I think you just articulated what my #1 blocker to mastering vim and/or emacs has been: they're both designed for the "mastery thorough thick manual" era. Dashing off to Google answers my immediate query, but often is far less instructive than a well-organized manual with an index at letting me discover the adjacent thing I actually need.
OK, that's my #2 blocker. My #1 blocker is that I am no longer 15 and have things to do other than just poke about until I master a new text editor.
> My #1 blocker is that I am no longer 15 and have things to do other than just poke about until I master a new text editor.
100% this. Once upon the time my attitude would have been a bratty "you just don't want to do the work to master your tools!" My response to that now is "no the fuck I do NOT, I want problem number 8131 solved yesterday so I can move on to problem number 8132 which btw requires entirely different tooling."
emacs and vim are tools that you'd use enough that mastering them is probably worth the time investment. However, it's 100% true that mastering every package your stack touches is impractical. Learn just enough to get the tests to pass and move on to the next bug.
I was lucky enough to have first encountered LaTeX and LilyPond while still in high school.
For me, those are ancient tools for ancient times, designed when things really were different. We have other capabilities now, nobody is forced to work on the CLI anymore - I also refuse to spend weeks to „master“ my editor.
Typing code is literally the least bad thing slowing me down when creating software.
“Ancient” with regard to a living thing is usually a characteristic that shows an ignorance of features and a lack of experience with dynamics of toolsets. Truly ancient (obsolete) things get lost to history.
We have other capabilities now, nobody is forced to work on the CLI anymore - I also refuse to spend weeks to „master“ my editor
I agree with all of that, but from the vim side of things. Although these are not my main concerns with organizing a development process, I find it troublesome to set up and tune a modern IDE into a useful state either, and refuse to do that unless it’s a workplace requirement.
Typing code is literally the least bad thing slowing me down when creating software.
Typing code in vim-insert or emacs is the same as in any other editor. You press keys, they show up on the screen. Press F1 and type a command. Press a shortcut to enter files pane and select a file to edit. Press C-K C-9 to expand all user folds. Install a plugin, map some keys and now you can set and cycle through bookmarks easily.
It’s not about typing faster. It’s about learning a language of editing. When you’re begin to be fluent in it, you will be communicating with the editor the changes you want to see. And it’s just a terse language that realizing what you want to actually do it and see it done take only one or two seconds.
I strongly believes the “Think about it” -> “Express it” -> “See it done” is much better the whole ballet your hand would be doing with the mouse and keyboard.
OK, that's my #2 blocker. My #1 blocker is that I am no longer 15 and have things to do other than just poke about until I master a new text editor.