Learning Vim
Like a lot of people, Vim has always been a mystery to me. I never really tried to understand or give it a shot until very recently. But why now?
Motivation
I was looking at split keyboards for a more ergonomic setup. Besides the hectic price tags, split keyboards seem to have a rather stiff learning curve. During that research only, I stumbled upon the idea that using vim has its own ergonomic benefits since it greatly reduces hand movements. And it supposedly can make me more productive! So here I am, giving it a solid try.
How I started
I just googled “learning vim” or something similar and decided to start with this github project since it had more than 9k stars. I started this portfolio site building project around the same time. So I decided to work on this project solely using Vim and I have done so till now. But I felt it was not enough to just work on this project to be confident enough in Vim to use it as my main editing tool. I needed another way to practice it more on more diverse tasks. That’s when I found the idea.
How I continued
We have had quite a few holidays in December in Ireland. Besides playing with Vim, I was also trying to get comfortable using Kotlin, especially the higher order functions. Since I love solving algorithmic problems anyway, I figured it’d be best if solved those problems in Kotlin using Vim. Of course I’m working at a much slower pace than usual with two new tools but that’s not the goal here. After practicing for few hours in the last couple of weeks, I feel comfortable with the basic Vim motions. Although I can’t say I perform those intuitively yet but I’m getting there. Another thing to note here is that I can type ~70-80 WPM if it’s alphabets only. I suffer with numbers and punctuation. So those are somewhat hindering the learning as well. Looking back, the original goal of reducing hand movements definitely seems like a possibility.
Tools
For this portfolio project, I use iTerm only and edit the text in the terminal. But for the algorithmic problems, I’m using Intellij community edition with Kotlin and IdeaVim plugins.
What’s next
I’ll continue practicing Vim at home for a few more weeks before fully switching to it for my daily job. In the meantime, I plan to upload the Kotlin codes I write in the Kotlin posts. This shall allow me to keep practicing and also remain motivated to keep the portfolio updated.