vi has a steep learning curve. After 25 years of using it I still discover new things. But once you reach the first plateau in that learning curve, where you've internalized basic movement and editing commands, it becomes magical to bend code and text to your will without your fingers ever leaving position, or your eyes having to leave the screen to fiddle with a mouse or hands contort to achieve strange key combinations. You enter a state of flow (in the Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi sense) where your productivity soars. I have come back months or years later to code I've written while in that state and find it's clearer and more cogent than what I produce otherwise, yet can't really recall the specifics of writing it. vi makes that possible, and I don't think I could get there with other editors.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Tuesday September 13 2016, @01:33PM
vi has a steep learning curve. After 25 years of using it I still discover new things. But once you reach the first plateau in that learning curve, where you've internalized basic movement and editing commands, it becomes magical to bend code and text to your will without your fingers ever leaving position, or your eyes having to leave the screen to fiddle with a mouse or hands contort to achieve strange key combinations. You enter a state of flow (in the Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi sense) where your productivity soars. I have come back months or years later to code I've written while in that state and find it's clearer and more cogent than what I produce otherwise, yet can't really recall the specifics of writing it. vi makes that possible, and I don't think I could get there with other editors.
Washington DC delenda est.