With everyone using Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, and the other 100 AI coding agents that i missed, I’m wondering how much editor mastery still matters like w/ Vim
Being honest the real reason i wanna learn Vim is to boost my ego & assert my dominance, so i can tell people "i use vim b...
Being honest the real reason i wanna learn Vim is to boost my ego & assert my dominance, so i can tell people "i use vim btw", but also part of me thinks investing time could still pay off for speed, ergonomics, and working over SSH overall...
but a bigger part also suspects the marginal gains i would gain would disappear when more of the work is delegated to AI anyway, like why would i learn Vim if i'm just going to be prompting Opus all day?
For anyone who's been using Vim for while AND uses AI to code (i'm assuming everyone codes with AI to some degree) my question is: Does learning Vim still meaningfully improve your day to day productivity EVEN with AI, or is it mostly personal preference at this point?
Comments
Do you already do any work over SSH? What do you do if you need to edit any files in that context?
Learning the essentials of vim was the sort of skill that for me took about 10 min per day over a couple months and has come in handy almost every day since then. Can you get by without it? I guess, if you do absolutely everything via a GUI. Or delegate all CLI work to LLMs without ever questioning or second guessing their output.
And yes, I use vim for almost every git commit or interactive rebase. Access to the full power of CLI git is something I value very much and has saved me countless hours. Not to mention using it for editing any config file that’s not part of a repo.
Every time you’re able to keep your fingers on the keyboard instead of reaching for a mouse saves you both time and precious context switching energy.
Aficionados of modal editing often insinuate that one would require mouse use in non-modal editing. Yet I have always fully keyboard-operated my non-modal editors, whether VSCode in the last 9 years or previously, Sublime and others, all the way back to Turbo Pascal in the late 90s. I don't ever use the mouse in them, whether I'm inside a text buffer or in the Command Palette (or in menus for the pre-Sublime editors back when). For example, F1 is bound to show "hover" doc tips over the symbol that the caret is in. A couple function keys and ctrl/alt/shift-plus-some-mnemonic letter are soo swiftly and easily muscle-memoried, I never felt any need for mousing, or for "modes" and typing just to switch from one to another.
I'm sure once one is used to modal editing, one can be speedy with it. So can I, entirely without modal yet without mousing =)
I also use VSCode and derivatives. Also mostly without mousing. But I don’t HAVE to, because I know how to use CLI tooling to not only edit files as needed but also handle things like version control — which I’ve noticed a disappointing percentage of my colleagues, even those with a decade in the field, are mystified by. I haven’t touched VSCode’s git integrations, but the astonishment at being introduced to CLI rebasing — followed by interactive rebasing — was eye-opening.
By dualogy 2026-02-225:50 Well for git stuff or any CLI stuff, I just key-chord into the integrated terminal (or alt-tab into my terminal emulator, depending on task) and do the git commands, having the whole "git integration" thing disabled in `settings.json` in the first place..
By mmh0000 2026-02-2015:40 Yes. For one simple reason: As vi is part of the POSIX standard[1], it is gauranteed to be installed on all unix(-like) machines you may touch now or in the future.
It's a handy skill to have if you interact with Linux machines.
You'll need to edit files sometimes, and Vim (or Vi) is usually present. I don't think I've seen an install without it.
The basics (opening files, writing, and closing) can be learnt in an hour. It's enough to make simple changes to .conf files.
By xp84 2026-02-223:18 Using vim to do this seems silly. Nano is also nearly always present, and doing those “basic” things is 10x more straightforward in an editor that isn’t modal and just gets out of your way.
I’ve often in my career witnessed engineers who’ve cargo culted the need for vim, but they only know how to hit ESC !wq or whatever, and one errant keystroke puts them in modal hell of some sort that, often requiring they just close the terminal and try again.
I don’t begrudge those who want to become power-VIM-users, though it seems wildly awkward to me, to each their own. But if you just want to use it to do the “basics” on ssh sessions, using nano makes more sense. PGUP and PGDN and Home and End and arrows work just fine to navigate, and the bindings for most things are printed right on the screen (except Ctrl-S to save… for some reason, but it works).
