1. root
2. tools
3. software
4. vim

§ Background

I started programming with vim in 2017, I’m still a bit new to the party.

But it’s a great party, and it might be an especially good one to join late.

My transition:

• first fired up vimtutor on an airplane, sometime in late 2016
• wrote journals, as an excuse to practice the motions
• discovered the workflow of markdown -> pdf with pandoc:
  • wrote assignments in markdown
  • graded assignments in markdown, leaning on UltiSnips (to great reviews!)
• began using vim-mode in my IDE of choice (at the time, VS Code)
• began programming in Go on and off in vim
• began maintaining an accounting ledger, mostly with vim and UltiSnips
• replicated all of the features in vim that I used regularly in VSC¹
• switched FT to vim
• continuously improving my vim workflow, I get maybe 5% better each month

It took me about 1.5² years to get to the final stage. It’s worth it!

§ Today

Today (2022-12-06), my workhorse is a self-compiled version of vim 9.0 with a few key plugins:

• ALE:
  • probably the only one I couldn’t live without
• deoplete
  • autocompletion, only driven by ale
• fzf (with rg and fd!)
• UltiSnips
• the usual tpope medley
• NERDTree
• vim-session

The full dot-file lives here here

§ Hacks

Ideas that I recommend experimenting with:

• try out vimgolf
• learn regular expressions, start with the basics:
  • *<esc>:%s//other_word/g is way fast.
  • once you have a muscle-memory toe-hold, you can get much better easily
• version control your vim config (same goes for snippets, shell profile, etc.):
  • maintain separate work and home vim configs
• leverage UltiSnips templates, especially for “structured” documents like:
  • design docs, commit messages, journal entries, meeting agendas, post-mortems
• consider using rg if grep never clicked for you:
  • rg has an intuitive interface for beginners,
  • it is also faster than grep in most common situations.
• if you’re writing natural language content, embrace pandoc³:
  • put all the config in a makefile
  • this workflow very well with vim-dispatch, allows you to write PDFs, docx “in vim”.

§ Motivation (Retroactive Justification)

Vim has been around for 30 years, and it is still getting better every year.

Betting on Vim being a competitive text editor in 2050 isn’t too far removed from betting on Linux being a competitive kernel, or PostgreSQL being a competitive RDBMS in 2050.

It’s a “Boring” tool: it’s free, it’ll always be available to compile yourself.

Basically, there’s no shiny rug to be pulled here. It’s a rock. It might not be the shiniest or sharpest rock on any given day, but it’ll be here until I retire.