Ok so I love using text based editors like vim and emacs. I suck at emacs though. I think I’m good at vim, but almost everyday another coder (matt) shows me something new that makes me wonder how I was even using vim before he showed it to me. I don’t like having to be surgical with my mouse to open declarations of functions and click on tabs to move between files, and whatever else I do while not playing flash games. I read stuff about improving my editing skills like Efficient Editing and the ever popular Steve Yegges Emacs to learn how to do things more efficient and faster, and in general, be more productive.
Steve gives advice on rearranging your keyboard layout to not move you fingers of home row. Many vim guides tell you to use the home row keys instead of the arrows to move through text to avoid the extra hand motions.
Srsly you aren’t that productive.
I am imagining cubes of coders where the typing never stops. All day long they just bang out code, they never leave home row unless the absolutely need to type a Q. They think in C, and artfully paint LISP all over their screens and all the other crap that people say to pretend that real world problems always have elegant A+ compsci solutions.
Am I really the only one that has to alt-tab back to the email to remember the process outlined in whatever spec I’m implementing?
Is it just me that needs to IM somebody about why bug 69 was resolved the way it was and explain why that impedes my ability to implement customer request 7?
I refuse to believe that nobody else looks at the last three functions they wrote and actually stops to think “Could I do this better?”
I’m just saying the stuff that slows me down while I code is thinking. Not the 1.5 centimeters between my shift key and my arrow keys. Or the difference between moving my left pinky .5cm left, over 2cm down. I think the time/mistakes it would take me to get used to using hjkl as movement keys instead of the arrow keys would be more then the time saved from reducing the extra miniscule movement.
I read this post by Yehuda Katz and, while I find it interesting that using his mouse lead him to the ‘/’ and ‘o’ and ‘ci’ commands, he is right. Don’t sacrifice the ability to code comfortably for these silly little “performance gains”. You are optimizing the wrong part of your algorithm. If you really need to speed up your ability to copy/paste, maybe you should slow down and think about what your doing.
