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by arendtio 2049 days ago
I'm not so sure about that. Yes, I have the hard part of the learning curve behind me, but learning vim actually changed how I write code in a very positive way. Now, I think a lot more in terms of lines and e.g. rogue whitespaces happen rarely. I know that are tools who can remove them, but I want to illustrate, that the editor improved the quality of what I type.

In the end, it depends how much time it will cost you to learn vim and if that is worth the effort and I am honestly not 100% sure, but I wouldn't want to go back to how the world was before.

2 comments

I agree that vim makes you much more line-oriented, but I'm not sure it's always a good thing. My non-vim collaborators find it strange that my LaTeX files have each clause of a sentence in a separate line.
> In the end, it depends how much time it will cost you to learn vim

Is there really that much to learn? Open file, save file, exit, block select, copy paste, search and replace - thats about 99% of what you do in an editor. 15 minutes to pick up, ipossible to unlearn. Unless you have some other editor ingrained in your synapses. Switching between editors with different shortcuts is a torture.

Actually, the commands you listed are more or less the basics, but the magic comes when you learn about the structure of the commands.

For example, `2dw` is a typical example. So you start with the number of times you want to do something, then you add a verb like `d` for delete and you end with a noun like `w` for word. As you probably have guessed, it deletes the next two words.

Since working with lines is quite common, many commands are executed for a line when you repeat the verb (easy to type). So `2dd` deletes the next two lines.

When you use this language you start using vim. There is still more to explore (e.g. macros), but this is where vim is different.