How would you distinguish an awareness of tool strengths, and a recognition that for the specific use in question, keyboard is generally faster / easier / more reproducible?
Because really, that doesn't sound like hate to me. It sounds like proficiency.
Dude - you're currently embodying exactly my point.
You think you're proficient - and hell, for your workflows you probably are.
I'm telling you - I spent two years in Vim (it's a phase) I know how to use it just fine, it just didn't end up mattering that much to my day to day life (It turns out I rarely just slam something out on the keyboard non-stop).
To the point where it was basically a wash on performance: small bump in editing speed, HUGE loss in hardware compatibility and flexibility. To the point I eventually stopped because it made pair programming a complete pain. Hell, I probably still have the old copy of my config & vundle setup somewhere in github - but it just DOESNT matter.
You've locked yourself into a world where you seem to think text manipulation is a big part of the day (and who knows, maybe you write novels or do spreadsheet manipulation all day, and it is!). But for me... I spend the vast majority of my time thinking/planning/debugging/discussing/researching/etc... Typing was less than 1% of all the time I spent at a computer. If it turns out I'm actually spending 1% instead of the 0.99999% I would using just vim.... who cares? Just seems to be you.
Again: I've used a wide range of editors. I'm using a graphical one now (the default Chrome/Android edit dialogue). I'm not at all unfamiliar with them.
When I need to do heavy-duty text editing, especially of any kind of a repetitive nature, I transfer contents to a vim session and do the work there. Even on Android. (Thank you Termux, the One App on Android That Does Not Precisely Suck.)
You seem to think I'm making any number of statements I'm not. Specifically, I'm not stating that:
- Mice are useless. They're helpful for focusing the terminal window into which I'm typing. Or playing games. Or using graphics and audio software, often. Or within a web browser (though I also use text-based terminal-mode browsers extensively).
- That everyone should use vim. Emacs users are also permitted to live. And yes, both tools have, as I've noted, steep learning curves, but that comes with a high payoff function. There are a tremendous number of people who simply don't have high technical literacy, or even functional literacy. See my "Tyranny of the Minimum Viable User" (https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/69wk8y/the_tyr...), and studies of US adult literacy rates (https://nces.ed.gov/pubs2019/2019179/index.asp). Neither of those are elitism, they are an acknowledgement of the cognitive landscape and a realisation that the overwhelming majority of people will not and/or cannot use advanced tools.
- That I don't use other editors / word-processing tools / development tools. I have, and some are listed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31771672 But having learned vi / vim, and having had it available on the majority of computing environments I've used over the ensuing 35 years, it is the tool that I, personally, find most useful and efficient. I also* don't spend the bulk of my time actually typing text, but when I am, vim most gets out of the way of my actually doing so. Vim's design philosophy is that even when you're in the editor, most of your time is not typing, but editing (command mode), and that is in fact the default mode of vim. You leave command mode to insert or otherwise add or modify text, then return to where you can read, search, or make other adjustments.
Finally, there's that efficient use of time thing. It turns out that over a 30+ year career the hardest parts aren't learning new tools, and as noted, many people seem to have a strong resistance to actually learning vim, but forgetting the old ones. As I've gone through multiple generations of computing platforms (Commodore PET, CPM, DOS, Windows 3/95/NT/etc., VMS, MVS, Apple II, Mac Classic, OSX, PalmOS, iOS, Android, ...), what's struck me is how non-durable much of that knowledge has been. Ironically, one of the first computing platforms I'd been exposed to was Unix (on teletypes no less), though it was another decade or so before I was truly using it. And again, that knowlege has built incrementally over decades with very minimal resets.
Vi/vim being amongst those jewels. Your "phase" lasted two years. Mine's lasted 32. Vive la différence.
And, moreover, why does what works for me bother you so much?
The two or three weeks I struggled as a first-year uni student have payed off more than virtually anything else I'd learned in my years at school. Seriously.
