11–20 of 134 posts
Two things that helped me more than anything with "learning" vim and or ever wanting to use it: 1. Remap your "capslock" key to "escape." Vi was written using an ADM-3A terminal and its keyboard, which you can see here: https://catonmat.net/why-vim-uses-hjkl-as-arrow-keys has the escape-key in a sane place. On modern keyboards, if you can, remap "capslock" to "escape" when pressed alone, and "ctrl" when pressed with…
Two things that helped me more than anything with "learning" vim and or ever wanting to use it: 1. Remap your "capslock" key to "escape." Vi was written using an ADM-3A terminal and its keyboard, which you can see here: https://catonmat.net/why-vim-uses-hjkl-as-arrow-keys has the escape-key in a sane place. On modern keyboards, if you can, remap "capslock" to "escape" when pressed alone, and "ctrl" when pressed with…
I've since remapped caps lock to control, and use ctrl-[ as escape (this is default behavior). I find having an easily accesible control key is very useful, even outside Vim. You can see in your link that it is actually the control key that used to be in the position we now put the caps lock key.
It does seem like remapping caps lock to escape when pressed alone and control when pressed with another key would be nice, but that wasn't an option for me (on wayland) as far as I know.
I bring this up only because there was a week or two transition period when I made this change, and I probably would have been better off if I had mapped caps lock to control from the start.
Also, the dot operator is king.
Two things that helped me more than anything with "learning" vim and or ever wanting to use it: 1. Remap your "capslock" key to "escape." Vi was written using an ADM-3A terminal and its keyboard, which you can see here: https://catonmat.net/why-vim-uses-hjkl-as-arrow-keys has the escape-key in a sane place. On modern keyboards, if you can, remap "capslock" to "escape" when pressed alone, and "ctrl" when pressed with…
FZF(and its vim plugins) really leveled up the game for Vim.
fzf is also really useful outside of Vim. I like to use it to fuzzy find git branches among other things.
It just opens vim to a txt file that incrementally explains how to make basic edits. I was instantly hooked when I realized how much time "o" and "O" alone would save me over.
I almost never use Vim these days because I was too lazy to port my .vimrc + Vundle plugins to a new laptop at some point, but I use a Vim-mode in every editor I use, even the browser.
In my opinion, the greatest benefit of using Vim, Emacs or even Acme is how easy it is to create custom tools for your problem at hand, even for one-shot tasks. VSCode is very capable, but it can't compete in this regard (and maybe that's what they want and maybe it's a good call as well).
If MS made an official set of vim keybindings that had better editor support, or even if there was some sort of kill switch that let me turn off vim key bindings quickly, I would be 100% sold on VSCode, but until then, I'll stick to the terminal.
The name could be a reference to learnvimscriptthehardway.stevelosh.com, which is an amazing resource.
Ah Vim, one of the root causes of my imposter syndrome. (The others are CSS Grid, and Kubernetes)
Vim not worth learning to use as adult. Time too valuable. Takes too long to become extension of body. Best learned as child/teenager. Time worthless then. Maybe if you can learn it fast. Took me years of teenage to get unthinking proficiency.