Re: productivity (and lack thereof)

Posted Sat 11 Sep, 2021.

This is a reply to three posts in Gemini:

productivity (and lack thereof)

Jason (carcosa.net) writes:

> I’m never sure if I should recommend Emacs to other people who want to improve their productivity, or at least their efficiency with editing text.

I'm not an Emacs user -oh, I've tried; wait for it-, but I guess I can relate in a way because I've been using vim for over 20 years -and that's probably why I've failed at Emacs-. I'm closer to what Jason explains in his post, but over the years I've changed my view on these things.

When asked what editor I recommend to someone looking for a new tool, probably without any experience with what I would call "hacker" editors (hacker in the sense of advanced computer technology enthusiast, not the security take of it), I would just suggest VS Code and move on. A few years ago I would probably spend a few minutes explaining why vim (or Emacs) are so great, but these days I don't have the same energy.

That said, I could explain why vim works *for me*, but it would be a very bad idea taking that as a recommendation, because I will sound very enthusiastic and I have found that people are different -specially now, when it is likely we have a very different background-. My experience is less and less portable.

So at the end, when asked "for you, what is the best coding editor?", my answer is: "that doesn't matter, but for you is likely to be VS Code". And I don't like VS Code myself, it feels heavy and slow compared with vim on a terminal, is not a modal editor, and its development mode doesn't align with my personal preferences (mostly open source, but the releases by Microsoft are proprietary freeware). But that's OK, I'm not going to use it!

If you tried a tool because a lot of people love it and say is amazing, but the tool doesn't work for you the way you expected, it is very likely there is nothing wrong with that tool. Is just that it may not be for you, and that's OK.

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