I don't know, man, every ninth moon cycle something comes over me and asks "remember how you learned software engineering using vim and rails and that was sort of it?"
That time has come, all aboard Steam Train Vim.
Specifically, I found Lazy Vim, a neovim setup, which I am configuring with lua, a scripting language I've never used before.
I am already learning stuff !
It's wild how much I learned about making software without Intellisense (or language servers), integrated test runners, refactoring tools, copilot autocomplete.
I wrote a lot of my doctorate in plaintext files in vim.
I did a lot of my foundational thinking and building work as an engineer here, in vim.
But I feel weird that the layer between "me" and the thing that runs my software is quite chunky.
And the software I interracted with became more and more like the big and chunky codebases that these tools excel at. I became a professional software engineer, I guess.
Alongside, maybe because of, this - the act of writing software has become something chunky. It has become a proper-noun Activity.
I love the JetBrains suite of tools. I do not want to stop using them. They are so good.
But the spirit of rebellion, of actually hacking away on a computer became something I don't really do any more.
I am familiar enough with the commandline that it's not magic. I hand-wavy know what's happening. But I think there's a feedback loop here: I only see things done with bash, sed, awk (and friends) when either i) it is a trivial example, or ii) a "hacky but it works" solution that no one's touched since 2012.
The promise of Vim from every Vim-huckster was that you could edit code at the speed of thought. It's an appealing idea, but most of the time I am not limited by typing speed, I'm limited by thinking speed (and quality).
Problems are just hard sometimes. And for over a century now, we've known there's no point in optimising for:
systemic ways of doing things which need not be done at all.
Anyway, maybe I'll do something with it (cool), or maybe in seven days I realise present/past Wilson is/was being too idealistic and not pragmatic enough.
Whatever, I'm writing this in Vim and I'm having a great time.
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