Is Vim worth the effort?

I'm the bastard child of IDE's and code completion. Would my workflow be faster if I were familiar with Vim?

No, use Emacs.

I read that the shortcuts used repeatedly in Emacs are uncomfortable :/

>>3
I was kind of joking, but I do use it and it's not too bad. I prefer modeless editing, but you should just try both and see what you think. Both of them have built-in tutorials, they shouldn't take any more than half an hour or so each.

>>3
Oh yes they are. But on the other way, Emacs is very good if the only thing you have is a text-mode terminal. You can have email, an excelent diff, web browser and lots of shit. But using Ctrl-X o just to change windows is a pain in the anus.

>>3,5
ErgoEmacs minor mode, or just make your own layout, you lazy ass.

my intro to unix exam had use using Vim and Emacs, we had to memorize shortcuts and all learn pretty much everything about it, worth 25% of the semester grade

that alone should tell you it was a really shitty class, but in the end Vim wins

>>3
You can't even use most of the default Emacs shortcuts unless you have a US keyboard.

Textmate. Watch the screencasts.

>>9
I use Linux, as I belong to the Free Software Movement. This rules out proprietary software like Textmate.

your anusflow will be faster if you are familiar with cocks

>>1
YES man! Learn vim. You will ride so much faster code. And its even kind of fun. Just imagine how much text you write in your life. (Status) Reports, Mail, Code, all that stuff is much faster.

>>10
Then that rules out Vim, as it is non-free Ugandese extortionware.

Code completion allows you to quickly write large blocks of code. This is appealing to n00bz because they think your typical hacker wakes up and writes 4000 lines of fresh code before going to bed.

The reality is that once your project grows to a moderate size, you're going to spend more time debugging it and making small fixes/changes than you're going to spend writing it. The bulk of the code you do write is going to be mostly repetitive boilerplate.

Once you understand this, vim's modal philosophy starts to make sense and you won't be so shocked to see vim hackers program way faster than their colleagues do in Eclipse.

That said, I don't just go around telling people they should use vim. If you find that your current tools are slowing you down and it's time to move on, then I would recommend it. Run vimtutor to learn the basics. Print out the graphical cheat sheet. Google .vimrc and edit yours. Once you have a few handfuls of commands at your disposal, you'll start to notice how fluidly and effortlessly you make edits. Eventually you'll be looking at a stack trace and without even thinking or touching the mouse you'll fire off a seemingly complex combination of keystrokes and have your bug fixed in less than a second. You'll feel like a god. That's how vim users feel whenever they code.

Can Emacs do most what vim does? Yes. Will it always take more keystrokes? Yes. Will those keystrokes always be less if at all intuitive? Yes. Will you get carpal tunnel syndrome? Yes.

>>14
Yes.

use control-n in vim to get some word completions.

M-x viper-mode is VIP Quality.

Depends. Vim is very good at manipulating text, and it cares little whether that text happens to be Java source code or Lisp or what have you. That often is pleasant enough, but stuff like autocompletion that actually has a model of the code or integrated build and deployment scritps were made for a reason, and I see a lot of people spending days configuring vim and Emacs to become half-assed IDEs using disparate plugins, full of UI inconsistencies (vanilla vi   is OTOH very consistent) and lacking integration, thus defeating the purpose of having a both a minimalist environment and of having an Integrated Development Environment.

I personally find that Emacs, with little tweaking, is a very decent C, Lisp (Common Lisp it seems, Clojure to a lesser degree) and L^AT_EX and R IDE, even if they don't work very much the same across languages (the key bindings vary, as well as the capabilities, etc.), so I use it in those instances. For Java, on the other hand, I wouldn't use anything short of an IDE, except for small code snippets but then I prefer using vim for that, if only because it runs nicely on a terminal emulator.

Now, that is of course partly a fault of Java, but the thing is that your needs come first.

>>18
s/of having a both a/both of having a/

Only if you are a glorious FARTIST.
We /anus/riders,
we fart autism together,
we compile lisp together.

its not enough to learn how to use vim, you have to know how to set up all the config setting in your .vimrc file to get vim to do what you want it to do

>>21
and this would be an example of how you set up your .vimrc file:
http://amix.dk/vim/vimrc.html

Very idiotic mess

It's written in Java, but jEdit's actually a very nice editor.

>>24
Stop advertising your shitty software on /prog/, Slava.

Use Yi instead.

http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Yi

>>25
Make me, Bram.

There really isn't much effort. I know that is sounds like a whole new world but if you read the tutorial you'll memorize the basic functionality in less than two hours.

Now with that said, I've been using Vim for a year or so and when it comes to editing it isn't really that much faster but that's the steep gradient of the learning curve.

All in all it was worth it even for basic functionality only because keeping your hands on the home row is much more comfortable.