Why I Use Vim (And Why You Should Too) - GEO Jobe (2024)
In a world dominated by feature-rich integrated development environments (IDEs), Vim stands as a contrasting alternative, offering a powerful and lightweight text editing experience. While IDEs provide convenience and abstraction, they may hinder a developer’s growth by obscuring the inner workings of the programs they build. This opinion article delves into the reasons why I choose Vim over popular IDEs, highlighting its efficient motion-based navigation, speed, and the broader exploration it encourages.
1. Motion-Based Efficiency: Traditional text editors often require hand movements away from the home row, disrupting the typing flow. Vim’s use of intuitive keyboard motions eliminates this drawback by keeping your hands comfortably in place. With Vim, you can navigate, edit, and perform commands with unparalleled speed, effortlessly moving through code or text using customizable keybindings. By minimizing physical strain and optimizing hand movement, Vim promotes a more ergonomic and efficient editing experience.
2. Empowering Navigation: Vim’s navigation capabilities are unparalleled. Through its modal editing system, which includes modes like normal, insert, and visual, Vim grants users the ability to traverse files, search for specific patterns, and manipulate text swiftly and precisely. The extensive range of navigation commands allows you to be exactly where you want to be in your codebase at the speed of thought, enabling seamless movement and effortless contextual understanding.
3. Understanding the Underlying Processes: While IDEs provide powerful debugging and automation features, they often abstract away the intricate details of program execution. Vim, being a lightweight text editor, encourages a deeper understanding of the underlying processes. By relying more on the command line and core utilities, you gain insights into how your code interacts with the operating system and become proficient in utilizing the full potential of your computer. This comprehensive understanding enhances your troubleshooting abilities and helps you craft more efficient and optimized solutions.
The terminal can do anything and everything
4. The Journey of Exploration: Adopting Vim is not merely a change of text editor but a journey of exploration. By immersing yourself in the Vim ecosystem, you become exposed to a vast community of passionate users and developers. The journey fosters curiosity, pushing you to explore and master various Vim plugins, configurations, and command-line tools. Moreover, the increased reliance on the command line and core utilities encourages a deeper understanding of the Unix philosophy and a broader skill set, making you more adept at managing your entire computing environment.
Comparing the time it takes to learn and the productivity gains
Choosing Vim over popular IDEs is not merely a preference; it’s a decision to embrace efficiency, understanding, and exploration. Vim’s motion-based efficiency, empowering navigation, and encouragement of deeper understanding set it apart from the crowd. By embarking on the journey of Vim, you unlock a world of unparalleled speed, contextual awareness, and mastery over your coding environment. Embrace the challenge, dedicate time to learn Vim, and witness the transformation it brings to your productivity and appreciation of the intricacies of software development.
Now if you want to get started with Vim, here’s some things you need to know first.
Vim vs Vim Motions
Vim is the actual text editor, Vim motions are the efficient movement commands that Vim uses. You can install plugins for almost any editor enabling Vim motions, giving you almost the same feel as the real Vim.
Vim is a long-standing text editor with a vast plugin ecosystem, while Neovim is a modern fork of Vim that focuses on extensibility, improved performance, and compatibility with Vim plugins.
I highly recommend Neovim over the original Vim, it’s just better in every way.
TJ DeVries (a core maintainer of Neovim) has a more advanced video about configuring Neovim Effective Neovim: Instant IDE
If you have any questions or would just like to learn more about how I use Vim in my day to day workflow please feel free to reach out to [email protected]
Vim (Vi IMproved) is a highly configurable text editor used by programmers and system administrators for efficient text editing. It is an enhanced version of the older vi editor, providing many features and improvements.
We have learned that Vim is a powerful text editor popular among developers. It's based on shortcuts, called the Vim language, which can make coding and writing faster and more efficient. With Vim, you can jump to any specific text position and rapidly make precise edits.
The advantage of vim is that you can quickly edit files from command line and has very advanced text processing capabilities. But again, a good IDE can do all this.
While the path to mastering Vim may seem daunting, the endless possibilities it offers in terms of speed, health benefits, and adaptability make it a skill worth acquiring. The worst that can happen is you find out you don't like it!
There are several reasons for this: Its power: Vim users benefit from powerful search and replace functions. Its features: for example, automatic completion, file comparison, advanced searches, command line history, online help, spell checking, block operations, scripting language, etc.
Some people indeed continue to use Vim and Emacs for their primary editors, taking advantage of tools like ALE (Asynchronous Lint Engine) based on LSP (language server protocol).
It's more of an advanced text/code editor. One virtue is that it isn't tightly integrated into a particular development environment (which would render it usable only in that development environment.) In other words, using Vim allows you to use the same editor regardless of development environment.
This is another area where Vim shines. Vim runs in the terminal and can be used in any environment, whether a GUI is present or not. Vim has the same keybinding set across all operating systems, unlike Vscode, which has different shortcuts for Linux, Mac, and Windows. So with Vim, you learn once and use it everywhere.
Having at least a basic functional knowledge of VIM is good because it can often be the default editor for new computers or a coworker's computer. It's not something that I would bother putting a lot of work into or including on a resume.
Benefits of Using Vim. Speed and Efficiency: Vim is designed to be an efficient text editor. Its modal editing and commands can help you work faster and more efficiently. You can use shortcuts and commands to perform complex operations with fewer keystrokes.
Why is it so hard to learn vim and stick to it, well meanly because of vims steep learning curve which is different than most other stuff you try to learn. To learn vim, you need to create muscle memory, do not try to memorize every single command the first day, it is impossible.
Vim's rich feature set and customizability make it a powerhouse for experienced users seeking ultimate control over their editing environment. Conversely, Nano's simplicity and accessibility appeal to beginners and those prioritizing ease of use.
This is another area where Vim shines. Vim runs in the terminal and can be used in any environment, whether a GUI is present or not. Vim has the same keybinding set across all operating systems, unlike Vscode, which has different shortcuts for Linux, Mac, and Windows. So with Vim, you learn once and use it everywhere.
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For simple text editing tasks, both vi and vim will behave similarly. However, vi is preferred because we can expect it to be on POSIX compliant (or at least mostly compliant) systems. Moreover, regarding the performance, vim requires a little more resources than vi due to its more extensive features.
Introduction: My name is Patricia Veum II, I am a vast, combative, smiling, famous, inexpensive, zealous, sparkling person who loves writing and wants to share my knowledge and understanding with you.
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