Having worked with a handful of terminal CLI purists I'm convinced most of the people who bang the drum hard for vi and emacs aren't nearly as productive as they think they are, and instead evangelize it largely for some mixture of these reasons:
1) They have a strong preference for keyboard only operation
2) It serves as a cultural cachet, or shibboleth, to signal how elite and pure a developer they are
3) they wish to continue working in the same environment they have been for years or decades, and learning new key binds, trying to find equivalent features and testing new features isn't worth some potential benefit
Everything else, like differences in RAM consumed, total install size, etc seem like post-hoc metric seeking for folks who have already decided what they like.
I find that many people "banging the drum hard" for a text editor are falling for the same kind of faulty thinking.
In my experience, the only situations a colleague has been slowed down in a significant way by their choice of editor seem to boil down to two categories:
- Haven't put in the time to actually learn the tool (i.e. using vim purely in insert mode, or VSCode as a plain text editor, constantly going back to a file manager to find and open files) and get stuck in a particularly horrible workflow.
- Burn hours daily fiddling with their setup, chasing perfection.
Neither of these are typically caused by the tool itself. At the end of the day... I'm confident most devs can be quite effective using just DOS EDIT or Notepad if pressed.
As for me.... unless I'm doing something specialized, I catch myself trying to eke out that last 1% productivity boost from my editor and ask myself... is this really the best thing to be messing with? Usually, it's not. Honestly, writing documentation or doing a quick prototype is much higher return.
> 1) They have a strong preference for keyboard only operation
Sounds like having a strong preference for keyboard only to edit text and code is the natural way.
I don't think most vscode user are using mouse a lot either and if they do that, they are doing it the slow and inefficient way as vscode can be entirely piloted with the keyboard as well.
1) They have a strong preference for keyboard only operation
2) It serves as a cultural cachet, or shibboleth, to signal how elite and pure a developer they are
3) they wish to continue working in the same environment they have been for years or decades, and learning new key binds, trying to find equivalent features and testing new features isn't worth some potential benefit
Everything else, like differences in RAM consumed, total install size, etc seem like post-hoc metric seeking for folks who have already decided what they like.