🪴\zansh.in\blog

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VIM diary

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While learning the basics of Vim over the course of a few months I kept a simple diary. I recorded what I had been Googling for and what I'd learned during my struggles.

Learning stepped-up a bit this month.

I put a lot of evening time into Vim Snake, as well as deliberately practicing actual typing. I had slowly realised that my unconventional finger habits were not a very good fit for proper home-row typing, which is what Vim really demands.

I had no idea how wildly wrong-handed my typing habits were. I had compensated for this over the years with peculiar and uncomfortable stretches I barely noticed myself doing. If learning Vim gives me nothing else, it has at least revealed one of the ways I've inflicted myself with RSI.

Now that I started to focus on this, my average words-per-minute dropped dramatically, but picked up over the month.

As for practicing Vim, by the second week of October I had Googled for cheat-sheets, plugins I didn't install, how to close the Netrw buffer, word-wrap, column markers, whither HJKL, and most importantly, I shopped around for colour-schemes.

I also watched a video on how to do 90% of what plugins do with just Vim. It covers the following topics:

- Fuzzy File Search
- Tag jumping
- Autocomplete
- File Browsing
- Snippets
- Build Integration

In reading about buffer management vs. tabs I learned that tabs are not used in quite the same way as in VSCode: buffers, splits, markers, and the jump-list offer so much that the requirement for tabs is something quite different in Vim. A tab is more like opening a second VSCode workspace than a second file.

I tried looking up what the QuickFix window was. I didn't understand it, and it would take me until the New Year before I would start using it regularly.

Around the middle of October I installed Neovim and went immediately into trying out the LazyVim distribution. It was a nice exercise to see just how far configs and plugins can take you, but ironically it was also what motivated me to keep going with rolling-my-own .vimrc with standard Vim. I didn't really know what was going on in LazyVim, and that felt like the wrong way to learn.

The last week of October was information overload, although in an odd way I thought I was starting to get the hang of things (I wasn't.)

• Looked into how to use Buffers, :bn :bp ^ etc.
• Searched "word wrap" :set no/wrap
• Searched "column markers"
• Looked into window splits
• Resizing splits
• Looked up duplicate line :copy / :t
• CTRL+A/X in normal mode, pressing g before while in VISUAL mode to bump all numbers in the selection
• How to paste to/from system clipboard with "+
• Insert the date using :r!date
• Learned Vim has built-in line sort, can work with ranges, selection
• Moving a line to another line
• navigating in/out of the jump list <c-i> and <c-o>
• Restore previous selection with gv
• Navigating up/down wrapped lines with gj and gk
• tpope's vim-abolish can do case-sensitive replace with S/...
• Wrap lines with gq, unwrap with J

Next part →

31 Oct, 2023