• 0 Posts
  • 8 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: January 9th, 2024

help-circle





  • The reason is b/c vim predates GUIs. Yes, as in all of them:-D. (Or rather, its predecessor vi did and vim unlike others very much remained true to its origins)

    Even now, there are many places e.g. when doing server maintenance or accessing a compute cluster via SSH, sometimes you do not have a handy GUI environment accessible, at which point your choices become extremely limited, and it helps that vim has been installed on every Unix-i/Linux-ish machine since the 80s.

    GUIs are superior, ofc, when they work. On a daily basis I even use a GUI for vim - MacVim (for Windows there used to be Cream but I am very out of date there), and there is always gVim. I could use something else but I am familiar with vim and it is EXTREMELY powerful - e.g. I could indent 100,000 lines in the middle of a file without having to manually select all of them at once first, or better still only do the indentation based on matching a pattern.

    It is very advanced, and thus not for everyone, and even those of us that use it often prefer the GUI way for simple tasks like select a contiguous block of 5 lines, but it offers the benefit that it works in the widest possible number of scenarios - e.g. more than nano. emacs does too, except its commands are so configurable that the X-windows GUI number 1, X-windows GUI number 2, and command-line versions all use entirely different shortcuts, so a cheat sheet would not help. vim offers consistency that, afaik, is absolutely unmatched anywhere.

    Now you know:-).


  • He said in the talk that “people are working ridiculous hours without needing to”, but I think it’s a bit naive to think that that was not the point all along. It’s like every movie ever when someone dies, follow the money and whoever just put out a high dollar life insurance policy on the victim is almost always the guilty party.

    There’s likely more to it that - e.g. someone read a book somewhere and decided to increase their feelings of control, but ultimately someone wrote that book. And the managers always say like “we’ll just put this for now and adjust later if we need to”, but then make it enormously difficult to change it whenever that would be needed. They act shocked every time - shocked I tell you, shocked!:-P - whenever their estimate based on not knowing the first thing about what they are talking about ends up being wrong (how could this be!?).

    I am comforted by having watched Star Trek TOS and seen engineering estimates treated the same way. So apparently this style of management predates AGILE, and even PCs:-P.