The only VIM I knew was a dish washer soap.
I started learning VIM really late in my software engineering career. Or I can say I wasn’t an employee when I started learning VIM.
The reason I learnt it so late was simple, no one around me used VIM. If I had seen it then I would have been aware of it at least.
Eventually, I saw screencasts of people doing weird, super-fast stuff on terminals which I later found out was actually VIM.
Reasons to use VIM
- to be more productive
- to alleviate load on CPU
- to show-off
You can do a lot of things using short-cut keys in VIM which is the only way of doing them. You can do most of theses in VSCode but using the UI where you need to use a mouse.
While writing this article, the CPU load is less than 0.05! It isn’t the same while using VSCode. More the lines of code you have, slower VSCode is.
Basics to start off
| command | function |
|---|---|
vim test.txt | create/open text.txt file |
i | switch to insert mode to add content |
Esc | switch to normal mode |
:w | save the file |
:q | quit vim |
:wq | save file & quit vim |
:q! | force quit vim |
I recommend starting off with this video. Try things out after each video so that it sticks.
I’ve created a website for looking up vim shortcuts where you can search by key or its function.
I will keep updating this post because there are lot of other reasons to use VIM but I’m not able to gather them at the moment.
Always remember how to exit - Shift+zz