Just Use Sublime Text

I've seen a lot of people saying this. I've met people who actually experienced this. And I can't listen to it anymore - so I've decided to write a book about how I learned Vim quickly, and how everyone can do this as well[0]. People just don't learn Vim the right way.

There's no need for months of frustration!

When I was starting with Vim, my friends were telling me something like "Just give it a few weeks, and you'll never want to switch back.". However, in every previous attempt to become good at Vim, I would give up after couple of days. Not because I'm someone who give up easily, but because I had lots of work to do.

And with every attempt of switching to Vim, I would spend most of my time on fighting with my new editor and not on the actual work.

The thing is, I didn't have to put so much effort when I first tried Sublime, or when I tried to switch to Textmate. They were downright pleasant.

What my friends were telling me (btw, advanced Vim users), was something like:

- "Turn off the arrow keys, it's not the Vim way..." - "Force yourself to use keyboard all the time, don't use mouse at all!" - "You have to learn x commands, and y things, so you could do z stuff..."

Then I realized - that was wrong! So, in my last (and the succesful one) attempt to switch to Vim (and finally learn how to be productive with it), I decided to don't listen to my "Vim masters" friends. I just decided that in the first couple of days, I'll try to use Vim as any other editor. Just like simple Notepad. No commands, no mappings, no plugins, etc. Just editing text. And that's how it all started.

With using some learning techniques, I've managed to get good at Vim really fast.

For example, if you can't get used to, or you're not productive with h j k l keys for movement, just don't use them. I don't use them. I use arrow keys all the time. Vim "masters" will probably judge me because of this - cause it's not the "Vim way". So what? I don't care. Arrow keys work for me the best, and I'm happy with it.

[0] - I'm in the process of writing a book - Mastering Vim Quickly (from WTF to OMG in no time) link: http://www.jovicailic.org/mastering-vim-quickly/

And unlike the author, I feel qualified to speak on this as I've been using Vim for 10 years and SublimeText since version 1.

ST is fancy. It's also pricey. I can save you $80 and give you a script that will set up Vim and all the cool plugins you'll need. In fact I've done just that for some of my students.

I love vim's editing commands: moving through a document, deleting, copying, etc. I think it's by far the best way to edit text. I hate everything else about vim. I find project wide search, finding and opening files quickly, shells and repls inside of vim, etc to all be subpar compared to vim's competition. I'm currently giving emacs with evil mode a try. Although not perfect, it does address most of my vim concerns after using vim for about 4 years.