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Are emacs and neovim worth it? (programming.dev)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I'm relatively new to programming, I've been learning C on linux using nano and it's been very fun. I've recently fallen into the emacs/vim rabbithole and I've been watching videos about emacs, Doom, spacemacs, neovim and reading comments about people switching from this or that to another config or editor, and I've been a bit lost on what to do. Then I realised that I haven't done any coding and spent all of my time focusing on editors. So here is my question (which has probably been asked many times) : what is the point of investing so much time learning all of this when there are some IDEs that are preconfigured with all the functionality a programmer would need ? Does learning neovim or emacs actually save time in the long run? I know that they're much more lightweight than IDEs and I've been really enjoying using the terminal much more than my time on IntelliJ, but having an easy out of the box visual debugger, refactoring and jump into functions can be really helpful in the long run I think, especially when starting to write actual large programs. Nano is fun, but not a time saver. Why did you chose your editor?

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

I wrote a comment on a thread with a similar topic elsewhere:

I love vim and am very happy that I’ve learned it, but at the same time I wouldn’t oversell how useful it is. I doubt that it makes you much more productive, although you might look and feel more productive. This is because at the end of the day being good at programming is more important than being good at editing text.

The main reason why I like vim is that it’s fun and because there is a closer mapping between what I want to do and the action of doing it. When editing in vim I usually have an idea of what I want to do which I can “compile” into a set of vim commands that I can quickly type out, usually without having to leave the home row on the keyboard too much. Using a “normal” editor feels sluggish and like I’m having to “dumb down” my actions.

I think that you should learn vim (or emacs) because it’s fun and empowering, or maybe even to occasionally get the opportunity to impress your colleagues. Don’t overthink it though!