John Carmack: Best programming setup and IDE | Lex Fridman Podcast Clips

vim bindings are worth learning, vim/nvim itself is not. Two reasons. One, graphical debugging. Almost every hardcore vim/nvim user I've met has terminal (no pun intended) printf-debugging disease, or uses an IDE on a second monitor. Carmack talked about it in an interview ( [this video] ) Secondly people, especially with neovim, seem to be hellbent on turning the thing into a GUI editor anyway, with bespoke search interfaces, file tree plugins, graphical plugin installers, and so on. At which point I don't understand why you're not using something made for that purpose rather than painfully try to reinvent it in a piece of software designed to output text

Print debugging is a disaster. If there's one widespread practice among non-beginner developers that wastes hours of time it's print debugging. I honestly can't tell how often I have seen people, even experienced programmers (usually because they insist on running some bespoke vim setup) refuse to use a graphical debugger to actually step through a program, and instead they spend hours hunting down bugs they could have found in ten minutes. There's a section of an interview with John Carmack ( [this video] ) where he laments the same thing. It's what the Windows/game development corner of the programming world actually got right, people generally use effective tools for software development.