Oops! and Why I Use Vim

A Quick Apology

So a lit­tle over a week ago, I wrote my first post of the year, de­tail­ing a cou­ple of my goals, one of which was to hope­fully re­lease a blog post every week. Oops… That lasted for a to­tal of one week…

Anyway.

An Unhealthy Obsession

A cou­ple of months ago, I switched to us­ing Vim full-time to do all of my text edit­ing (coding and writ­ing Markdown… I still use MS Word for rich text edit­ing).

When I say I can’t go back to Sublime Text any­more, it’s not be­cause I’m in love with every­thing about Vim. It’s not even that (despite what some peo­ple may say) Vim has shown me the flaws of all of the other graph­i­cal text ed­i­tors in the world. In fact, I some­times find my­self miss­ing all of the thought­ful, plug-and-play as­pects of Sublime Text, like how easy them­ing it is, or how seam­less the au­to­com­ple­tion is, or how pack­age man­ager (with Package Control) “just works”.

The real rea­son I can’t go back to Sublime any­more is be­cause, when­ever I want to save a file, I end up typ­ing ”

So you may be won­der­ing to your­self, Why would Naitian ever have wanted to use Vim then?

Good ques­tion.

An Unlikely Romance (OoooOOOOoooo)

The orig­i­nal mo­tive was not to be­come a l33t hax0r that lives in the ter­mi­nal. Oops. My ex­pe­ri­ence with the com­mand line has been one of slow, be­grudg­ing ac­cep­tance. I like to imag­ine it as a buddy film where the ini­tial mu­tual dis­dain slowly blooms into a won­der­ful friend­ship.

Movie analo­gies aside, the true rea­son I chose to use Vim was be­cause I could use Vim with tmux, which meant I had full con­trol over how my text ed­i­tor and ter­mi­nal em­u­la­tor meshed to­gether. It was like a tiling win­dow man­ager ex­cept I didn’t need to in­stall a tiling wm. Is that a weird, con­vo­luted ex­cuse to use vim? Yes, but that be the truth.

Well, af­ter I played around with the vimrc for a lit­tle bit, I was hooked on how con­fig­urable vim was (I’m a sucker for con­fig files), and the rest is his­tory.

The Happy Ending

So now I use Vim every day to do every­thing from writ­ing this sen­tence to mak­ing my web­site to do­ing my AI labs.

Expect a post on how I use Vim com­ing up soon (hopefully next week when I don’t for­get to post…)

Also! You know what would make the end­ing even hap­pier? If you used that handy dandy RSS link in that footer down there to sub­scribe to this blog and read all of these mildly amus­ing posts!