users do the same. It's called the NERD tree plugin. I personally find it faster to navigate with autojump from the command-line and then open files in vim from the command-line, but many Vim users like the tree approach.
> Changing the font to something post-1980.
You add a line to your ~/.Xdefaults or ~/.Xresources for console vim or to ~/.gvimrc for gvim. It's no harder than changing fonts in Sublime. I personally like 14-pt Bitstream Vera Sans Mono. It looks similar to Sublime's default iirc.
> Make it look good (this willl take infinite time)
I don't know if by "it" you mean the font or the colorscheme, but as with Sublime, some fonts and colorschemes are really nice and some aren't. It sounds like your criticism here, as with virtually all of your points, is that vim's default settings, unlike Sublime's, are not optimized for use as an IDE. That is correct. However, instead of bashing vim for this use case with uninformed, antagonistic statements like making it look good will take infinite time, all you have to do is ask or google how to configure vim for such a use case. A lot of vim plugin writers are ex-Sublime users, so it should be pretty easy to make vim simulate the default Sublime feature set, if you really wanted to. If you're more comfortable with Sublime, it makes total sense to stick with it. Perhaps Sublime Text's greatest strength is that its default configuration is excellent for software development. As you pointed out, typing isn't normally the bulk of development time, so if you're already happy with an editor, you really don't need to switch to a faster one. Just don't tell others who do use one that's said to be faster that you, someone who has only used their editor in a console/ssh capacity (and from the sound of it, a casual capacity at that), knows their editor's shortcomings for development better than they do.
> It's sort of like Linux vs MacOSX on the desktop. Linux people can and do customise their machines to an amazing extent, all sorts of crazy window managers and weird shell extensions, all promising great improvements in window management and shell completion, etc. But at the end of the day, I don't notice linux-using programmers as being any more productive, as a rule, than mac users, who tend to not fetishize the tool so much and just want to get on with the job.
I know quite a few Mac OS X users who care very much about their programming environment/toolset, and I do think they're more productive than those who don't.
> I admit I'm biased against vim because of how ugly it is
But it's not! If you're running it on ssh and if your console font is ugly, then yes, it will be ugly. But that's like saying that ST is ugly if you set it to use whatever ugly font your shell is set to. Vim is configurable, and a sane vim/gvim set-up looks clean and beautiful. Since you're a Linux server user, you should know the power of configuration!
Expose the current file in the side bar so you get a picture of its location in the dir tree? Install a package? Change the window size?
I'm not talking out my hat at all. I notice no productivity improvements from using vim. Maybe some appear in different lines of work, but I'm not saying it just to annoy you.
I don't notice Gentoo users being all that much more productive than Ubuntu users, either. It's basically a hobby to endlessly tweak your environment, and so is vim, IMO.
2.-Adding the package name to a file and typing BundleInstall
3.-Basic window management... (Have it mapped to Alt+hjkl)
I know how to do all of these very easily from first week of serious usage. I'm using vim for less than a year and wouldn't call myself a "vim power user".
I think it's a little bit adventurous to judge an editor that popular for that long time based on seemingly (seeing the use cases you said) limited personal experience.
You don't notice any improvements... Great! But don't equate your lack of understanding with the fact that plenty of people are extremely productive with vim, and can do quite extraordinary things with it!
Plenty of people are extremely productive using any number of tools. I like to think I am a rather productive programmer myself, despite my general dislike of vim.
However, in the general case, I don't think it is much of an advantage in and of itself, which is why I disagreed with the poster above matter-of-fact stating:
> Productivity is far greater with vim
as if that was an indisputable fact. It is not. That was the thrust of my argument.
And regardless of typing prowess, knowledge of sound, elegant design is the essence of good programming. How fast you can edit text is almost irrelevant in the long term. I know excellent programmers who basically type with two fingers, and shitty copy and paste hack programmers who do their damage at an amazing rate with vim. The two-finger typists make more than the vim wizards, and for good reason. Don't confuse the tools with the craft itself.
