For a long while, I’ve been using Sublime Text 3 extensively. I coded on it, took notes on it, planned events on it. I loved it because it was one of the few apps I had where I can install extensions to customize the look and feel of the app, but also mostly because it was fast.
As time went by, I felt that the configuration options open to me were not granular enough. Customization was limited to what the endpoints which the developers left open. Documentation also lagged far behind features.
The large letters in caps “UNREGISTERED” did not help with the experience. $99 for a text editor also didn’t make sense.
Don’t get me wrong, Sublime Text 3 was a great editor, far ahead of other editors at the time in terms of speed and modularity. But I felt that I had to move on.
At the time, I was vaguely aware through pop culture and memes that there are two somewhat legendary editors: Vim and Emacs. I knew that if you googled “vi”, Google would ask if you meant “emacs”, and vice versa. I also knew that they were both open-source and free to use.
So since I was indeed looking for something free and open source and fast, I started looking at vim. And that’s how I started.