To Vim or Not to Vim?

I try to learn something new about one of my tools every day. Slow, methodical, constant improvement is important to staying effective as a developer. We interact with numerous tools and we should constantly be re-evaluating them to try and become more efficient at our job.

While I have been keeping with my commitment to learning about my tools, one of the tasks I've been putting off is going back to basics and learning Vim. You may be asking with all the advances throughout the years in editors why would I want to go back and learn Vim?

Well, the fact this editor is still widely used in the community after 25 years is reason enough. Besides, even though one can be extremely productive using a modern IDE I feel they can make you complacent. Too much magic behind the scenes. So, that's why I decided to start the Vim journey.

Now what?

 

I knew it would be frustrating at first, but not this frustrating! In the beginning I felt completely worthless in this crazy Vim land. I try to type a word and the next thing I know I've deleted half the text on the screen and my cursor is skipping around everywhere.

A co-worker introduced me to vimtutor and sanity was restored. Over time I became familiar with the commands and I'm starting to understand the logic behind its power. Small commands that can be combined to do really complicated things. I'm a huge fan of not using the mouse and Vim takes this to a whole new level. The only problem is now I want it everywhere! At least thanks to vimium I can happily vim in the browser :)