Vim Will Actually Change Your Life

You probably haven't used it for very long. Sure you've heard of it, you might even be using it right now but... do you really know how to use it?

Vim is one of the most powerful text editor on the planet. Once you get used to it, they said, you’ll never want to go back to your old ways.

Learning vim is going to change your life.
Why? Because you'll be able to do the following:

1. Vim lets you edit as fast as you think
2. Vim lets you focus on the task at hand, rather than the tool
3. Your hands never leave the keyboard
4. You can use your real keyboard layout
5. Special characters are easy to type: e.g., { } [ ]
6. It's universal: available everywhere, a constant on every system

Vim has quite a steep learning curve, if you are new to vim I recommend these exercises

No menus (unless you want to)

As you write code, you don't want to waste time searching through menus. Some program are really big offenders of this, where what you need is not only hidden in menu, but has a menu in a window which has another a menu.

Tools shouldn't get in the way, having a few keystrokes to handle text is a really simple way to save you time.

My experience 🐶

I've been using vim for quite some time. It sounds crazy to some people, but I've been using vim for day-to-day edits since I started my career as a programmer. Vim is an incredibly powerful text editor. It's been around for a long time, and if you use the right plugins, it's absolutely amazing.

If I'm in the terminal, I don't want any editor. Nano doesn't let me record and replay keystrokes. Ed is to cumbersome to use. Emacs is interesting, but I prefer vim keybindings.

While coding, I often have to login over ssh to a web server. This web server almost always runs Linux, so having a command line editor at hand is great. Sometimes I have to login to routers, which also run Linux. Good news is that vim is everywhere.