Coders or lemmy, what editors do you use? Is it worth learning a new one?
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Modal editing for just raw text input would actually be slower, because you also enter and leave Insert Mode. I find it's very fast and powerful for navigating around the text, which you probably do a lot more than actually editing it. And when it does come to editing, there are a lot of higher-level tools (at least in Vim) for accomplishing things more quickly, like the 's' command and 'q' macros.
I think getting into a mental "flow" state is really valuable, and muscle memory is important for being able to stay there. If your muscle memory is to navigate around using the mouse, that's great, but Vim feels faster to me.
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I happily use Helix for Rust, etc projects, and as a general editor. I switch back to VSCode for TypeScript/Svelte projects because the plugins make it more productive for me. I do miss the editing experience and need to check if there's a VSCode plugin that lets me not confuse my muscle memory.
Helix was the thing that finally made me remap my
tabkey toesc. -
I keep hearing about how modal editing is faster
I've always been skeptical that optimizing text input speed would make a significant difference to overall performance. IMO if you are unhappy with your setup then look around but if you're not you don't need to have FOMO about it.
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Well I was mostly looking to learn vim and was trying to use Helix as a way to do that because it looked like vim, but with a commands window that popped up to help learn the commands. They're upfront about making some breaking changes from vim though, and while I may not need to jump into a bunch of different machines that often I do like the flexibility of being able to hop into vi, vim, nvim, or some GUI editors with vim bindings relatively comfortably. So I found that LazyVim was more what I was looking for personally and nearly as easy to work with out of the box.
I am glad to see the project seems to be going strong. That was another minor concern of mine, there's little risk of vim going anywhere, but I remember being excited about the Atom editor a while back and that just kinda faded away. If it passes the test of time I'd be happy to try it again in the future. I figure it would be easier to go from vim -> helix than vice versa.
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That's the thing: I do feel vscode being slow. On my work machine, it's fine - it takes about two seconds to open a project from start. But on my older laptop, that's a solid 10 sec before I can start editing.
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Sublime Text.
The only thing I need from my editor is syntax highlighting and not be slow.
(Assembler, C, Python, Java and Bash are the languages I mostly work with)
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Panic Nova on macOS, VSCode on Windows, neovim in the Shell.
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neovim. i much prefer the motions of helix, but there’s just some plugins i can’t live without.
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I do still use sublime as a "note" app, where I a "cheatsheet" open with a bunch of common commands I need for our project + a todo.
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I use the vi option or plugins for Sublime, PHPStorm, and Pycharm or whichever IDE I'm using.
Works for chrome and Firefox too. -
Haha, I know that feeling from earlier when I was trying out
hx --tutor. Just staring a the keyboard trying to remember which key to press, only to press the wrong one and have it do something completely unexpected. -
That's a good argument. The editing speed is not the limiting factor in my workflow.
Honestly, I think my interest for modal editing is a bit irrational. Maybe I don't want to be a normie, using the default keybindings
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There is more value in understanding how to extend and customize your editor than in searching for a new one. Use whatever your workplace provides the best support for, and then customize it from there.
I think there's something to be said for shaking up your environment periodically as well and trying new things. Sure, there's a week where you edit at a snails pace, followed by a month where you edit a bit slower than normal, but different tools really do have different pros and cons.
For the code bases I've worked in, this evolved from necessity as the code files were so large many editors were struggling, the rules for the style so custom that editors can't be properly configured to match, or the editor performance in general was questionable.
I went through a journey of sorts from IDEs to Electron based editors to Emacs and currently am working with Kakoune (and a bunch of other editors like Sublime, Helix, and Zed that couldn't meet my requirements or didn't match my sensibilities). Pretty much every change has been the result of the editor pain points that couldn't be addressed without actually working on the editor itself.
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seeing mscode/codium/vswhatever makes my brain hurt. geocities of code.
now i am using Zed. problem solved. -
Helix’s is amazing. It’s pretty simple and it has tons of out of the box features like lsp support. I switched from vim and never looked back tbh. It’s far superior
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Why geocities of code?
