To summarize, for me most of the real work of programming happens in my head, and in my experience that's a much more powerful place to work when you train yourself to do it. In light of that, all the "features" of the IDE become bloat and distraction. What I need is a fast, responsive editor that doesn't get in my way.
> I do note that you're comparing vim (a - feature rich - text editor) to massive, bloated, IDEs... I'm curious if you've tried other, often programming related, leaner text editors to compare? (ie, Sublime Text, VSCode, Notepad++, etc)
Yes, exactly, and many of those are other good alternatives to Vim. Above is why I strongly prefer text editors to IDEs. I know Vim-style modal editing with basically a language of commands in and of itself is not a good match for everyone's mental model, but personally I'm at the point where I don't have to think when I'm manipulating text: it's all automatic, and extremely powerful. Moreso from a text-manipulation than any other editor I've used. That's why I'm with Vim specifically and why it's so productive for me. Vim+unix has become (over the years) the fastest way to author and manipulate large amounts of text: it's the quickest way for me to encode the model in my head in textual, language-oriented form.
To summarize, for me most of the real work of programming happens in my head, and in my experience that's a much more powerful place to work when you train yourself to do it. In light of that, all the "features" of the IDE become bloat and distraction. What I need is a fast, responsive editor that doesn't get in my way.
> I do note that you're comparing vim (a - feature rich - text editor) to massive, bloated, IDEs... I'm curious if you've tried other, often programming related, leaner text editors to compare? (ie, Sublime Text, VSCode, Notepad++, etc)
Yes, exactly, and many of those are other good alternatives to Vim. Above is why I strongly prefer text editors to IDEs. I know Vim-style modal editing with basically a language of commands in and of itself is not a good match for everyone's mental model, but personally I'm at the point where I don't have to think when I'm manipulating text: it's all automatic, and extremely powerful. Moreso from a text-manipulation than any other editor I've used. That's why I'm with Vim specifically and why it's so productive for me. Vim+unix has become (over the years) the fastest way to author and manipulate large amounts of text: it's the quickest way for me to encode the model in my head in textual, language-oriented form.