Do you use vim as your default text editor? If you do not, have you ever been in a situation you could do nothing but use vim?
Do you use vim as your default text editor? If you do not, have you ever been in a situation you could do nothing but use vim?
Yes. But mostly IdeaVim in JetBrains IDEs though.
For those that haven’t yet learned vim: the real power is that the commands can be combined to form a mini-language. Commands can also be recorded in macros and replayed. This is what makes it so awesome. But to really make use of this you have to properly learn it, only knowing i and x isn’t enough.
Also note that modal editing isn’t for everyone. I’m happy to learn hotkeys, I even got far enough to build musclememory for vim’s normal mode. What never went away though was my confusion about what mode the editor is in. I would constantly input text in normal mode and input commands in insert mode, leading to costly mistakes that tore down any speed advantage vim would have given me. I really tried, but never built muscle memory for this kind of context switching[1], maybe it’s an ADHD thing.
These days I’m on Emacs with an always improving custom command scheme of non-modal but context sensitive commands that do similar things in all major and minor modes.
Same situation with tmux which is almost a requirement for the typical vim workflow, and adds another layer of mode switching on top. On Emacs window management is included and so are remote shells/editing, so no need for the tmux<->editor context switch. ↩︎