Why I Use Vim

Vim is hard. Vim is awesome. Vim is for old people.

Everyone has an opinion. Here's mine.

The Beginning

I've been using Vim for over 10 years. My first encounter with it came when I had to do my first programming assignment in a Linux terminal. There weren't many options for editing files, so I rolled the dice between Nano, Emacs, and Vim. Guess which one came up?

Opening Vim for the first time had me wondering whether I should close it (if I could figure out how) and try something else.

My past experience had taught me that when you're in a text editor, you're able to type text. I tried typing but nothing was being written and occasionally huge chunks of text would disappear or move somewhere else on the page.

Confusion Sets In

I thought of giving up.

Luckily I decided to persist and look up a few basics about using Vim. With enough knowledge to make basic text edits, I continued using it as my primary editor whenever I was working in a terminal.

Unfortunately my usage was limited to switching into insert mode i and moving around the document letter by letter h, j, k, l. It stayed like this for a few years. I even figured out how to exit the document :q.

The Decline

Eventually I started working in languages where IDE's were the norm. Eclipse and Visual Studio had me working in a normal text editing environment. It became normal to switch from typing on my keyboard to using my mouse to place the cursor somewhere else along the page.

This worked fine for a while. But in the back of my mind, I always remembered how nice it was to never have to take your fingers away from your normal typing position.

The Comeback

After a bit of searching, I found that most IDE's have a plugin that enables "Vim Mode". It's the first time I realized that Vim is much more than just a text editor. It's an entire hotkey based system for moving around ANY text editor (that supports it of course).

I started enabling the Vim keybinding in every program that I could.

I fell in love with Vim again. I started learning more advanced movement patterns that allowed me to jump around the page without ever having to move my hands.

I started enabling Vim mode everywhere:

• Visual Studio

• Eclipse

• Sublime

• WebStorm

I realized that learning Vim once gave me an advantage in many different working environments.

The Benefits

Normal text editors are great for writing a continuous stream of text. The problem is that I spend more time re-editing what I've already written instead of writing new content.

Vim provides the tools needed to edit a document much quicker than if I had to constantly point and click or use the mouse to highlight sections every time I wanted to make a change.

There is a snowball effect when learning Vim. The more commands you learn, the more powerful previously learned commands become since you can combine commands together.

I admit that there is a slight learning curve when first starting to use Vim but it's worth it. I look forward to using Vim for a long time.