[photon_collider]

Strangely, I've noticed mixed opinions from developers about whether learning vim is a productivity boost. Some people believe it is while others disagree.

I'll admit my FOMO was what originally got me to start learning vim. I still barely know the basic motions but I'm starting to think it could lead to a productivity boost once I get over the learning curve.

[TheRoque]

The productivity boost is highly subjective, it depends a lot on your work. Do you edit files a lot or spend more time thinking ? Do you use some graphical tools on the side that forces you to grab your mouse anyways ? With AI tools now, where you can now basically select a file and prompt "rewrite all in snake_case" in VSCode it's becoming even less evident. I think the biggest gain from vim is simply if you're more happy using it or not.

[znpy]

> The productivity boost is highly subjective

There is a quote from Apple UX designers/engineers about testing the keyboard vs mouse for doing stuff in the OS.

Apparently the test subject always reported that they keyboard-driven controls were faster, but the timing measurements showed that mouse were faster.

Chances are the keyboard feels faster, rather than being actually faster.

I'll add another point of view I developed while observing many LaTeX vs Word or Excel vs SomeObscureCoolThing(tm) threads: people will happily waster thousands of hours over many years to learn vim/emacs/LaTeX/SomeObscureCoolThing but will plain refuse to spend 20-200 hours (again, over many years) to properly learn how to use Jetbrains' stuff (IntelliJ etc) or Word/Excel/PowerPoint (or the LibreOffice equivalent) or some other mainstream tool.

I've seen countless time web-apps being developed in months that could have been an excel sheet developed in a week. People wasting weeks on their documents because after a software update LyX would not open the documents anymore. People (particularly in university) being super-stressed, wasting precious time and occasionally missing deadlines because they waster too much time fighting LaTeX to align tables or images because they refused to properly learn how to use Word (or the LibreOffice's equivalent, writer).

And don't even get me started on the plumbing of various tools together. Most vim/emacs user (and I say this as an emacs user) can only integrate other tools as long as there is some copy-paste-ready code, but they can't go much further.

So... Yeah productivity boost is incredibly subjective. And chances are it's also fake.

It's not too much of a big deal (meh) but I'm annoyed by the fact that all this isn't even acknowledged.

[stvltvs]

The real productivity boost happens when you become fluent and it feels like a second language that describes actions on text objects. At this point I can do most things as fast as I can think what needs to be done. It's like being bilingual.