Va Va VIM!

Way back in the distant past, no, further back than that, my working days were spent hammering away in the mysterious and arcane editor vi . In my memory, hazy though it is, these were my most productive coding days, I just seemed to crank out so much stuff. There is a caveat to this, my roles in the early days were 100% coding focused, and there were no distractions, literally, none. Well, ok, you could get up and make a cup of tea (even coffee hadn’t been invented yet). But there were no agile ceremonies, no interweb to browse, no new technologies to learn (technology was a strictly enforced monoculture in each company or team). But there is no doubt vi contributed to my productivity.

Recently, as a result of having some time on my hands (furlough) and some stiffness in my shoulder (mouse induced RSI) I decided to revisit my old friend vi. For those totally unfamiliar with vi, the RSI aspect is relevant because vi was designed with no dependency on a mouse, there weren’t any.

Things I learned…

• vi is now called vim, or rather vi is now superseded by an entirely separate tool called vim, which stands for vi improved.
• Muscle memory is long lasting. Indeed I have been religiously hitting <esc> after typing code my entire career, much to the confusion of every version of Visual Studio, IntelliJ, Eclipse etc that I’ve used over the years.
• Muscle memory takes a while to acquire. I have spent a LOT of time Googling for how do I do x in vim. You can do everything in vim without leaving the safety of your keyboard, but you won’t remember it all, muscle or not, for a while.
• There is an excellent vim extension for VS Code .
• VS Code and vim work really well together, for example there is good integration with multi-cursors which is a real time-saver.
• There is an outstanding tutorial written by Jaime González García that walks through installing and using vim in VS Code.
• My shoulder is much better.

Things I recommend…

• Watch a vim overview/tutorial. You won’t (and don’t need to) remember all the commands, but it helps to have a high level overview of the modes and the type of things vim is capable of.
• Spend some time in vim, grab a code file that you have no emotional attachment to and just start hacking. Try to replicate the common actions of coding in that language using vim commands. There is a steep initial learning curve, so be patient and give this a little bit of time.
• If you decide that you’d like to explore vim further:
  • Install a vim extension in your IDE of choice. This gives you the speed and precision of vim, with the benefits of the IDE, ie auto-complete, intellisense, snippets et al. If you really don’t get on with it, uninstall it again. Nothing lost.
  • Build your own cheat sheet, you can focus it on the commands you use most often, and building it will help to acquire muscle memory.
  • Put your mouse on eBay.