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Discussion on: Will Vim give me more productivity!?

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0ctavia profile image
Octa

Vim can be a big productivity boost but it has an upfront cost. At first it's tricky to get the hang of modal editing and moving around, editing, going back to the mode where you move around etc.
Second, VIM doesn't have a lot of the "crutches" that IDEs have, and if you want certain features, you need to research and implement plug-ins, sometimes transforming VIM into something very different.

My experience has been that VIM is excellent for small projects, works okay on larger ones if it's well organised or has a logical structure. I have no auto-suggestions and a very basic autocomplete only (just previously used variable names), so I find that I have a better memory and knowledge of things I coded in VIM. However when I'm trying to unravel spaghetti code, I might pop over to something more IDE-like.

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meenachinmay profile image
Chinmay Anand

If you are only conscious about auto complete in vim then its okay. On youtube i saw many people showing there vim working like charm for every single need to write code even for large projects.

youtu.be/Iid1Ms14Om4
Watch this guy here.

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ktorek profile image
Paweł Kruszewski

This guy is great :) Citing: "you will be more productive, you'll just be covered in coconut oil for the rest of you life" youtube.com/watch?v=-I1b8BINyEw :D

However after 6 years of using VIM as a main text editor (not IDE) I'm roughly at 30% of his speed. It's a thing to consider. Once you'll not be able to use VIM though a whole day of coding like I can't with Java- the productivity benefit will not be that clear.