VIM, because why not ?

Vim is a command line text editor i like to use.

Excerpt from official vim website:
Vim is a highly configurable text editor built to make creating and changing any kind of text very
efficient.

It is included as “vi” with most UNIX systems and with Apple OS X.

Vim is rock stable and is continuously being developed to become even better.

Among its features are:

• persistent,
• multi-level undo tree
• extensive plugin system
• support for hundreds of programming languages and file formats
• powerful search and replace
• integrates with many tools

Excerpt from the same website:

Vim is a highly configurable text editor built to enable efficient text editing. It is an improved
version of the vi editor distributed with most UNIX systems.

Vim is often called a “programmer’s editor,” and so useful for programming that many consider it an
entire IDE. It’s not just for programmers, though. Vim is perfect for all kinds of text editing,
from composing email to editing configuration files.

Screenshots :

Vim instance 1 :

Regular vim instance.

NERDTree is a file explorer embedded in VIM (after the addition of a plugin)

Vim instance 2:

Vim with multiple splits (windows)

Editing this way is integrated into vim, no plugins are needed.

WHY ????

One of the first things that i found dubious was that vim was a command-line tool, a command-line based text editor are you freaking serious ? was the first thought (or well, one of the first) thoughts to have crossed my mind.

What could you even do with something that’s NOT a GUI am i right or what ?

Like, how could you paste stuff or do cool stuff like multi line editing and all the cool new miscellaneous stuff that comes with the cool text editors like atom.io or vs code or sublime text etc … ? (i used cool exactly 4 times, just noting that)

So yeah, you could say i was pretty skeptic of all the seemingly awesome street cred people who use VIM get.

And my skepticism turned out to be one of the reasons for why i started entertaining the idea of trying out vim in the first place.

God bless Descartes, is all i can say.

What can i do with vim ?

Can’t say with certainty, but I’m pretty sure you can actually do more than what you can do with most text editors.

However, when you will start vim, you won’t be able to do much, which is why i decided to have VS Code and vim installed at the same time so if i really need to do something and cant find a way to do it in VIM i open up the file in VS Code to do it.

BEWARE OF THIS COPING MECHANISM FOR IT MIGHT BE THE CAUSE OF YOUR DESTRUCTION

Well, destruction in the sense that if you just give up every time you can’t do something in vim, you won’t learn much about vim text editing.
I’d like to emphasize on the fact that if you want to learn vim seriously, you best delete all other text editors, and force yourself to use vim

Modal editor :

The use of editing modes is certainly something that might… put off a lot of folks, (so much so that vim comes with an easy mode(only insert mode is in this easy mode)), but after a while, and after getting accustomed to a basic level at least with the navigation commands, one can start seeing the potential improvement of using vim as a default editor.

Because vim only shines in normal mode.

Reasons for VIM :

Quite a few actually:

• I am impressed when i see some advanced vimmers getting around their document and editing like
  crazy fast and efficient, and i am curious to see if i can reach that level.
• I like efficiency.
• I like efficiency.
• I like efficiency.
• Quoting a friend, dick-waving,
  because in that split second where you tell someone in discord or whatever that you use vim
  and they tell you they couldn’t use it because of steepness of the learning curve yada yada
  yada, you feel a certain … twisted feeling of superiority i guess ? i know, it’s pathetic, and i won’t lie that, (assumption incoming) like many users of vim in the
  begginning, there is this certain cool and good ambience around using and being comfortable
  with command-line tools.
• I heard using vim can be quite efficient, and i like being efficient.
• Vim is … not resource-hungry, and that’s an understatement.
  

Anyways, this was my first (but not last, ohhhh trust me it’s not the last) post about VIM, i’m
pretty sure i did a bad job introducing it, but c’est la vie.

Next iterations of the post about vim i think i’ll mention some good ressources regarding vim, and
then probably mention my config/set-up.

Stay tuned ;)