Lessons from 3-years of intensive learning
TL;DR
Using Vim is by-far the most productiveness-enhancing, enjoyable and rewarding tool you’ll ever adopt. This post was an idea I had for a long time; there are literally endless pieces of information about Vim out there, and every time I started writing I thought I was just adding to the chaos. I feel it became too important to ignore, too much of a productivity change, and probably the best tool I have ever decided to take upon learning, and so I’m sharing my process. This is an opinionated post about how I think anyone should start. As I usually prefer to get solid procedures and actual action items, this is what I tried to create here so readers don’t lose themselves in the sea of information out there.
For years Vim was a stranger to me. In one of my first job interviews as a junior, the recruiting manager wanted to test my limited set of skills and asked what my favorite IDE was. My answer was something like “Notepad++”. Needless to say, it wasn’t quite what he was expecting.
He dug further and asked, “What do you think about Vim?”
I replied: “Vim?? isn’t that this console thing no one knows how to exit?”
Long story short, I didn’t get the job…
To me, Vim was this CLI editor sysadmins used in videos and a kind of a hack-tool used by hipster developers around the world. “Why would anyone do that to themselves?” — I asked myself and others more than a few times trying to understand whenever I met another enthusiastic user. I genuinely wanted to know why are people talking about it so much, why would anyone use it? How can anyone be so motivated to use and improve their flow with Vim continuously when it’s such a terrible tool to use.
What’s wrong with modern editors?
So I tried it out. A lot.
I took vim for many, many test drives. I wanted to prove to myself I could use it. It was my nemesis and I would not accept defeat. I got to a point I made up my mind that Vim is a religion. There’s a bunch of people who believe in it with all their hearts and just the same amount of opposers, like me that couldn’t see the light. So I left Vim aside, but couldn’t help keep thinking about it as I kept noticing other professionals across dev communities speak so highly of it. Heck, even on Silicon-Valley [s03e06] the fight is over spaces vs. tabs and Vim vs. Emacs. “Really?” I thought, “Vim vs. Emacs?”, people don’t use *standard *editors?
The real change happened when I met one of the most talented backend developers I had ever worked with. He was so enthusiastic about Vim, had so much knowledge, and most importantly worked so freaking quickly and smoothly I had to know what he was doing. This leads to the beginning of my “why”…
Why
Vim is always there on any *nix machine, Mac and soon even Windows machines. You can always find it running natively on your OS. Vim (or its predecessor VI) are already installed, so even if you’re not going to utilize it for everything, you probably want to know it pretty well. You want to be able to find your away around remote-servers-editing quickly.
It’s productive
This is the holy grail of using Vim; once you master the basics, you’ll become so ridiculously fast, you really won’t able to go back. You’ll start looking for those quick moves when writing messages or when chatting online. Writing any code or editing blocks of it becomes smooth and fluent in a way you probably never knew possible.Integrations
Vim is so powerful it has integrations with just about anything you can think if. I don’t even leave it to git commit, push, browsing through history and what not. Took it one step further and created my flow of solving merge conflicts right from Vim!Awesomeness
Not sure if I should address this as a real factor, but being honest, Vim is an enjoyable tool. Every time I use it, including when editing these lines, I enjoy my shortcuts, movement abilities, macros, and repeatable commands.
Think of yourself in the office using it; your colleagues are going to be so impressed they’d start asking for resources and tips. I know because that’s how I started and how other colleagues of mine started after me. We all can say the same thing, after reaching a medium proficient level: you become so freaking fast, other editors stop making sense. You can think fast, work quickly, and never feel an idiot again.It’s right
Hands down, how many times did you find yourself editing over 20 locations in a single file, reaching for your mouse over and over, knowing in your heart what you’re doing is either wrong? How many times did you feel like you were wasting time on reaching UI buttons or looking for the right click to help you make the change? For me, the answer was dozens if not hundreds of times, until one decided to put a stop to it.It’s light; it’s so light it takes 10% of your machine’s resources. Check out the comparison below describing average memory consumption of popular IDEs:
A comparison of VIMs average memory consumption taken on multiple Linux servers
How
Honestly, Vim is not the most accessible tool to adopt. Hell, it’s hard.
Vim has a very steep learning curve, but rest assured: if you try, don’t give up, and be consistent, it’s 1000% rewarding.
Time vs. Productivity of IDEs
The visual above is a simple demonstration of my learning curve experience. With any other IDE, I became semi-productive quite quickly (“semi” is only said in retrospect after knowing what Vim can do..). However, the green Vim curve shows my starting struggle which, after a while turned into an incredible skill.
How did I do it?
After a few brutal fights where I returned to my fallback IDE with my tail between my legs, I made a decision to actually LEARN Vim. Here’s how I did it:
Got a nice small notebook I could carry around
I bought the awesome Practical Vim by Drew Neil both in hardcover and for my iPad to read on the move
Every night before going to bed, I read one tip — the book is very intelligently built like that for easy, slow studying
The IDEs on my mac were removed, no more VSCode or PyCharm's arms to run back to. It was Vim alone
I’ve signed up for “Mastering Vim Quickly” newsletter and followed them on Twitter, where I was constantly learning new tips
I’ve started my online list of tips I learned and picked up on the way, which I maintain to this day
Talking about new tips, they are endless: even after years of work you’ll find yourself applauding another feature you never knew of. Vim is an infinite jar of candy
Rotating the joke on VIM… don’t quit the fight; it’s worth it
Gradual learning
After a few days of reading, I slowly started getting the grasp of movement in Vim using the famous hjkl, and learned to search and save keystrokes. I began understanding how Vim operates. What's the fastest and most elegant way for doing every single change. I started finding myself getting out of bed after reading a tip to try it out and writing it down in my notebook.
Diving right in may not be for everyone. If you’re not yet willing to drop everything else and use Vim alone, you may want to try out some excellent integrations for IDEs; a popular one is VSCode’s Vim mode which adds most of Vims functionality and abilities right in your beloved (and soon to be ditched 😉) IDE. I tried it and had a hard time finding 100% of the functionality I was used to, so I went straight back to full-on Vim.
When
Funny question to ask, but — right now. You may be launching a new project or starting a new job; these are just a trigger to adopt a new life-changing tool. Nothing has to be dramatic; you can pick it up as you go. As long as you’re consistent and determined, within a few weeks, you’ll get to the point discussed earlier where no other tool is required anymore. You'll be past the point of just being productive: you'll be faster in vim than anything else.
Who
Jokes aside, mastering Vim is a life changer for any writer. Yes, it’s designed to edit code, but I got to a point I’m writing my text there since I feel more confident, productive, and comfortable. Here’s a nice piece: “Vim for writers”.
Whether you’re in IT, DevOps, full-on developer, the occasional script writer (and scriptwriter 😁), or data analyst: everyone can use Vim and enjoy it to the max. I got to write Python, Golang, Crystal, TypeScript Bash and a lot of text (these lines right now, for example). There's no text editing situation I can think of for which vim is not a perfect solution.
Customizing
By now, you learned that Vim is one of the most versatile, customizable tools out there. Not only it has endless plugins, but you can also change your configuration file (the .vimrc) and can pretty much change everything. Having that said, you may want to start Vanilla. Here’s a good video that can save you a lot of plugin installations just by knowing Vim’s built-in abilities. The one thing that is recommended to use is Tim Pope’s Vim-sensible plugin.
Plugins
Having one of the largest enthusiasts communities out from there, Vim has endless plugins, most of them can be found on GitHub. A word of warning though, while plugins are helpful and enjoyable, they have a few downsides with them:
They’re heavy on Vim: you may notice lagging and longer response times with some highly demanding plugins
They may be conflicting with other plugins/configurations: (usually, you won’t notice that with popular plugins)
They’re masking some of Vim’s abilities. You install a plugin that has pretty good vanilla functionality in Vim already — Check yourself before running to every shiny plugin
They may be slowing down your leaning, adopt them with care, slowly, and only when you feel the need
Here’s a rather short list of plugins that I use (I try to maintain them by removing the ones I don’t use anymore occasionally). you can also find the full list of them together with my .vimrc on GitHub.
tpope/vim-sensible — Sensible configurations discussed above in “customizing”
tpope/vim-surround — Change / create / remove surroundings
in VIM: “ < ‘ ( [tpope/vim-commentary — Quickly comment out blocks of code
tpope/vim-fugitive — VIM git integration — No reason to ever leave the IDE!
VundleVim/Vundle.vim— A plugin manager
Valloric/YouCompleteMe — Much useful integration for autocompletion while producing lines of code
w0rp/ale — a Basic static code analysis
junegunn/vim-easy-align — Aligning code by a delimiter
vim-airline/vim-airline — A useful toolbar visualizing mode, word count, encoding, etc.
scrooloose/nerdtree — A popular but rarely used plugin by myself showing an index tree like most IDEs
junegunn/fzf.vim — A better replacement for nerdtree and generally finding files on projects
airblade/vim-rooter — Sets the root of the project regardless of where Vim was launched from (useful with fzf)
python-mode/python-mode — Python static code analysis (complying with all the PEP right away, a fantastic piece of the addon)
jiangmiao/auto-pairs — Automatically and conveniently generating the pair of you opening bracket or parentheses
That’s it, and thanks for making it this far!
I hope this post helps you get started and find your way towards an enjoyable productivity change. I know the internet is full of information and ideas, but since I had to figure out for myself what works best, and made it only after a few attempts, I thought of sharing the process with some other people looking for some guidance. I hope you enjoyed reading and will share this with anyone looking to make his first steps into Vim!
Big thanks to fuzzymidget Reddit user who offered his help with styling and language corrections, commenting on my post on subreddit r/vim.
I invite you to take a peek at my own .vimrc configuration, suggest changes or take ideas.
My name is Omer, and I am an engineer at ProdOps — a global consultancy that delivers software in a Reliable, Secure, and Simple way by adopting the DevOps culture. Let me know your thoughts in the comments below, or connect with me directly on Twitter @omergsr.
Edit [July 5th]:
With his permission, adding @russellbateman's comment which gives another angle and some insights I couldn't have come up with on my own:
I have used Vim/vi for 35+ years. One problem in the (rather religious) discussion of editors is that folk only compare editors. Vim/vi isn't merely an editor; it is a full, raging text processor! Mere editors, even really fine ones like Notepad++, typically don't walk very far down the road of text processing. They're present as editors only.
Until comparatively recently, IDEs that offered vi compatibility really only offered the skin-deep face of modeful editing--that part of vi that is what puts people off. They did not offer .exrc or .vimrc support nor keystroke power much deeper than the mode. A lot of people were and still are left perplexed as to why anyone would ever be masochistic enough to learn Vim/vi just so they can switch it on in their IDE.
Fortunately today, while exhibiting some annoying practices in terms of integration, first-rate IDEs like JetBrains IntelliJ IDEA offer more complete Vim integration than the silliness early IDE attempts made two decades ago. Personally, and because I grew up a UNIX command-line guy, I am not the least bit bashful about popping up a console outside my IDE to run Vim/gVim even though I know that IDEA's vi emulation is probably up to it.
Last, I generally never install any plug-ins despite recognizing their utility. I'm not hostile to plug-ins, it's that, just as vi/Vim is everywhere nowdays (and the only game in town on freshly brought-up Linux systems), plug-ins are not ubiquitous, so I don't even think about them until I'm doing something really specialized, not a frequent situation.
Oldest comments (67)
Actually, I'm a neovim user :)
Thought that this would be too advanced for people to take in.
My goal was to broaden the audience and get more people interested in Vim as an IDE other than getting to know it in depth.
Thanks for the comment anyhow, you're 100% right!
Congrats, great post.
I'd like to recommend checking this website vimawesome.com/ is a nice place to find plugins and this one vim-adventures.com/ to helping you get used to using the keys for navigation on the code
Agree with both!
vimawesome is a great source of knowledge.
Thanks for sharing and for reading
I've never used Vim, so I don't speak from experience. There is this one thing that has been bothering me for some time, and I didn't understand yet: if Vim is so awesome, how come no other editor has adopted some of its capabilities? As you mentioned, VSCode has done it (to some extent) but not to the fullest, just as a mode.
I mean, if some other editor\IDE would implement these awesome features, why wouldn't Vim users change their editor?
Well, it's a good question and I think it comes down to this:
Most IDE's want you to learn their language, syntax and shortcuts. They are all inherently adjusted to modern desktops using mouse and arrow-based keyboards. They want to lure you into using them and sticking with them with shiny features and colors.
Vim is hard. It takes time and effort, other IDEs can't afford to lose you just because they have a "vision" of how productivity should be.
On top of that, even if one of them were to adopt everything Vim does, it'll never be as low-resource requireing as Vim, and will never become a standard to be found on any Unix server to use...
I think that explains it more or less.
There are a few interesting answers about that on this thread:
stackoverflow.com/questions/14410/...
I'll take the last half sentence of the accepted answer:
Meaning, on any other case you can harm yourself or get frustrated (Vim is hard), but with the right method and learning curve, you can become incredibly productive and satisfied.
But again - it takes work.
Absolutly, I'm a neovim user myself. Not an expert but after time I find "easier" working with vim/nvim than other editors. That stackoverflow thread is interesting because, in reality, modes and modal editors are precisely against every usability principle.
Hence the question - how do you explain the adaptation of vim and its modern progress?
And do you know any other modern IDE that comes close to its abilities?
VScode vim mode doesn’t count.. these are still vim modes in a prettier GUI
The key question here is, why do modal editors exist in the first place? In the early days of Unix before mouses were widely used, all the editing was keyboard-driven, from moving the cursor around the document to more complex operations, like string substitution.
This answer
Because when mouses started to be widely used, there was no point in modal editors. But again, there is a reason why vim or emacs survived all these years, they are incredibly powerful.
As for modern editors, well, actually there is Oni.v2.
I get that, I do. But the thing is that while it isn't explicitly mentioned, mouses are convenient but are key in making us lazy, slower and thus less productive.
Heck, even arrows are "banned" in Vim...
So yeah, a mouse is easier, and if you don't want to learn too hard it's obvious why would you use it.
But for those of thus that care about productivity and satisfaction, it can't be achieved with other IDEs, no matter how familiar you are with their own set of shortcuts. In Vim it's a philosophy translated into concepts, rather than a few nice keyboard shortcuts.
This is all IMHO of course...
Vim is awesome, but he has the hardest learning curve. If you want to learn Vim you have to deal with frustration, if you can do that you can use the best code editor that doesn't set any limits.
VSCode, Sublime, PHPStorm and Atom all have their Vim plugins.
I agree with everything.
In regards to having a Vim mode in your IDE, personally I don't like it;
Combining these I decided to stay with Vim alone, and never looked back
For me, Vim is still a code editor, an IDE has certain advantages for complex projects. From this point of view it is better for my purposes to combine IDE with Vim Commands. Outside the IDE I work with Vim.
I don't worry so much about resources with the IDE, I use Docker for JS stories that eat more resources :D
Haha understood :)
Throughout my work, I found replacements for IDE features like static code analysis (Python and Go have some incredible Vim plugins for that), even a debugger with breaking points and everything.
Yes, in the end of the day I understand why some devs would choose IntelliJ with their entire environment pre-configured, hooked up to Git and what not, to me it looks lazy and not knowing what's under the hood (git / env vars / any other operational stuff) but who am I to judge what helps people write code and deliver...
The irony is that they have. EMACS has a vi mode. Apparently you didn't know that.
Look up EMACS viper.
Also bash has a vi mode. There probably are others.
So...basically they have.
Hi, not sure a comment on what is this specifically, but you are 100% right. The motions are adopted by lots of tools for convenience
I think the reason is it's very hard to do so. Vim has been around for really long and it's features have slowly evolved to what we see today. Replicating these features would be a difficult task – it would be an awesome feat if editors could.
Also, most editors aren't designed with vim compatibility from the ground up, so it gets hard mixing vim and non-vim.
I agree. And I have to say most of them do adopt a vim-like plugin at least for basic motions. See Jet brains editors, VS code, Atom, etc.
Awesome resources. Thank you :)
I was shocked also. Because the Practical Vim book's price is ₺126 in Turkey.
Not sure how much that translates to, but it’s available in a lot of ways.
My specific choice for this one was paper, that I could read and write comments on the pages to further play with later...
If you need help finding it let me know
Actually, I can read it in English but yes, I need to help to find it but should be a little bit cheapest :)
IMHO, some books always should be free or cheapest.
Anyway, Thanks.
You nailed it with this post about Vim!
As a long time Vim user I see its functionality as poetry. It moves you as you work with it. It inspires the way you work and see the tasks ahead. Its truly stays out of the ways as you craft your current thoughts into reality.
Thanks for reminding me that Vim is wonderful! 👏🏽
What an awesome comment to get!
Thank you for that, for being right and putting the essence of it in beautiful words!
I love macros and it's one of my most used features in Vim, but this post was meant to hook people up and help them get started, macros IMHO are too deep in.
Maybe they're worth a separate post though..
Well, yes, but the essence is not the manual keystrokes, it's how to be smart about composing the actual record sequence of motions.
Thinking about "least strokes", and "everything can be automated" concepts that Drew Neil describes in his book.
These are the important stuff.. anyone can just go
qaand@abut you want to learn that it can be used with multiple registers, and then can be combined together, and you can edit it, and be very thoughtful about how to do fast efficient moves and records...As I've said.. maybe an idea for the next post!
open terminal window and run
$ set -o vienjoy!
Oh this is one of my favorites! I even took it a step further and mapped my terminal with
jj(which I use for Vim escape) to apply Vim mode (set -o vi). Awesome featureFrom someone who couldn't figure out why "Esc-b" and "Esc-f" stopped working, thank you!!!!!!
I was a sublime user for the longest time. Then I started working on a raspberry pi project and could not figure out how to install sublime, so I went with what would work on such a dinky machine: vim. Never looked back!
This is a beautiful tweet idea :)
I have used Vim/vi for 35+ years. One problem in the (rather religious) discussion of editors is that folk only compare editors. Vim/vi isn't merely an editor; it is a full, raging text processor! Mere editors, even really fine ones like Notepad++, typically don't walk very far down the road of text processing. They're present as editors only.
Until comparatively recently, IDEs that offered vi compatibility really only offered the skin-deep face of modeful editing--that part of vi that is what puts people off. They did not offer .exrc or .vimrc support nor keystroke power much deeper than the mode. A lot of people were and still are left perplexed as to why anyone would ever be masochistic enough to learn Vim/vi just so they can switch it on in their IDE.
Fortunately today, while exhibiting some annoying practices in terms of integration, first-rate IDEs like JetBrains IntelliJ IDEA offer more complete Vim integration than the silliness early IDE attempts made two decades ago. Personally, and because I grew up a UNIX command-line guy, I am not the least bit bashful about popping up a console outside my IDE to run Vim/gVim even though I know that IDEA's vi emulation is probably up to it.
Last, I generally never install any plug-ins despite recognizing their utility. I'm not hostile to plug-ins, it's that, just as vi/Vim is everywhere nowdays (and the only game in town on freshly brought-up Linux systems), plug-ins are not ubiquitous, so I don't even think about them until I'm doing something really specialized, not a frequent situation.
Wow!
These are some deep insights I'd be happy to add to the post's body (if you're in).
I've never thought about it in the extent you described, also for lacking the experience and familiarity with recent history I guess.
So first, thank you for that!
Second, you made me recall a very good Vim talk about using it "vanilla" - "How to Do 90% of What Plugins Do (With Just Vim)": youtube.com/watch?v=XA2WjJbmmoM
Sure, no problem!
Done. Thank you!
It was more like a marketing post. There are many free and comprehensive online resources available for vim.
Yes, I agree.
I mentioned at the beginning that I hate over flooding information that already exists in the internet, BUT - I gained so much by learning Vim, and while finding the information I didn't really know how to approach it, and the immense change it had taken me through made me feel I have to share it with the world.
So yeah, in a sense this is a marketing post, although no one is going to make any profit from it, besides those who choose to learn, and maybe the author of the book for making a few more bucks (which I believe he deserves very much)
a. That's fantastic! I did not know this one
b. How is it compared to python-mode or vim-go ?
I get it. Will definitely give it a try!
But if you ever take it with Golang or Python the two above are crazy-good.
Static code analysis in a level I've never experienced with any other plugin / IDE..
Long time Vi/Vim/Neovim user here. 8+ years to be more precise.
I guess I was at every step of a Vim user already, from the fanboy to the it's just a tool person.
Some things are really amazing about this "simple" text editor. I'm still learning it even after so many years, there is always something new to learn and to improve one's workflow.
I would say the worst thing about Vim and it's steep learning curve is that it leaves out some many people... And the ones who are "allowed" into the club usually become such fanboys that is even hard to make critics to the editor. Been there, done that.
Nowadays I just try to be open about it and if people want to start I tell them to find a good reason, like feeling more productive, and not something like "feeling like a Hollywood hacker".
And then, to finish: How do you know someone is a Vim user? Don't worry, they will tell you :-)
I guess it can't be put better than that :)
Great Post!!
vim is definitely one of the tools a developer asks himself after learning it:
"how did I live so far without it?"
I would recommend this learning resources too:
mkaz.blog/working-with-vim/
github.com/romainl/the-patient-vim...
github.com/romainl/idiomatic-vimrc
Thanks for sharing!
I'd switch the last two with Practical Vim book, but that's me :)