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.
That’s what I love the most about VIM, that it has dozen little tricks like these. Need to jump over a word? Jump to next occurance of letter L? Jump five words? Jump to second parameter of a function definition? Jump to matching bracket? There’s a motion for all of that, and more. Including “go to definition” or “go to references”, if you set up your vim correctly.
What I did was simply install IdeaVIM into my Rider, so I can start learning the motions while also keep the features of the IDE I’m used to, but also more importantly installed LazyVim, which is a pre-made config for nvim that can do most of that by default, or has a simple addon menu (LazyExtras) that automatically download and install plugins relevant for a language you are working on. I.e I need to work in Zig, I just open LazyExtras menu, find zig-lang, and it install LSP, debugger, linter, etc that’s specific for that language.
Well, having vim in an IDE might be good way to get the hang of it. I do see the potential of vim, but skill floor is too high for comfort. I don’t mind learning something, but I need to be productive out of the box.