Free yourself from the shackles of productivity
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One of the things that has been plaguing me recently is editor choice. I've been a programmer for a large portion of my life, and the editor is the window to code. Naturally, I have tried a lot of editors:
- IntelliJ and friends
- VSCode
- NVIM
- Helix
- Emacs
- Nova
- Zed
- Micro
It is easy to switch editor. Most editors use the same LSP backends (IntelliJ is an exception!) So why switch?
"Modal Editing is more productive"
My first big switch was to NVIM. I was instantly sold on the idea that I could use my keyboard to do actions quicker. And you can! After learning how to use vim keybinds, you can do a lot of actions very quickly. Is this good, though? One can quite easily see the link between 'actions per second' and productivity, but I would like to argue that this is not useful.
"Helix has easier keybinds"
What sold me on Helix, a TUI editor made in Rust, was two things:
- It claims to have keybinds that make more "sense"
- It claims to have faster actions per second than vim keybinds
Instead of having an "action to selection" model, it has a "selection to action" model, which supposedly makes it more intuitive. The issue here is that productivity and intuitiveness are kind of fake words in situations like this. Nobody has stats on this! The developers chose to make it like this because they thought it was better. And that's fine! The issue is, none of this is objective in any way. You are not a better programmer for using a modal editor. Even if modal editing was an objective good, developer productivity is not a concrete measurement, and probably is influenced by a wide amount of variables. Caffeine intake, or hours slept, is probably a better measure of productivity than editor.
It doesn't matter if there is a "best editor" or not
That's my thesis. All editors are, functionally, the same program. You can do whatever you want in any editor about as fast as any other editor. I will not defend IntelliJ over VSCode, or anything similar, because they are the same. Stop taking editing so seriously, and relax!
But...
But I like using $EDITOR!
That's good! I'm not on a crusade. I think discussion just orients around "productivity" and other such programming metrics too much in editor conversation. I think people tend to forget that we are human sometimes! If $EDITOR is what makes you feel good, go for it!