Why I Decided to Learn VIM

Building habits

Since I’m a relatively new programmer, I have a lot of room for areas of improvement, and workflow is definitely one of those areas. Before learning VIM, I was never really a person to utilize hotkeys/keybindings to my advantage. I was extremely reliant on using my mouse. When being pitched the typical VIM spiel, the whole “keep your hands on the keyboard” point appealed to me since I have always been a fast typer. I knew in the back of my head that learning VIM wouldn’t lead to any sort of negatives.

Limitless potential

When debating if I should learn VIM, I decided to watch a tech talk about it, and the single major takeaway I had from it was that people can use VIM for years and still be improving their usage on the tool.

This hinted at a few things for me. First, picking up VIM is a huge time investment, but more importantly, you’re always finding ways to level up your craft. As someone who’s a pretty new developer, I want to parallelize my efforts when I can. This is a reiteration of my previous point, but when I incorporate different tools (VIM in this case) into my development workflow, I give myself the ability to kill two birds with one stone.

I no longer need nano on my Linux servers