Skill transfer - GUI text editor to VIM

Upon installing Arch linux on my Laptop, I had the thought of spending the summer writing articles in VIM, not only for stereotypical reasons, but to also improve my workflow, as I was told that using solely the keyboard and nothing but the keyboard has the magical effect on making your text editing endevours much faster. This statement resonates with me since I really enjoy using the keyboard more than the mouse. I fully recon that user interfaces are focused on making functions quite accessible, but in a text editing environment, I believe the keyboard has more speed potential. Vim capitalizes on this with its built-in macros setup; the trade-off lies in its learning curve... And ohhhh boy!

Before trying to toy with VIM and since quite some time, my hands and arms were positioned in a way that reaches the mouse and the Ctrl, Shift and space keys; since these are the keys that I mostly use in my workflow. VIM takes this on a whole new level by making me use the entire keyboard, I am talking here about using keys that I would have never imagined myself using in a text editing environment. Funnily enough I had little to no difficulties getting used to the main navigation keys HJKL; I could easily transfer my dexterity from some video games, since the average game I played had me use the keyboard. This setup made me reconsider the position of my hands and arms, you might want to say that I started to feel like an octupus after using VIM for quite some time. I have never imagined myself for once being in a situation where using the ESC in a key combination, or caring about whether my CAPS lock is on in order to enable a macro.

Originally, I was going to write this article to document my learning journey while slowly updating it each time I learn something new. As of the writing of this blog post, I still have many macros to learn, but I can assure you that I became much faster at writing. So far I became efficient at jumping and deletion macros. The built-in Vimtutor, which can be accessed from the terminal at any time (Or online if you click the embedded link), is well made and I may even argue that it is quite faster than learning from a video. I began learning it on the 1st of May 2024; it is just a matter of building muscle memory at the end, and I have read articles from people claiming that once you start learning it, there is no going back. At the end of the road is the promising reward of efficient workflow, and honestly, it's worth it! Some of VIMs macros are intuitive if you are an english speaking, but some can still take some time.

I began incorporating VIM in writing emails through neomutt (I should write an article on that in the future), editing python scripts, typesetting my \(\LaTeX\) and writing these blog posts. From a quantitative perspective, you may say I became slightly faster at text editing by a couple of minutes. I can sight some room for improvement. What's more important is that I can transfer my skills from VIM to doing my chores on the terminal emulator, since getting used to the latter has also been proven to be much faster than using GUIs in some scenarios. I can only confirm victories here and no losses, it was worth my time.

On defaults settings and since I am not using the numpad side of the keyboard, a choice between 60%-80% keyboard layouts is a good option. Their compact size and button placement looks as if it was made for this workflow, allowing my fingers to travel quickly and navigate through the keys with no issues. Of course you don't have to go for these types of keyboards, I myself would like to have the numpad installed just in case I am sitting in a non-working manner and just laying my arms.

Plugins wise, I still have not installed any plugins, and I think I should do so in the near future, especially if I am going to do some extensive coding on VIM, I will surely need something like a spell-checker. I want to stress out though, that I had a better experience learning it through the Vimtutor than Vimadventures . There are multiple resources and cheating-sheets out there to choose from. At the end of the day, VIM is an environment that strengthened my skills through practice, it takes time. Due to how well-designed Vimtutor is, my exercise routine revolved around going for 1 chapter at a time, and then writing code or walls of text to practice using what I have learned while also trying to keep my previously taught techniques in check. Trust the process! It will be funny if someone turns image editing into an activity that can be exercised using the keyboard efficiently better and faster than the mouse.