When I was at the university and started programming on UNIX, the professor said we should try both …

> My conclusion was this: vi is better for touch typists. Your fingers are almost on the home row. Emacs wants you to hit the meta/alt key a lot, which is difficult for a touch typist. It's much harder than hitting shift. Vi makes you hit escape, but that only happens when you switch modes and it's not that hard to hit. I had been playing rogue and nethack for a bit when I started programming. The keys hjkl for doing movement was a natural transition to a vt-100 terminal for writing code in vi. I had also been coding in LPMuds for a bit and the ed command set was firmly engrained in my mind. With vi being both "move using rogue keys" and "do the fancy stuff with the ed commands" there wasn't even a second thought spent on considering emacs.

Many people who use Emacs a lot make CapsLock an additional Ctrl. Using your left-hand little finger makes it trivial to use C-p, C-n, C-f, C-b as cursor keys.

"My conclusion was this: vi is better for touch typists. Your fingers are almost on the home row. Emacs wants you to hit the meta/alt key a lot, which is difficult for a touch typist. It's much harder than hitting shift. Vi makes you hit escape, but that only happens when you switch modes and it's not that hard to hit." In emacs you can type exactly the same as in vi/vim if you use something like evil, doom, or spacemacs.

Unless you use a keyboard like a Dactyl Manuform that provides your thumbs with better access to such modifier keys https://github.com/abstracthat/dactyl-manuform

> why would a professional programmer not want to invest the time to learn to type properly: typing fast boosts your productivity significantly. I have not found typing speed to correlate well with productivity. I spend quite a lot of time thinking while coding.

That's weird, I'm a Dvorak touch typist and I find the Alt keys to be much easier to reach than Escape. To reach Escape I basically have to leave the home row, while to reach one of the Alts I simply have to bend my ring finger.

> Emacs wants you to hit the meta/alt key a lot, which is difficult for a touch typist. hmm.... I wonder if this is the reason Mac OS uses the option key for things like 'kill word' (ctrl+backspace on other OSes or ctrl+w in vi). I have a hard time typing quickly using option/command instead of ctrl. I also prefer vi-like keybindings.

> In my undergraduate wisdom, I deemed emacs to be "stupid" and went on with my life using vi. That’s what we do when we’re younger. Judge things on the wrong basis. Or come up with weird theories on how people who prefer different things do so because they’re deficient in some way— > Emacs wants you to hit the meta/alt key a lot, which is difficult for a touch typist. wait what… > And my conclusion was that emacs was for them, because hitting the control/alt key isn't as much of a penalty when you're a hunt-and-peck typist. You see that the there are Alt and Control keys on both sides of the (American[1]) keyboard. Right? Touch typing is no harder with Control and Alt than it is with Shift. > And my conclusion was that emacs was for them, because hitting the control/alt key isn't as much of a penalty when you're a hunt-and-peck typist. One Year of Experience Ten Times Over: The Comment.…