How does VS2010 compare to vi when making a change to a config file on a remote machine?
He keeps banging on about fingers staying on the home row, but I don't really notice moving to the arrow keys, perhaps it's cognitively similar to switching to/from insert mode.
It's slower. I still move to the arrow keys in vi for some reason, and it noticeable slows me down when I do so. The physical movement of your arm there and back takes time, plus you can't run any other "right-hand commands" while your right hand is out of place. In terms of workflow there's no difference, but in terms of speed there definitely is.
I've not seen an emacs master at work, but I've seen a vi master at work and they are simply stunningly fast at manipulating the text. I've never seen a gui editor master come anywhere close.
I'd honestly love to see some videos. I want to see how it is faster, what it could give me. If it is I'm all for jumping ship, I've honestly never seen a Vim/Emacs master at work. I have tried to find video examples before because I want to see if it is worth learning.
I am only pointing out that all the author's examples are achievable in most IDEs, you just have to learn. There's nothing special or magical there.
And IDEs have other advantages. The phenomenal amount of code completion VS does for me means I generally only ever have to write a variable, function or method name once and from then on the first 2 characters will pretty much finish it off for me as VS is totally context aware. Not in a file, but in an entire project, in an entire solution made up of many projects. For all the imported libraries. Contrast that to basic auto-completion which can only take you so far.
Snippets make anything boilerplate fairly trivial. Using statements are included at a ctrl-. enter as VS recognises the desired namespace. You can write function calls without them existing, ctrl-. enter, and VS will add them for you in the right file which you can then jump to after you've finished the line by pressing F12 and immediately start on the new function or object method, which already has the correct parameters.
Maybe Vim/Emacs can do all this too, but it's just demonstrating that you can pump out 100s of lines of code in very little time if you really want to. But it's rare for anyone to keep that up because that's not real coding. Maybe if you'd written the program before. Real coding is thinking or physically writing in a notepad for a while, then writing at most probably 20 lines and then pondering and then writing a few more lines, pondering some more, then maybe another big burst, then some more tweaking.
At least that's how it is for me.
For example the answer for VS to this video question of 'can your editor do this' http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pCiVCiku3cM is yes. It can. But how often do you actually do crap like that?
But there's no good videos I can find demonstrating the famed Vim or Emacs power that gushing articles like this profess which I've been able to find. And almost every single time with the examples these articles provide I find myself thinking 'but I can do that in the same number of key presses in VS'. Often even less key presses.
I don't have videos to hand, but the vi master I know is a sysadmin rather than a coder - lots of glue code and config changes. I can't say I've watched a full-time programmer code in vi.
When I first starting playing with linux, I watched him get into a remote machine, replicate a few blocks in a conf file and customise them in vi, then restart the service, all in the time it would have taken me to simply complete my Windows remote desktop request.
He keeps banging on about fingers staying on the home row, but I don't really notice moving to the arrow keys, perhaps it's cognitively similar to switching to/from insert mode.
It's slower. I still move to the arrow keys in vi for some reason, and it noticeable slows me down when I do so. The physical movement of your arm there and back takes time, plus you can't run any other "right-hand commands" while your right hand is out of place. In terms of workflow there's no difference, but in terms of speed there definitely is.
I've not seen an emacs master at work, but I've seen a vi master at work and they are simply stunningly fast at manipulating the text. I've never seen a gui editor master come anywhere close.