When engineers report that switching to Vim has massively improved their productivity, I can't help but think that the way they work must be very, very different from my own.
When I "program", 95% of what I do is read documentation and other technical resources, conceptualize what I want to happen, and construct the corresponding logic flow, while trying to anticipate potential problems and corner cases. In other words, most of what I do doesn't involve touching the keyboard at all.
If Vim magically tripled the speed at which I'm able to edit text, I doubt it would have a noticeable impact on my overall productivity. In fact, even if you gave me a brain-computer interface that allowed me to manipulate text at the speed of thought, it wouldn't matter much. I touch-type at around 70 WPM, which is very average, but if I two-finger typed at 15 WPM instead I would still be able to produce exactly as much code as I do today.
Simply put, text manipulation is not at all a productivity bottleneck for me. I need much more time for thinking about code than I need for writing it.
Is this really unusual? How do people operate for whom Vim gives a productivity boost? Does code just flow from their brains into their fingers? I don't get it.
When I "program", 95% of what I do is read documentation and other technical resources, conceptualize what I want to happen, and construct the corresponding logic flow, while trying to anticipate potential problems and corner cases. In other words, most of what I do doesn't involve touching the keyboard at all.
If Vim magically tripled the speed at which I'm able to edit text, I doubt it would have a noticeable impact on my overall productivity. In fact, even if you gave me a brain-computer interface that allowed me to manipulate text at the speed of thought, it wouldn't matter much. I touch-type at around 70 WPM, which is very average, but if I two-finger typed at 15 WPM instead I would still be able to produce exactly as much code as I do today.
Simply put, text manipulation is not at all a productivity bottleneck for me. I need much more time for thinking about code than I need for writing it.
Is this really unusual? How do people operate for whom Vim gives a productivity boost? Does code just flow from their brains into their fingers? I don't get it.