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Users of Vim and similars, what exactly makes it useful compared to other text editors? How much time do you suppose you save when working with it? (programming.dev)

submitted 4 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I'd like actual examples instead of "I work faster", something like "I can move straight to the middle of the file with 7mv" or "I can keep 4 different text snippets in memory and paste each with a number+pt, like 2pt", things that you actually use somewhat frequently instead of what you can do, but probably only did once.

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[–] robolemmy 5 points 4 months ago

Maybe I’m atypical, but for my entire career I spent large portions of my day logged into servers via ssh or whatever. Since I couldn’t count on anything fancier than vi, that’s what I used. At some point it was so familiar and second nature that I stopped using anything else, even on my personal systems. For the final 15 years (I’m retired now) I was working for a cloud provider, managing literally thousands of systems. The vast majority of our work was automated, of course, but when anything broke, the fallback was ssh, bash, and vi.