Khang Nguyen

is a writer.
My vim journey - part 2

When I started out I was slow. Oh, so slow. I took far longer to accomplish the same task in vim than I did with sublime. After all, I only knew the hjkl movements and i and at best a.

Every time I crashed vim with an error in the config file I would go back to the familiar environment of sublime to fix the problem.

I often switched back to using Sublime whenever I got burned out from trying to recall vim keybindings.

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There were times I felt like giving up on vim. I would sometimes go a day or two without using vim at all, but somehow I just kept watching YouTube tutorials on using vim. There seems to be this contagious common enthusiasm shared among those YouTubers who talk about vim.

And so for the next few weeks that was my life: use vim, get tired of remembering keybindings and being slow, switch to Sublime, but keep watching vim videos, learn something new, switch back to vim, repeat.

As I went through this dance, I gradually began to notice that there are certain things I can do effortlessly in vim that I cannot do in Sublime.

For example in Sublime, if I wanted to add a new line under the line I’m currently at, I would have to move my cursor to the end of the line and press enter. The movement can be done either with the mouse or pressing Ctrl+Right. In vim, the same is accomplished by pressing o from anywhere in the line. Not having to move my hand away from my keyboard to me was a huge plus.

With each equally useful built-in function vim offers that Sublime doesn’t, coupled with better vim documentation to enable a quicker discovery of those functions, I left Sublime for good.