EN 80: "Reaching Vim 'proficiency'"
Since issues 44 and 72, which were sent in February and November 2024 respectively, there has been no mentioned of Vim again and this is a good a time as any.
After all this time, although I haven’t mastered Vim, I’ve become proficient enough to use it every day at work with some ease. My typical use case is single file text editing, within the IDE (VS Code). It might be heretical, but it works for me.
By no means, I could consider myself good at Vim, there are plenty of more things to learn and ways to be more efficient. The thing is that I’m not that interested in those things right now, given that 99% of what I do—simple, no crazy text editing—is accomplished with what I already know. Nonetheless, from time to time, I try to read the chapter of Practical Vim I haven’t finished and practice.
In issue 44, I was trying to learn the basics with the game “vim adventures”. It’s a decent game to learn the basics and get some practice, but what really made things click was the book “Practical Vim”. What I appreciate about the book is how it presents the “Vim way” of editing text in a way that makes sense. Reading the many useful tips—the book is composed of 120 of them—shows you the best ways to think about editing in Vim in different scenarios based on your needs.
The reality is that reading the book wasn’t enough, it would’ve been great if that was possible. After reading the tips, I started to apply them daily and be aware of how to do things more efficient, even undoing what I did to try the new way. This process of thinking in and applying the “Vim way” to the daily editing for hours slowed me down significantly for a while, but after some indeterminate uncomfortable time the motor skills got better, and the whole thing became more subconscious.
If I were to start again to learn Vim, I would use Vim tutor, or any of the free online Vim playgrounds first, and then jump to Practical Vim and practice frequently. The goal would also be to learn how to do the most common things I do in my editor with Vim, for example:
Add things above and below the line with
oorO. I do this constantlyChange or delete from the cursor to another point and within brackets, parentheses, etc.
Copy-paste and move chunks of code
Interesting links
You Should Know This Before Choosing Next.js (Eduardo Bouças). Insightful article about Next.js, issues with openness and governance, and the way Vercel makes it difficult for other providers to support all features of the framework.
How Amateurs created the world’s most popular Processor (History of ARM Part 1).