There's been a number of "anti-vim, use a real ide(TM)" posts coming into my feed lately and I don't get why. Do people really get buttmad about this?
I switched from vscode to vim as I found it to be largely much faster in getting around when I started my new job, some people find the opposite. A ok.
Why do people try to force us into these largely closed solutions? ( Mainly it's vscode, which has a real EEE threat)
I've never gone for vi(m), even after roughly 25 years of using Linux now.
I'm not trying to force you into anything, certainly not anything closed. I used NEdit until its lack of utf-8 and ancient GUI library started causing trouble. Then I used Slava Pestov's JEdit, which was wonderfully extensible and portable. Now I use vscode, which is just so outrageously well made that even electron and Microsoft can't scare me away from it. All are open source. (Don't know what you mean by EEE threat, googling it doesn't help.)
But modal editing is just a bad idea. We've known since the 70s. One of the most solid things to come out of behavioural psychology was the idea that switching contexts - so that the same thing does something different - has a cost, and isn't a great idea when designing a user interface. Imagine you had a car with stick shift. But you also had a little button on the dashboard, which, if you pressed it, toggled so that the stick shift controlled your car radio instead of your gearbox.
Obviously, that would be a terrible idea. Still, people might get used to it. They might even get so used to it that they would defend it and complain when the feature wasn't there.
All I see that's really different about modal editing is that the stakes are lower when you make mistakes. But it's, bizarrely to me, become a matter of prestige and pride for some to use an antiquated UI design. I'd understand it if you grew up with it, but odds are you didn't. Even the guy who tried to push it on me back in the 90s didn't either. It's like everyone's zipping around in electric cars, and some people still swear by those gear/radio sticks.
stick shift
That is an unfair comparison on the edge of a strawman. In vim, you see your mode right at the cursor shape (bar in insert, block in normal, selection in visual). It’s like saying that DEs are bad because switching active windows is modal. Why not send input to the first window in the taskbar by holding ctrl and to the second by holding ctrl-shift then? Does that sound absurd? Even when you make a modal mistake once in a while, no stakes are lost because uu.
One thing I agree on is that UI could use more graphics, smoothness and features. But all my attempts to adopt vscode failed miserably. It’s just too mouse-y and too configure-y but still lacks futuristic features I want.