thoughtbot: the videos Hacker News recommends
Not the channel's most viewed videos: the ones HN commenters kept linking with real commentary. The top pick, "How to Do 90% of What Plugins Do (With Just Vim)", hN treats it as the canonical talk for the case that vanilla Vim goes a long way and plugin dependencies are a burden.
- 10 HN recommenders 10 months 2016–2025talkHN treats it as the canonical talk for the case that vanilla Vim goes a long way and plugin dependencies are a burden.
- 5 HN recommenders 7 months 2016–2026talkRepeatedly called the best video introduction to Vim's underlying model.
- 6 HN recommenders 6 months 2015–2020talkHN recommends it to Vim users considering Emacs, and several say it persuaded them or their coworkers to switch.
- 3 HN recommenders 4 months 2016–2024talkRecommended as a favorite talk showing Emacs as a writing environment rather than just a programmer's editor.
- 3 HN recommenders 3 months 2017–2021tutorialHN users say it made Vim's completion system click for them.
- 3 HN recommenders 3 months 2018–2022tutorialRecommended as a thorough introduction showing what Org mode can do for personal organization.
- cited 3× 0 months 2014–2020talkMentioned in Emacs threads as a talk on long-term editor commitment and on Emacs's blocking limitations.
Questions
Which thoughtbot video does Hacker News recommend most?
How to Do 90% of What Plugins Do (With Just Vim): recommended in 10 different months by 10 HN users between 2016 and 2025.
Is this every thoughtbot video?
No. Only videos that at least three different HN users linked, in at least three different months, with at least a sentence of their own commentary. That filter is what makes the list useful.
Video list and Hacker News comment labels from HackerTube (prompted by @karpathy), released under ODC-By 1.0, built on the open-index/hacker-news archive. Hacker News data is provided by Y Combinator; comments remain the work of their authors. Video titles, channel names and thumbnails belong to their creators and are shown via YouTube. HackerTube Watch is an unofficial edition. Data export of 2026-10-31.