I've been working with the command line for just under two decades. A couple of years of those were spent with vim as my primary editor, but eventually I moved to Sublime and never looked back.
But I still use the command line heavily in all my work. I usually have a konsole window that I alt+tab into whenever I need to build or run tests, instead of using Sublime's "build system" support. The only time I use vim is when I need to ssh, or am using Termux on my phone.
> The proper argument here, probably, is this one: the terminal, with its way of combining small CLI tools into pipelines, covers infinitely many use cases,
Extensible GUI tools (Sublime, VSCode, etc) cover infinitely many use cases too, except they offer more reliable and reproducible runtime environments.
I think the reason these types of discussions never die is because people in general tend towards closed mindedness. It's hard to put yourself in other people's shoes, and even harder to entertain the possibility that you're wrong.
But at the end of the day this only matters for novices. After enough experience with them, no matter what you use, your productivity bottleneck isn't going to be your tools (unless its ed...).
> I think the reason these types of discussions never die is because people in general tend towards closed mindedness. It's hard to put yourself in other people's shoes, and even harder to entertain the possibility that you're wrong.
I think the real reason is that people are used to GUIs who see the "harder tools" cannot entertain the possibility that they are wrong, and see the need to constantly make these hit posts to validate themselves. I have _never_ seen a vitriolic post made by a vim/emacs/tmux/etc. user telling users to switch over - I have seen countless by the "other side". I myself switched to terminal native workflows, not because of one of these posts but despite them, seeing how people who actually used these tools came off way more positive and seemed to enjoy their work way more than I saw from people who used e.g. VS Code and endlessly complained about anything not fitting into their worldview. It's exhausting and provokes no real discussion - nobody is actually being swayed by them, and it just adds fuel to the fire, letting people with opinions swing them around
But I still use the command line heavily in all my work. I usually have a konsole window that I alt+tab into whenever I need to build or run tests, instead of using Sublime's "build system" support. The only time I use vim is when I need to ssh, or am using Termux on my phone.
> The proper argument here, probably, is this one: the terminal, with its way of combining small CLI tools into pipelines, covers infinitely many use cases,
Extensible GUI tools (Sublime, VSCode, etc) cover infinitely many use cases too, except they offer more reliable and reproducible runtime environments.
I think the reason these types of discussions never die is because people in general tend towards closed mindedness. It's hard to put yourself in other people's shoes, and even harder to entertain the possibility that you're wrong.
But at the end of the day this only matters for novices. After enough experience with them, no matter what you use, your productivity bottleneck isn't going to be your tools (unless its ed...).