this post was submitted on 08 Apr 2024
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As someone who's been a software developer for over a decade and in IT even longer, I still don't use vi/vim for anything other than when crontabs have it set as the editor.
Honestly if you don't use vim motions in your ide of choice, you're missing out big time. Being able to do things like "Delete everything inside these parentheses".
di(or "wrap this line and the two lines below r in a pair of {}"ys2j{, or "swap this parameter with the next one"cxia]a.with a single shortcut is game changing.Even just being able to repeat an action a number of times is ridiculously useful. I use relative line numbers, so I can see how many lines away a target is and just go "I need to move down 17 lines" and hit
17j.Absolutely insane how much quicker it is too do stuff with vim motions than ctrl-shift-arrows and the like
That's really neat, but I don't think I do that often enough to really make the performance hit of learning a whole new thing and memorizing keyboard shortcuts and commands worth it. I don't find myself refactoring code a ton, especially after moving to a more TDD-like model.
It's less about refactoring and more about navigation of your code while editing. Ever wanted to delete a single word?
dawdeletes the word your cursor is currently in. How about "copy everything up to (but not including) the nearest "D" on the current line?yfD.The whole point is that editing code in the middle of writing it, not just refactoring it, is immensely faster.