Just today, I read an article Getting Productive with Vin in a Week without Hating It. Kudos to the author, Nick Janetakis, for coming up with a great title.

The article chronicles Nick’s journey of learning to use Vim.

My experience mirrors his.

I’m also the type of person who enjoys jumping into new things.
When I decided to switch to Colemak instead of classic QUERTZ/QUERTY keybindings, I went cold-turkey. That was painful for a while, but I’ve now totally retrained my muscle memory.

With Vim, it was similar although a bit more involved.

How to Get Started⌗

I started with Vimtutor, the interactive tutorial that comes with Vim. This gives you a basic overview and I would recommend it as a first step.

Parallel to using Vim and VS Code with Vim keybindings, I did a lot of research. Here are some useful resources:

Pain points popped up now and then (for example, how do I save a file in Vim?). That was always a great opportunity to learn something new.

Useful Plugins⌗

I started with no almost no plugins and then incrementally added useful ones.

My initial configuration came from this talk on YouTube which is a must see:

How to Do 90% of What Plugins Do (With Just Vim)

That said, some plugins are insanely helpful.

Check out Vim Plugins I Like for a great range of good choices.

Don’t add all of them at once. In fact, pick and choose and see which ones you really need.

Just Use Vim⌗

In the end, you actually have to use Vim.

Give it a try for a few weeks and see if you like it.

I didn’t believe the hardcore Vimmers that recommended to unbind arrow keys to have a “pure” Vim experience. After all, learning Vim involves a lot of unlearning and doing new things, I don’t want to make it more painful than it already is.

Like with everything, doing something new is a bit uncomfortable, but it’s definitely worth it.

I’ve gotten used to how Vim works and I enjoy its powerful capacities. I’m (subjectively) more productive in Vim now than I was in VS Code.