I haven’t blogged for a while and I forgot how internet commenters can get bizarrely angry about statements like “I got tired of managing my vim config so I decided to stop using vim for now”, as if it’s some kind of attack on vim (or on them??)

It makes me really appreciate @grimalkina’s work on developer culture, like this https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/2gej5_v2

I still have a lot to learn but her work has helped me start to understand where this stuff comes from

(I used vim for a long time and I love it!)

@b0rk @grimalkina I was astonished when I said in a talk that the C++ macro feature was bad and people got mad at me. I thought it was self-evident and that even big fans of C++ would agree with me that the macro system was one of the worst parts of the language.

Instead they just got angry.

@b0rk @grimalkina A while back I was helping my kid with her CS class homework and sent her a followup email observing:

“You lost a lot of time and energy dealing with issues like: Using vim; copying files back and forth with scp; losing the network connection; the college shared machine is slow and yucky.”

“It's important to remove as much friction as possible from your basic process. Otherwise it's like trying to cook with dull knives and rusty pots, except worse because it interrupts your train of thought. You can't do good work with bad tools.”

“When you start the next project, start it in VScode in the beginning. And maybe set aside an hour or two before you start in earnest, just to go through the VSCode tutorial and familiarize yourself with its basic features, without trying to do that at the same time you are actually thinking about your homework. This will pay off quickly.”

Then I published the letter on my blog and boy oh boy did I get a lot of hate from the vim fans.

But the simple fact was, she lost a lot of time and energy dealing with vim.

@mjd it's easier for me to understand your post getting hate than @b0rk's.

Yours really does read as if you're saying vim is an objectively bad tool. First, you're making that recommendation to someone other than yourself in the first place. But also you make _separate_ recommendations to (a) spend an hour learning the editor before you're also trying to write code at the same time, and (b) use something other than vim. That definitely sounds to me like "the problem is not just that you hadn't learned vim in advance, the problem is also vim itself".

Whereas @b0rk really did just say "this is my preference", and not even that, more like "I'm trying out this thing to _see_ if it's my preference". If the hate-mail from vim fans had come to you but not her, that would have made perfect sense to me!

That said, I do agree that vi-type editors in general are a strange choice for a new user. It used to surprise me whenever I saw a novice choose vim, until I realised that gvim makes it easy to ignore the scary parts (https://hachyderm.io/@simontatham/114177885089067364). But then I'm also not a vim user myself, so perhaps the vim diehards would consider that my opinion still doesn't count :-)