I’ve tried vim on and off during college but never really had the time to fully get working with it. As it turns out the stress of two degrees is not conducive to “fun activities”. Now that I have a real job ™️, I’ve decided to finally try and use it this week full stop and I genuinely feel like a programming chad. There’s still a lot I’ll need to learn and probably overtime I’ll discover some inefficiency in how I’m using it now but it really does just feel good. I understand the hype now.
The thing about Vim is once you get the navigation down you’ll want it for everything and you’ll refuse to go back to anything else.
I used Vim for so long that I can’t live without some form of vim style navigation. my Window Manager uses it, my web browser uses it, all my TUIs use it, hell I even switched to Emacs and installed Doom Emacs and THAT uses it. Now I only ever use a mouse for gaming because you realize that navigating around your PC purely with your keyboard is actually faster than using a mouse. I’ve disabled the touchpad completely on both my laptops.
If you’re digging Vim check out NeoVim with LazyVim. makes plugins and theming and what have you easier. I use it as my backup to DOOM Emacs.
I’m more interested in how do you navigate system menus and such, or does DE manage this? I’ve tried one Linux distro recently without a mouse attached and it was painful because some elements of the system UI are not accessible in any way
never really an issue with that either because most GUI menus will trigger via alt. even in something like KDE with the proper keybindings setup it’s not an issue. heck even discord now has keyboard navigation.
I second this. I only started slowly switching to nvim few months ago, and I already can feel slightly annoyed when I have to take off my hands of the keyboard to reach for a mouse, or when I’m editting a text in i.e a browser, want to make an edit few words back, and I have to spam keys like a madman instead of just jumping where I need to be.
It’s addicting and extremely comfortable, having a good keyboard navigation controls.
I really need to look into tiled window managers and a browser.
how do you actually navigate a browser tho? i always feel like i need the mouse for that…
I use Qutebrowser. All links and interactions are keybound. so if for example I want to “click” on your user name I hit “F” which pops up a link hint and then hit whatever two letters are over the link. so for your profile it would be f + ll. that’s it. everything that it’s on a webpage that you would normally use a mouse to interact with can all be done with keybinds. It’s great, it’s quick.
Browser navigation is also keybound. if I want to go back I hit shift+h. forward is shift+l. to switch tabs it’s shift+j or k. closing a tab is just pressing d.
there’s also extenstions for chrome and firefox that will do the same thing like vimium and tridactyl.
If you’ve used Vim for an extended period of time then navigating the same way in a browser is actually awesome. takes a bit to get used to but once you do you won’t go back and trying to use a browser with a mouse just feels slow.