Ten Years of Vim
About ten years ago, I began using Vim. Since about eight years ago, I have been using Vim for every email, every piece of code, literally every text I write. Today, I want to write a short text about how I came to use Vim and what I like about it.
I don't really remember when I first used Vim. It must have been around the time when I was programming PHP a lot. I had access to a "real" computer at home – running Windows XP – in 2002 for the first time; before that, I could only use older Macintoshs. It's typical for first-time Vi users to stumble into believing – by hear-say, I guess – that it is indeed a really superior editor, until they try it out the first time and can't even save, because they don't know how to. That were my first experiences too, probably.
Anyhow, at some point in time I ditched PHP Zend Studio for SciTE. Later, I got to know Vim (i.e., by reading a tutorial about it and actually understanding it) and was instantly hooked. Probably, the guys over at #html.de talked me into it. Ironically, I used Vim before I ever used a UNIX-like operating system.
In my Vim learning curve, I identify seven important advances:
- Understanding the Modes Concept. – This, of course, is something everybody needs to grok. It's fairly straight-forward, once you think about it.
- Understand the Visual Mode and Yank/Paste. – Line-wise selection already gives you more power than a regular editor when moving code.
- Understand Mappings and Macros. – Even today I am amazed how few people automate things. If it's one line, do it manually. If it's three lines, carefully think about the task while recording a macro for it!
- Unterstanding Windows. – Multiple files and stuff.
- Consequently using [h], [j], [k], [l]. – This actually was
a much bigger step that you might think. I went to great lengths to
achive this: I configured the arrow mapping to
:echoerra message. Today, I configure all programs to use Vim key bindings, especially for horizontal and vertical navigation. It's the first thing to do. I only use the arrow keys for Mplayer seeking. - Using Text Objects. – See
:help text-objects, if you don't know about them. - Switching to a US keyboard layout. – Once you do this, all the Vim commands begin to make sense. (I used a German layout before.)
Steps 1–5 happened in the first two years. The text object only came with more recent Vim development, and I'm not quite sure when I adopted them. Learning the US layout was around 2006, maybe.
When I switched to using Debian in 2004, using Vim for all tasks already felt natural. Of course, at that point I finally came to understand Vim not merely as a text editor, but as a philosophy. And that is what fascinates me to this day: The Vi way of editing text is much more than a set of clever key bindings. It's a language.
In a way, I'm really professional at using Vim. If I think of the
tasks I do, I suspect there are very few superfluous keys I press
during editing. I have acquired a really good intuition of how to skip
to a particular line, to a particular function parameter or a certain
word in a sentence. (I use [H], [M], [L] for global on-screen
navigation a lot, and I heavily use the [f], [t], [F] and [T] jump
commands.) Just as you don't actually think about the letters you type
when you become a good typist, I don't think about what command keys I
press in Normal mode. I just press them, and the cursor magically
moves around to where my eyes rest. This is good.
On the other hand, I am just using core Vim features, most of which are already found in original Vi implementations. My really conservative .vimrc change history shows that I pretty much settled my editing habits. – But: I have never used a third-party plugin before. Strange as it may sound, I never felt the urge to do so. Command-T certainly looks like it could be of use; however, I usually start a new Vim instance and go with the Z Shell completion, which I suspect to be superior in more than one way, to find the file(s). – Thus I must acknowledge that there might be vast possibilities yet do discover. (Oh, and while confessing, there's another big one: I have never used Emacs. All I know about it is hear-say.)
For keyboard enthusiasts, there are two quirks with Vim: It mainly
relies on Escape for mode switches, and the keys for many
combinations are aligned for QWERTY layouts. There's just no way
around it: while [c] and [d] are mnemonic for cut and delete, [h],
[j], [k], [l] simply aren't. There's no way justify their use when
switching to Dvorak, and that's why I didn't (switch). I also once
tried mapping [j][j] to Escape, or using the Caps Lock key as Escape
replacement; I can't really stick to using it. (I also stick to
calling vim on the command line instead of a shorter alias. It is
the fourth most command I type, after sudo, git, and man.)
For me, text editing is equal to using Vim. I feel like a four-year old moving a mouse when I'm forced to use another editor on other people's computers. And because text editing is really clumsy with regular text editors, I no longer wonder why people don't really bother to correct errors: the effort is just not worth it.
If I had to sum up the difference between Vim and other editors in one sentence, it is this: While other editors are great for creating text, Vim is also great at manipulating text. And text manipulation, for most programmers and authors, is what it's all about.
:wq