19

Many people claim that editing text using the vim editor is faster than using a mouse-based one, for experienced users.

There seems to be a lot of anecdotal evidence for this claim, but considering that the typical vim user probably spends a lot of time typing, it seems normal that they will seem faster - in any editor.

Are there any rigorous studies evaluating this?

Improve this question
14
  • 2
    Why do you think the answer to the other question isn't generalisable to vim in particular?
    – Oddthinking ♦
    Jan 30, 2016 at 0:11
  • 6
    Surely depends on the user. For me a mouse based editor is faster than vi (because vi is modal and a large proportion of time I get beeps)
    – mmmmmm
    Jan 30, 2016 at 0:15
  • 4
    Personally, I've found that automatic indenting, syntax highlighting, multiple tabs, and a sidebar showing me a list of functions and objects defined in this particular source file are very convenient when I'm writing code. On the other hand, if I'm just bashing together a quick perl script I'll probably hit vim.
    – Shadur
    Jan 31, 2016 at 23:21
  • 2
    @Shadur When I started reading what you wrote, I thought you were referring to Vim because that's essentially what I have in Vim every day for work. Then you said, "if I'm just...I'll...vim," and I was confused... I've used Vim for just a month now and don't really see why everyone thinks it is so challenging to make "nice". Most of the time that I notice something I'd like to improve, I have it the way I want it 5 minutes later. I can't say the same thing about IDE's or other text editors. Also, the configuration is all in one Git repo and can be set up in 10 seconds on a new system.
    – JakeD
    Jul 10, 2018 at 1:16
  • 3
    As a programmer, I spend most of my time thinking. The mechanics of getting the code typed into the computer is the smallest part of my job. I spent like two days last week finding that the cause of a particular bug was that the check for a particular condition was being made at the wrong point. Total change: move two lines of code from here to there. Total editing time: seconds. Wouldn't matter a bit if I used Vim of Visual Studio for that. The debugging options of VS couldn't help: You can't debug touchscreen interactions live.
    – JRE
    Aug 31, 2019 at 13:34

0

Reset to default

You must log in to answer this question.

Browse other questions tagged .