It (well, vi, which vim is a clone of) has been designed to be a possible interface on a keyboard that doesn’t have arrow keys or other modifier keys than shift.
That sounds great and all, but in the last 40yrs I have not owned (or seen…) A keyboard like that.
For whom the heck was this useful? 😁
Not mocking, I do use vim or nano, but also never got why it had to be so incredibly unintuitive.
You don’t have to move your hands while touch typing. This is the single biggest reason why vim is still used today, regardless of whether you have arrow keys or not. In fact vim does support arrow keys and using the mouse as well! It’s just much easier to edit files without needing to move your hands and/or use a touchpad/mouse.
Even then, not having to move your hands means not spending time… Moving your hands.
This is useful for people who want to spend time learning to be enforcement at what they do. In the same way that holding a Nintendo controller “weird” is useful for Tetris speed runners.
If you are as efficient as you need to be using a shower interface, then great. Other people need (or more likely want) to be more efficient than that.
Maybe I’m a luddite, but I still don’t understand why people want to spend their time arguing with Claude code and fixing it’s bugs. Rather than just learning to write productive coffee themselves. But, people do. That’s their choice, and I let them to it.
If prefer to spend my time learning him and code, than Claude and idiosyncrasies, and then whatever to comes next, and next again.
That sounds great and all, but in the last 40yrs I have not owned (or seen…) A keyboard like that. For whom the heck was this useful? 😁
Not mocking, I do use vim or nano, but also never got why it had to be so incredibly unintuitive.
You don’t have to move your hands while touch typing. This is the single biggest reason why vim is still used today, regardless of whether you have arrow keys or not. In fact vim does support arrow keys and using the mouse as well! It’s just much easier to edit files without needing to move your hands and/or use a touchpad/mouse.
Even then, not having to move your hands means not spending time… Moving your hands.
This is useful for people who want to spend time learning to be enforcement at what they do. In the same way that holding a Nintendo controller “weird” is useful for Tetris speed runners.
If you are as efficient as you need to be using a shower interface, then great. Other people need (or more likely want) to be more efficient than that.
Maybe I’m a luddite, but I still don’t understand why people want to spend their time arguing with Claude code and fixing it’s bugs. Rather than just learning to write productive coffee themselves. But, people do. That’s their choice, and I let them to it.
If prefer to spend my time learning him and code, than Claude and idiosyncrasies, and then whatever to comes next, and next again.
At the time vi was originally developed, such keyboards did exist (on terminals). That’s the reason it works the way it does.
Weird terminals but ok. I actually even like vim