I can't say I agree. To me this is equivalent of saying "I have way more music in my head than I have room for and I can't afford to expend more than about 0.0001% of context on a piano". The tool you use for 8+ hours a day is extremely important and even small gains will pay dividends over the long run. The more efficiently the text editor allows you to do tasks, the more time you have to think about other tasks.

But then I discovered https://www.lazyvim.org/. Turns your copy of NeoVim into an IDE.

I still haven't edited the default config much, actually. But now I'm probably 2x to 3x as productive in vim (nvim, now) as before.

P.S. If you decide to check out the LazyVim config, I highly recommend reading https://lazyvim-ambitious-devs.phillips.codes/ all the way through. There's a lot of new keybindings to learn, but Dusty Phillips's book gives you a gentle on-ramp to learning most of them.

The existence of vim classic would be hard to explain without reference to LLMs.

Seems like an interesting fact for those who don't follow the development of vim/neovim.

That advice was not entirely accurate (sometimes vi is in /usr/bin/vi, for example), and the merging of /bin with /usr/bin has made it kind of a moot point. (EDIT to add: Though the fact that busybox includes a basic vi implementation has kind of un-mooted the point, actually). But I first started learning vi because I figured I would need it professionally, and when the modal-editing workflow "clicked" for me, I figured out that I had just learned the editor I would want to stick with for years.

And although vim replaced vi and nvim replaced vim in my finger-macros, that has remained true to this day.

You don't need emacs on a server. TRAMP is built-in and can open remote files in a local instance over SSH, SMB, FTP, ADB, or docker/podman.

Recently I was trying to find a good way to delete from the current position backward to another character, like dT or dF followed by the target character. The trouble was they'd leave at least one character behind, either what I jumped to or what I started on. What worked how I want, and was still easy, was just using visual mode. Where "n" was the character to jump back to, I did vFn which selected from my cursor position back to the letter n (and including that n). I could then hit d and delete all of it, no extra character left behind from either end. I remember at first I was thinking "there's gotta be a way to do this without visual mode". Best I could come up with was hitting x after dFn or whatever to get the stray character. I think using visual mode is probably fine, though. Maybe if I were doing this type of edit a lot I could bind some key sequence to do it.

Would it be accurate to say you didn't use visual mode much in vim before you moved to Helix?

EDIT: Found http://www.fifi.org/doc/tramp/tramp-emacs.html which mentions that TRAMP started development in November 1998. I would have been getting that advice in late 1997 or early 1998, given when I started my Unix class at college. So the answer appears to be that the advice was actually correct at the time, but superseded sooner than I thought it was.

Why is that handy? Well, the idea is that you're probably already looking at the point on the screen you want to move the cursor to, so instead of figuring out a complex navigation, you can type a few keys: `s` plus the letters you're looking at. Then pause for a quarter-second, and type the letter that just appeared where you're looking at. The label letters will be chosen such that none of them appear after the text you typed, e.g. if the words "car", "cat", and "can" all appear in your document, then after you press `sca` the labels `r`, `t`, and `n` will never be chosen. (But the label `d` might be chosen if the word "cad", or words containing it such as "academic", never appear in the document).

It took a little getting used to, but now I've found it's quite the fastest way to issue commands. Want to delete everything from here to that closing parenthesis right there? If you're on its matching open parenthesis then `d%` is fastest, but if you're not, then `ds)` followed by split-second pause to see the label appear (in a bright contrasting color), then type the label. Quite a bit faster than `v` plus a bunch of movement, in my experience. Once you get used to it, it really speeds you up.

And when you get down to it, isn't "once you get used to it, it really speeds you up" a description of the entire vi family of editors in the first place?

Sounds familiar.

[1]: “However, even though steam-powered tractors provided an alternative to draft animals, the size, mechanical complexity and risk of explosion rendered these tractors unusable for most farms.” https://www.volocars.com/blog/history-of-tractors-in-agricul...

Maybe it should be included in the list. It can still be downloaded from the openwatcom project, https://openwatcom.org/ftp/manuals/1.5/vi.pdf

Granted, it's more about chemicals than tractors, but still quite close to the spirit of the comments. Bio approach sacrifices some tech advances.