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!