I personally started with vim and I’m now using neovim for years. And I have to admit that it’s just an editor… But a perfectly optimized one.

It requires some efforts to learn the basic useful features (like horizontal and vertical motion) but I quickly saw its potential. What made me stick to it and willing to invest even more efforts is the fact that you build it to fit your needs like a glove through the interface customization, no limit and powerful keybindings remapping, and a collection of plugins for everything (without making it slow or bloated). With the right plugins, this editor can handle any regular typing or specific coding language, and makes your workflow way more efficient thanks to a great project management approach and/or speedy fuzzy finder file explorer.

I’ve barely started a series of posts dedicated to this incredible editor. Whether or not you’re using a vim or neovim, I’d recommend to stay curious because there’s other editors out there to be aware of and one may prefer them. I’ve tried quite some of themwhen moving to neovim but this one was just the one for me.

Beginner’s Command Cheatsheet

:q!

I’ve switched to vim on a whim few months ago, and it still is a pretty fun and satisfying experience. I couldn’t get LazyVim to properly work on our Unity project, since the LSP can’t handle the hundreds of projects it generates, but IdeaVim in Rider works pretty much the same, as far as the movements are considered.

However, the important thing is that I said fun and satisfying, not faster and efficient. I still make mistakes, I have to look into a keybind reference sheet every time I want to do something I’m sure has to have a special keybind but I’ve forgotten which one it is, but once you do that it feels good.

Slowly but surely learning new stuff, getting the hang of some motions you use often, not having to reach for your mouse, all of that feels good. It’s still no way near the speed or efficiency of me just clicking the damn mouse, instead of fumbling around with VIM modes, undoing random actions because I missed one important key and now half of my text is gone, or just remembering that your clipboards get overridden by almost any action unless you do it differently.

So, if you want to get efficient and quicker in your programming, I highly recommend checking the keybind section of your IDE, and learning the few important keybinds it has, such as jump to next function/next parameter, search symbols, and the like. That will make you more efficient.

If, on the other hand, you want your editing to be a skill you can slowly continue mastering, eventually (after years of use) min-maxing, but always having some cool new things to learn that will feel good, them vim is pretty nice for that.

Just don’t expect it will make you faster or more efficient.

After a decade of using the bare minimum vi modes I just yesterday discovered I could use visual mode to jointly indent multiple lines.

I will still prefer pycharm every day of the week over vim, but yesterday I needed to modify code on a server and rebuild some docker containers. I couldn’t be arsed setting up my local env, making a merge request etc and was pretty impressed that a combination of screen, vim, docker compose and git - all available via SSH, was a complete toolset for getting an emergency change deployed and an app running again.

“Why are we running from the police, Daddy?”

“Because we use Emacs, son. They use vim.”

–old Slashdot T-shirt