More than 2 years ago, my business partner, @alibby and I started a tiny little website called VimTricks on a whim. It was a place to showcase tidbits and tricks we had learned over our many years of using the Vim text editor. This month, we evolved VimTricks into something brand new: a vim newsletter. VimTricks is now a vim email newsletter that delivers new tips twice a week.
We have both been using the Vim for many years. We build all of products and services, like our main business, StatusGator, using Vim. For us, Vim represents the most powerful text editing tool available: customizable, extensible, and open source. But Vim can be daunting to learn as a beginner. Even advanced users have much to learn from the large ecosystem of plugins and customizations available.
Internalizing all the capabilities of Vim is a difficult process but one of the most effective ways we have found to do so is to write them down. In fact, the minute we launched VimTricks, we both realized how much more learning and exploring we were doing. VimTricks gave us a reason to find a better way to do things with Vim. Instead of using the same old roundabout way to make an edit, we would research and find a better way. Then, we’d write up a post, reinforcing what we learned. Just this process of discovery, writing, and editing, has proven to be an incredibly powerful way for us to improve our Vim skills.
And now, we are even more motivated to keep learning Vim because we hold ourselves to a deadline. Our Vim newsletter sends emails twice per week, every Monday and Thursday at 8 AM Eastern time. The feedback has been great so far and we are thrilled to keep learning and keep publishing. We may look for a way to monetize such as with subscriptions or sponsors. But right now I am just highly motivated to keep publishing because I'm learning so much.
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