PSA: run vimtutor in the terminal

Drat, I've been working with vi for 35y now... (feeling old) I'm glad I now know how to kill the mouse functions in vim so X clipboard works. ;)

Tried emacs once (in '94)... opened an extra xterm and killed it as I couldn't figure out how to save and exit. (it's just what you're used to ;) )

Helix > Vim (and neovim)

I have about 30 years of my career left. That's not enough time for the return on investment of learning VIM to payout.

If you are actually interested in learning, it's not too hard, you'll be slow for a little bit but it pays off in the end.

First, understanding there are actions and objects and quantifiers. Actions are what you do to objects, so when you want to (d) delete, that is the action, then you'd want to specify a object. ($) being the end of the line, (^) start, (w) is word, (j), (g) is top of file and so on, these are already the words you'll use to move along as well.

Then, for many of these we can add quantifiers, i.e. repeat x number of times.

So 3dw is delete three words and 3dj is three lines down and so on. If you want to select, it's just swap v for d and off to the races.

Once you learn the basic concept, you really only need a few actions and a few objects to be functional.

Print/find/make a cheat sheet and put it up by your monitor or keyboard and give yourself a week.

Also, checkout the vimtudor or vim golf and play the game for a few minutes.

35 years ago (give or take) I used vi (no "m") for email and Usenet. I doubt I could remember how to do anything useful with it now.

As a long time vim user with many macros and plugins, etc. and I love using it. But I have to say, it's hard for me to actually suggest vim to anyone new, because of how long it takes until you actually start using it comfortably...

VSCode has a vim plugin, you should try it

somehow I read the last frame as "stop tinkering with your setup, use the bloody mouse and get the job done"

I get the feeling that every developer with this midnset still uses a tenkey.

Emacs is my favourite IDE. I switched to it from vim and never looked back.

The only way to learn to use it is to use it. It's OK if you don't but using it will get you there. I've been a vi & vim user since the 90's and I'm still learning new things.

By the way, the vim extension for VScode is great, so why not combine both.

I mean I use the vim plugin in IntelliJ lmao.

I’m no expert but it’s much more enjoyable writing code when you don’t have to go handle your mouse every 1 second.

i, x, r, dd, :wq are good enough for me. Everything more than that is for nerds.

I fell in love with Vim a while ago, but it's missing a lot of the core features of VSCode. However, the Neovim-VSCode integration has been a saviour. All the cool features of VSCode combined with the text editing speed of Vim.

I've tried for years to master vim, but still fall back to old habits. I have gotten to the point where single file editing is faster in vim than in IntelliJ, but still haven't figured out the mysteries of vim buffers and multi-file editing.