[nxc18]

This is a huge thing I've been thinking about lately.

Very recently I was a pretty staunch advocate for IDEs and thought the whole VIM situation was crazy. It is unintuitive. It doesn't come bundled with lots of useful tools. It takes some configuration if you want nice things (e.g. file tree on the side).

Over winter break I decided to really commit to becoming productive in VIM. I stopped using VSCode and I stayed away from other IDEs, even as I was learning Java Spark and digging into some Python projects.

I didn't notice it at the time, but VIM has made me much more productive, even with my very minimal knowledge (I learn new commands even for basic things all the time). Ultimately, the fact of the matter seems to be that the keyboard->mouse->keyboard transition is really slow. Going to Visual Studio (I'm learning Win32 and I don't want to do that without IntelliSense) after ~2 months in VIM is almost excruciating. I'll be loading up the VIM plugin pretty soon

The long and short of it is, and my advice for everyone who asks is, learn VIM (and other command line tools) as soon as you possibly can. I have no loyalty to the UNIX philosophy or ecosystem, but take it from me, you'll be glad you did.

[omellet]

I use VsVim in Visual Studio, highly recommended.