> What I am talking about is "cost", which ultimately map to all > programmer's time involved in typing and thinking about what to type. > (But not include thinking about algorithm, data structure, etc.)
Hi Peng, It sounds like you are measuring cost as equal to time. If you want to know the answer to that, you would need a study that somehow compares time taken between one or more people using Vim, and some number of other people using various other editors. You can use google to see whether such studies have been done and what their conclusions were ;) Note that, different tools could be more optimal for different text. For an extremely silly example, if you want to write out "lorem ipsum" text, you can do it many times more efficiently with a lorem-ipsum generator than by typing it out in Vim. A less silly example is the difference between natural language and programming code. Code is often line-based, and can thus take advantage of Vim's linewise mappings; for natural language, new sentences do not necessarily induce line-break (as you can see in the current email). So, Vim is optimised for coders, and might appear less efficient when used for natural language. In other words, first define what type of text you are measuring the cost for. I would furthermore claim there exist other "costs" to consider, in addition to the naive metric of "how long does it take to type something or other". I exclusively use Linux, and my work involves a lot of sshing around between various servers. And all my workstations, laptops, raspberry pis and NAS run Linux and can be accessed with ssh. For this ecosystem, Vim is ubiquitous, fast, rock-solid, bandwidth-friendly, and integrates well with other command-line tools. Regardless of whether I could save a few seconds on writing this email by using some other editor, that would not stop Vim from being the overwhelmingly correct choice for me. In other words, it is not sensible to measure the "cost" of just one tool as though it exists in isolation; it is better to focus on the pros and cons of different working ecosystems of tools. Eg, I would not recommend Vim to someone who has the unfortunate type of job where they need to work a lot in Windows writing VBA apps (as I did in a past life). For that kind of work, you are better off using the VBA editor. ~ Tim -- -- You received this message from the "vim_use" maillist. Do not top-post! Type your reply below the text you are replying to. For more information, visit http://www.vim.org/maillist.php --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "vim_use" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
