Let’s Get Vimmy

This last section is going to get a little more technical. It’s still using the same concepts I outlined above, but very specifically for a programmer who uses vim and XCode (me). For those who don’t know what vim is, it’s essentially a text editor that tries to keep a programmer’s hands on the keyboard at all times. There’s a pretty cool cheat sheet that gives a rough outline of what the different keys do, but the four we want to focus on are:

h j k l (left, down, up, right). It’s kind of like W A S D in gaming.

Vim Cheatsheet (larger)

Because my right hand is always resting on h j k and l, I wanted to map all of my arrow-key shortcuts to those four letters. There are lots of examples, but the two game changers are:

I’ve also mapped window snapping and a few other things to both arrow keys and vim directional keys, but hopefully this gets the point across.

Conclusion

For those that stuck through to the end, thanks for reading! I hope you got something out of this.

I didn’t write this to preach any really sophisticated method of improving your workflow. All of these shortcuts and ideas are pretty simple and intuitive in hindsight. The point is to hopefully encourage thinking about efficiency at a high level. People spend thousands of dollars on products that are marginally better than the ones they already have, but won’t spend ten minutes thinking about why they find some flow frustrating and possible ways to fix it.

Tools used to make this post: