Not only was I comfortable using it but I enjoyed the speed and efficiency and now the thought of using Mousepad makes me cringe.Ībout the modal thing. The fourth week I’m sure I had a huge smile on my face because I could honestly say, “I’ve got this and it’s great.”Īfter a month of Vim practice, I was thoroughly corrupted, er, that is, converted to Vim. By week 3 I was high fiving myself in the mirror.
The second week was still clumsy but I was encouragd.
The first several days of using vimtutor, the built-in learning tool, were extremely rough and I think I invented a boatload of new curse words. A couple of those days were only 15 minutes and a few were as long as 2 hours but I would say my average practice per day was around 30 minutes. I committed to spending at least 15 minutes a day, every day, for 30 days to learn Vim.
Vim vs gedit how to#
Hey, if I can learn how to do this, anyone can.
Vim vs gedit full#
It took me a full 30 days to be comfortable in Vim but I’ve always been a slow learner. They say it takes 3 weeks to learn a habit and I think that’s an accurate number. Don’t plan on learning Vim on a Friday night when you have a project or homework due on Monday morning. I’m glad I did and I wish I had made the time to learn this awesome editor years ago.Ī couple of caveats about the learning process mainly the timeline. The pandemic gave me a lot more time at home and I used this to start learning Vim. I’m just a regular (whatever that means) user, not a coder or programmer but I do write a lot of long documents. I think that the combination of Vim and LaTeX is probably the ultimate word processor. I’m looking at other terminal based programs now like Calcurse but I’ll cut this list off here so this post doesn’t get too long.Ī little bit of background: My original notion in learning Vim was to use it as a stepping stone to also learn LaTeX. That’s a practical and useful benefit that I got almost immediately. And the nice thing about Linux is that you can have your cake and eat it too so I don’t have to settle for just one. I’m completely blown away by these two terminal file managers and I would never have bothered with either one if I hadn’t learned Vim first. Knowing how to use the Vim key bindings sets you up for a natural progression to really useful things like Ranger and Vifm. I cannot think of anything that is better than Vim to have in your Linux toolbox. So please allow me to share my enthusiasm about why Vim is a great gateway or maybe even a gateway to greatness.
Vim’s built-in learning module, vimtutor, is probably the best place to start for most people and that is well documented. Since there are plenty of online videos to teach you how to use Vim, I’m going to concentrate on the why and not the how. If you are happy using Kate or Mousepad or Gedit that’s fine with me. I’m not trying to take away your favorite GUI text editor. The goal of this post is to encourage anyone who is curious about learning to use Vim to make the effort to do so. Greetings and salutations to all fellow Vim lovers and potential recruits/victims.
0 kommentar(er)
