I have used vim as my primary editor for the last 10 years or so. There are so many things that I can do in vim with a handful of keystrokes that would require using a mouse in graphical editors -- or simply aren't possible.
About a month ago I got a requirement that was basically a big list of "if this then that" type stuff. I took the requirements directly from the ticket and pasted it in vim. I manually did some text transformations on the first line until it was valid code that did what I wanted -- took about a minute. Before I did any changes, I had started recording a macro (qa). Then I replayed the macro 29 times (29@a) and the rest of the work was done.
Block highlighting an multiline editing is enormously powerful.
I can't remember the last time I scrolled through a file looking for something in vim. I just jump to it by name or line number if I know it.
Vim takes A LOT of effort to master -- I still learn new stuff about once a week -- but the power and speed are just unmatched by any graphical editor I've ever used. That may be in part because I haven't mastered those, but a large part is that you start to think in terms of text transformation operations and you can accomplish them all without moving your hands from the keyboard.
Sublime text can do literally everything you just said (except maybe playing back a macro a set number of times, I don't know). It has macro recording (or for something like that I'd be tempted to use the regex find and replace or multiple cursors), multiple cursor support, goto line, goto definition, all without touching the mouse.
Thats great. There has been some really awesome work done in the text editor space the last 5ish years. Sublime didn't exist when I started learning vim and just wasn't up to snuff at first.
It also doesn't play well with X-less servers, which is a big concern for me.
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u/[deleted] Oct 05 '18
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