Adventures in VIM part 1

After I wrote my last post about changing text editors, I dove back into some books and trying a few more things out.

My initial concern that I might not recover the time I spent learning VIM in efficiency improvements is a reasonable one but also probably wrong. I am still far faster at using a mouse and cursor keys in VSCode, but it is easy to see how proficiency with modal editors can save a great deal of time.

I’ve started by adding the VSCode Neovim plugin to VSCode and getting used to the hjkl navigation keys, and used it for a significant amount of my coding work yesterday.

I am already a big fan of ^ and $ to get me to the beginning and end of text on a line. I also use d$ a lot, which deletes from the cursor to the end of the line.

At least initially the effort has made everything significantly more difficult, since thinking about what I need to write next has to compete with being hyper-vigilant about how I am using my tools. I am alread developing some of that muscle-memory though; I’ve caught myself trying to edit the address bar in browsers with vim commmands.

Muscle-memory, though, is not to be taken lightly, and I have a lot of command key sequences carried over from my BBEdit days in the late 90s, as well as a long-standing relationship with the arrow keys. But it’s not going to take quite as much effort to switch as I thought.