Programming

Definitely. vim is hard to get used to, but after you do, it's damn powerful especially with plugins. Always nice to be able to do typing and coding entirely on the keyboard and not needing to move your hands to the mouse for something. Also, if you do any Linux cli stuff, you almost always have access to vi at LEAST. So being familiar with the tool she the gui and something like nano isn't available, is invaluable.

:wq

Learn vim and use it in vscode, kinda gives you the best of both worlds

I may be the odd one out here, but I don't think that the editor you use is really going to make all that much of a difference for your efficiency. Text manipulation is rarely your bottleneck when coding, so I'd just go with an IDE / editor you feel comfortable with.

I used to be a hardcore vim user but nowadays I just use VSCode with a heavily customized keymap.

I think anyone who does programming should at least give Neovim a good shot. Like, dedicate a few months to get a feel for the basic controls, use relative line numbers to jump to lines, f and F to jump to spots in lines, ciw ci" etc. to change stuff. If it's not your thing then fine, but learning Neovim is like switching from clicking file -> save to ctrl+s, but with everything.

You really don't need a mouse at all and in the end you'll get to make changes as fast as you can think. It's a language you speak through your keyboard to your editor and things just happen once you get fluent. E: checking if editing helps this thread federate better.

Emacs is awesome, definitely learn to use it then learn to lisp. Vim mostly learn to exit before running EDITOR=emacs

Yes, for me the happy medium is to learn and use Vim emulation within your IDE of choice. Purists will object that Vim emulators offer inconsistent levels of support, but in my experience they all offer support for the core functionality plus varying extras. For those who already have Vim fully configured for their workflow and preferences, there is no substitute. But for anyone else, Vim emulation in an IDE is a great way to level up your text editing powers.

You should learn basics of Vim just for quickly editing config files on servers.

For programming I don't think the speed gains are worth it. It would take more time to learn it than I would shave while using it.

When you get into Vim, you love it. There's so many buttons for movement and editing that you never have to mash the arrow keys ever again. But that's because you must customize Vim for how you like it. As you use Vim and accustom to the crazy binds, you will find situation where you think "I want to do this movement over and over and faster". Then you learn about the dot (repeat) key, the "copy(y) within quotes", the "jump to next function" button, the "jump to definition" button, etc... And if you don't find a button for what you need? YOU MAKE YOUR OWN BIND. I have a button combo that does "take the current word under the cursor and grep it for every file with the same current filetype down the directory tree". I use that button 50 times a day. Pure bliss.

It's a text editor where you can program in your favorite movements.

Just to help you differentiate: vim is a text editor with a huge ecosystem of plugins and its own "language" where you can make the vim program into a sophisticated IDE. Vim also has very clever key bindings to help you interact with text more efficiently. My advice is that keyboard navigation using vim key bindings are worth learning, not necessarily sinking time to creating an IDE in vim for yourself with plugins.

vim key bindings make it incredibly easy and efficient to manipulate text, after putting effort into learning it. Most text editors, IDEs, Note taking apps (Joplin, Obsidian, etc.) have VIM mode where you can interact with text same way as in vim. Hell, I wish Word had vim key bindings!

To make VIM useful as an IDE you have to spend time to find plugins you need/want, customizing, tweaking, troubleshooting, etc etc.

personally, in my professional software eng career, I don't have time to troubleshoot VIM plugins or customize my setup and I need an env that is frictionless and basically pay others to maintain it and make improvements. I use IntelliJ IDEs and VS code with vim binding enabled.

I do hobby around with it in my free time, making tweaks here and there but it is a huge time sink. Also, my squishy brain cannot always take the overhead of keyboard navigating an IDE. On days I am mentally drained of chasing evasive bugs, having a GUI that where i can click through menus without having to invoke a command really helps with mental fatigue.

I would suggest enabling vim keyboard navigation and getting the hang of that first while still using android studio so you don't lose all your IDE features. Looks like your editor has a vim plugin. Then, if you like navigating with a keyboard, you can slowly build your own IDE using plugins and switch over.

It is really a good idea to learn vim. It’s everywhere, particularly useful when connecting to remote servers.

In order to use it for all your development needs, you’ll probably resort to multiple plugins. The advantage: wizardry, the disadvantage: you get used to it, and won’t work on vanilla remote installations.

I like to use vim for every day scripts and remote text editing, while using helix as main code editor.

Helix is not yet as popular, but it comes with batteries included. Many of the plugins that you’d install in vim come as a feature in helix. It is also a modal editor, and it varies slightly in it’s use, but a nice addon to your toolbelt.

Engineer here who has had to work on many machines that were off-network, without a monitor or with a crappy one, with no ability to install random software:

There's a very good chance that vim is installed. Getting good at it certainly helped my productivity working in those environments

I think it's worth it mostly because it's really not hard to get to a point where you're equally as efficient as you were before, and from there the sky's the limit.

It's also really nice not to have to open a full gui to make quick edits to files.

For me though, it's not even the efficiency which brought me to it, it's that it just feels so much nicer to use. Someone once told me it's like using a really nice pen: it's not going to make you a better writer but it will make writing a hell of a lot more enjoyable.

Vim is great because you can enable the bindings in nearly every editor.

I really enjoy vim, especially when I need to work in a lot of remote sessions. I’d recommend neovim with a prepackaged config like lazyvim and customize from there as you figure out what works for you.

I'm quite biased, but I think it's great to learn vim. The best advice I've ever heard for beginners is "don't feel like you have to use the command line vim, start with gvim or the vim mode for VSCode and gradually try to use more and more vim keys". Check out ThePrimeagen on Youtube too. He's not everyone's cup of tea but he's got some really good playlists for getting started.

vim keybindings are an amazing and useful skillset to have.

And neovim is the best editor in existence.

Let the religious wars commence!

Personally, I'm a vim guy, but I think either is fine. For most coding purposes, a graphical editor like VScode is fine, but knowing emacs or vim is essential if you ever want to edit files without a GUI, e.g. on a remote host over SSH.

Learn vim, but learn it well. Not enough people take advantage of it's macros feature. Once you've tried that, you'll never go back.

Also, while you're at it, spend some time learning i3. Then you'll be able to show your principle engineers a thing or two.

I would recommend trying a vim extension for vscode first if thats what you're used to already. The learning curve can feel a bit daunting but once you learn some of the really basic shortcuts you will have already noticeably increased your efficiency imo

Learning vim was valuable for me since many servers that I manage have it installed, so it's easy to edit files on them. For example advanced searches using regex (and replacing), multiline editing, jumping to function definitions etc.

For servers that don't, they usually have vi at the very least. (i.e. BusyBox)

As for emacs, I've been interested in trying it before but it seemed to require a separate graphical application? But I could be wrong.

I'm simply faster with vim and I don't even do anything fancy. It's also available basically anywhere there's a command line as the default.

If you want to edit code use the old and veterans vim or emacs. But if you want that and beyond, just use emacs.

What I suggest is know how to use nano.

Vi and Emacs only look at those if your going to use them a lot. Otherwise you will forget. I have used both at times. It is very personality based to. Vi and now Vim people will say how great it is. On the other hand not for me, I think they are nuts. I favor emacs but even then I really favor nano. Just different perspectives.

Vi, yes, it's on about every distro especially server one without X.

I used exclusively emacs last century, even in DOS/Windows, but not anymore, vi or nano are ok for simple editor.

Using Vim-Bindings in an IDE is nice, but I could live without them.

The structurally-aware commands of your IDE are at least as important. (expand selection, surround, refactorings, the contextual commands on alt-enter, ...)

Do not replace your IDE with cli vim.

I can personally recommend learning to work with some kind of modal editor, whether that is vim or one of the more modern alternatives like neovim or helix.