Memorising Shortcuts

I was playing around with ShortcutFoo, because it’s free to try out without a registration, and I started to wonder: how do people memorise keyboard shortcuts? When using Vim it feels like there’s always a more efficient way to do something, so it’s natural to want to master as many shortcuts and commands as possible.

One good way to learn commonly used shortcuts is to occasionally run through vimtutor. Learning how to use the help system is a good idea as well, because unlike a lot of software's documentation Vim's help is impressively complete.

The VimGolf community is a great source of ideas about how to improve editing efficiency. A problem is suggested, then whoever has the solution with the lowest number of key presses is the winner. I like to read through these, but often the lowest number of key presses is a regular expression, and I probably wouldn’t solve something like this using a regular expression in my daily work.

I like trying to use Vim in as many places as possible. I write my blog posts with Vim, notes, and obviously as much code as possible. There are also lots of plugins for popular applications to make them behave more like Vim:

• XVim adds Vim shortcuts to Xcode
• Vimium makes Chrome behave a little bit more like Vim
• Vimperator is a popular Firefox Vim-inspired extension

And there’s always Vim for iOS and Vim for Android!