Vim: a waste of time, isn’t it ?
I’m a late Vim adopter. I’ve spent years on VSCode and Eclipse. I love their plugins and love configuring them. Productivity was there, until I viewed Ben Awad youtube channel. If you search for productivity, you listen to advices. Now after 1 year of regular Vim use, it may seem counter-productive.
Ben Awad has many videos to explain why every developer should use Vim and others showcasing many tips to increase productivity. But, he used the Vim plugin on VSCode. I followed some of his tutorials on Vim and learned the basics of mouse-less editing. I liked it, but it was cumbersome in the beginning.
Little time later, I was searching to learn more about discrete optimization and it required some linked lists knowledge. I viewed PaxosRaft livestreams on Youtube. He used the genuine Vim and his screen organization was attractive with syntax coloring and a cool lightline. He uses Oh my Zsh! that I just installed on my mac.
When experts swear only by Vim, there should be a reason. Even more, Vim is installed by default on almost any Linux like machine, and, for instance, my mac. So I opened it and… it was sober. How Sunny Beatty, the author of the PaxosRaft Livestream channel, has all those colors on his Vim?
At that time, I was developing an optimization algorithm with Python for our tourism activities’ planning tool. So, I searched for some advices on the right Vim configuration for python. On the Realpython website, they have a nice article on that topic. I followed their recommendations and it actually worked wonderfully. It spent a little time figuring out how the debugger works (Vimspector plugin) and I started enjoying coding using Vim.
Of course, the main feature of Vim is getting rid of the mouse. It happens that it was a real pain in the beginning. And, thanks to the Vim cheat sheets, pinned on my second desktop screen, I was able to quickly learn how to copy/cut/paste chunks of code, block editing, search and replace terms, and many more keyboard shortcuts and instructions. The end result, is that, my attention is totally focused on the screen and no more on the mouse pointer to exactly click at the right place. May be one day, one could measure the difference time between editing a code with and without mouse.
After one year of almost extensive use of Vim, I can say, that I’m not willing to go back to old editors. I ditched VSCode. and I even extended my Vim configuration to my remote servers hosted on DigitalOcean. I have now my Vim editor available almost everywhere even from an iPad (I’ll write an article on that).
So, yes, the learning curve was almost flat in the beginning. And, now it is increasingly on the raise. I will be happy to share my findings on Vim and other dev tips for beginners.