The simple truth was that, no matter how
much energy I invested in my custom configuration, the
people who built and designed Vim knew it a lot
better than me.
That would make sense if the defaults we were talking about had been carefully selected five or ten years ago or shown any signs of evolution since they were first laid down in 1975. If I was editing code in the languages they used in environments like theirs using underlying tools that performed like their tools in a codebase the size of `ex`'s, I'd certainly trust the defaults. But I'm not doing any of those things.
Today, I work in a codebase whose human-readable source alone might be larger than any installed digital storage system that existed when vi's shortcuts were chosen. By necessity I navigate it with semantically-aware indexing and information-retrieval tools that would have been miraculous back then. My edits are guided by static analysis and effected with automated refactoring and code generation tools.
My configuration doesn't suit my environment as well as vi's defaults suited their environment. It does, however, suit my environment better than vi's defaults do.
And let's not even get into emacs configurations. :P
One of these things that aged really badly is : for command mode. On the particular keyboard that vi was made on : was accessible without modifiers, but on virtually all other keyboards it needs shift and is not a good default. Comma (,) would make much more sense. I'm sure there are other instances where the keybind initially made sense on the keyboard the devs were using that nowadays makes less sense.
Today, I work in a codebase whose human-readable source alone might be larger than any installed digital storage system that existed when vi's shortcuts were chosen. By necessity I navigate it with semantically-aware indexing and information-retrieval tools that would have been miraculous back then. My edits are guided by static analysis and effected with automated refactoring and code generation tools.
My configuration doesn't suit my environment as well as vi's defaults suited their environment. It does, however, suit my environment better than vi's defaults do.
And let's not even get into emacs configurations. :P