Hi! 😊 Thank you very much for leaving a comment! :D

My intent wasn't to be religious in any way but to share something I find useful, interesting and which I think has helped me become a more productive programmer.

I used this quote:

Vim is for programmers who want to raise their game.

Because it perfectly describes the feeling/intent that I had when I started learning vim. I love to continuously examine how I am doing things, see where I feel pain and try to improve. So you could say that I'm always for raising my game. At the time when I learned vim, I was super proficient with Visual Studio and ReSharper but I felt that my flow was often stopped or slowed down when doing small refactorings (like at the code block or code line level). It that context, vs(vim) was a great combination with ReSharper. And, even if it didn't improve my productivity measurably (I never went back or exhaustively quantified the difference between before and after adopting vim), it did make me feel like a coding wizard as I became a lot more fluent when coding (which I think is a good thing :D).

I certainly didn't mean it as exclusionary or demeaning of anyone using other editors.

Editor wars are pointless

Totally agreed

you'll probably click faster than you touch-type

No :) I can give you a lot of examples where keyboard is superior to mouse movement + click combination. The click is not the slow part of using a mouse. The slow part is lifting your hand from the keyboard, grabbing the mouse, moving the mouse where it needs to be, clicking and then moving your hand back to the keyboard. This is not only slower, it also breaks your flow.

• select a word with the mouse, press delete, type again vs cw{insert}<ESC>
• open a tab with a mouse vs type gt
• go look for a file in the file explorer with the mouse vs C-p {start typing filename} <ENTER>
• go open the menu -> File -> New -> click, type name, enter vs :e {filename}
• etc... I don't think there is anything that you can do faster with a mouse that you can do with a keyboard (perhaps resizing a window? :D)

Note that keyboard superiority is not limited to vim. Any editor provides shortcuts because they're just faster than using the mouse. Learn your editor shortcuts and you're going to be infinitely more proficient than you were when you used the mouse.

I think that we just don't see things alike and we don't need to discuss it further. :D

This was awesome. Thanks for posting.

Now I need to plug Atom's vim-mode-plus, specifically, it's incredible occurrence operators:

d o i l delete occurrence in line - deletes all instances of the current word in line
c o i l change occurrence in line - changes all instances of the current word in line
c o i p change occurrence in paragraph - changes all instances of the current word in the paragraph - perfect for refactoring the name of a function param
c o i p change occurrence in paragraph - changes all instances of the current word in the paragraph - perfect for refactoring the name of a function param

And even more. I'm so completely hooked on these workflows because they're so nice.

I also added some vim/emmet crossover keymappings, like

'atom-text-editor.vim-mode-plus:not(.insert-mode)':
  'g e r t':  'emmet:remove-tag'

That one's clutch:

<a href="#"><p⌨️re><code>Bar</code></pre></a>

With cursor at ⌨️, I escape to normal mode and hit g e r t and voila - I get

<a href="#"><code>Bar</code></pre></a>

I'm so hooked on VIM, I even baked simple commands into my keyboard's firmware. It's a little buggy, but you're free to use it, and if you're interested, PR's are welcome ;)

Stop it. You had me at "Vim"

I remember a post where someone compared their .vimrc to a zen garden or something like that. They said that they loved visiting that file and make a few tweaks every now and then.

That post was right, it is surprisingly entertaining to find out that Vim has a motion/command/whatever that is useful (like go to matching curly brace) and go to your config file and make it even more convenient. Piece by piece it grows into something that makes you productive and you love it because it's yours and you made it.

It's all cool and geekish but in real world any other modern editor is just more practical and productive. There is absolutely no point to learn billion of shortcuts for basic stuff. Writing code is not about typing, that part of coding takes like 20% of work and most of it doesn't require vim-like spell casting on the text.

It is more than enough to have editor like Atom or VS Code which you can extend with plugins at your need. There are plenty stuff to learn in modern programming, why would you add on top of that learning a whole vocabulary of unnecessary shortcuts which won't even benefit you much.

"This is a very bad first impression and I've twice given up on learning vim just because of this. (Let's learn vim! Open vim! Ain't got time for this...)" That's me yesterday after I installed it 😅 thanks for the post, I'm gonna give it a try again today 🙏

Love your article and I love how popular it appears to be! I have been a Come user for a couple years now and am so thankful kful I learned it. One neat little tricky I found in Gmail, if you have the keyboard shortcuts turned on, they simulate vim movements 😀

Your post is just awesome!
As a daily vim user, I always feel frustrated when reading such articles because I'm not using 1% of these features.
However, the only 10 commands I've been using for 18 years are enough for my needs. Your post is the best explanation of why I'll never learn more. It's too complicated.

Great article. Lots of new commands I will try. I started with vim in an internship 6 months ago. Actually I started with a vim plugin in Visual Studio. At first it was hard, I wasn't a typist (typed with 3 fingers on each hand for the last 15 years) and I was not very productive.

Then a friend of mine really convinced me. At the same time, I learned how vim works and how to type with all y fingers. It was a very painful moment but I am happy I learned all that. It significantly boosted my productivity.

Basically, I learned by searching for what I wanted to do then write it on a sheet. I made my own cheat sheet and it really helped me learn a lot of Vim syntax.

Now my laptop for college is fully running Linux, I use clion as my principal IDE and I use ideaVim plugin. For me, a vim plugin in a IDE is the best of both worlds. I have all the advantages of my IDE with an extra layer of power.

I've setup my default text editor in my shell and on git to be vim and I am actually quite decent using the real thing.

f'ci'MAN<ESC>

You don't need to f' by the way, vim will seek out the first '' pair travelling down the line. So ci'MAN is enough ✌️

Vim is a very powerful tool--that's for sure. But still, after reading this post I'll still only use VIM for quick edit on scripts. Not a full time editor for programming. I don't think it will raise my game either.

Thanks for sharing this wonderful article!

There are another brilliant series for Vim beginners from Derek Wyatt.

Basically, if you manage to break through the first hard time learning Vim, I doubt you will ever drop it.

There are other great resources for vim:

1. vimtutor - a basic tutorial that ships with vim. This gets you comfortable with the basics of moving around and changing text.

2. Your problem with vim is that you don't grok vi

3. Learn vimscript the hard way

4. After that the book already mentioned: Practical Vim

I've made a few casual threats to learn Vim before. The ubiquity argument is a good one, but it wasn't enough to get me to put in the effort. And then I needed a replacement editor at the office. I'm an Emacs user, I like Emacs, I'd prefer Emacs, but I can't use it at work for reasons that are dumb. Vim seems like a viable option I think. If it doesn't work out then I guess I'll have to give VS Code a try. Although that's going to leave me with many of the same problems I have now.

[Neovim] comes out of the box with more sensible defaults and an integrated terminal

People often pitch this as a reason to use neovim. Vim also comes with an integrated terminal (well, it depends which options your version was built with) and has for a while. When neovim evangelists say it has a terminal it's a bit like BMW fans saying that their car is better than your Ford because it comes with seats.

As far as sensible defaults go, that's a whole can of worms. An awful lot of people disagree with anyone else's idea of "sensible"...

Great article Jaime. After making it past the learning curve, VIM is by FAR the most efficient and effective way to do development!

Although I don't see myself learning Vim anytime soon, this is without a doubt one of the best articles I've read about it. I especially like the playful tone you had when explaining the keystrokes. I'm keeping this article for future references. Thanks for this!

Thank you!

I think I learned more from this article in 20 years of using vim (mostly because it wasn’t emacs).

What a great and detailed post. I used to get so frustrated with terminal would auto open vim. :)

I will say that if you are 'ssh' into any Linux or BSD servers knowing vim is a must. It is like a carpenter not knowing how to use a tape measure.

I use vim a little. When I write a single file I use it because it's light,
else I use vscode.

I cannot memorize those vim command.

Thanks for this awesome post!

I watched the WAT video, laughed so hard that I needed to share it with the collegues and almost forgot to read on the rest of your post... I carried on gladly :)

Do you know the project vim-bootstrap vim-bootstrap.com ?

Is open source

$ brew install git ctags

$ sudo apt-get install git exuberant-ctags ncurses-term curl

$ sudo emerge --ask dev-util/ctags sys-libs/ncurses dev-vcs/git dev-python/pyflakes net-misc/curl

$ sudo pacman -S git-core ctags ncurses curl

$ sudo dnf install ncurses-devel git ctags-etags curl

$ sudo zypper in ncurses-devel git ctags curl

$ pip install flake8 jedi
$ pip2 install --user --upgrade neovim
$ pip3 install --user --upgrade neovim

$ npm install -g elm-test
$ npm install -g elm-oracle
$ npm install -g elm-format@exp