(Should you) Get started with vim

NOTE: This blog might discuss ideas which might not exactly align with you. But at the end of the day, that’s all they are, my choices. I’m always open to discussion and learning something new though.

It’s all about editing text

The world of text editors is very hostile from what I’ve experienced so far. You might’ve heard discussions surrounding what to use — vim, emacs, notepad, VSCode and all the other choices. I enjoyed using VSCode during my time in college. I still remember it was something new that had come out then and I enjoyed using it a lot. So why am I writing about vim now?

Why did I choose vim?

It was in a CS Lab in college when I first ran into vi. I was on a Fedora Machine and a git commit put me into vim (Ctrl + C :wqis how you quit vim by the way). For some reason, the cryptic UI was fun to use. Ever since then, I have enjoyed it. Well, it’s improved version vim.

On the terminal, I’m usually running something close to Ubuntu. Whether it’s inside a container, a pod running in Kubernetes, my home server (a Raspberry Pi 4 running Ubuntu Server), my personal machine on Windows running WSL. And even though Ubuntu’s default editor is nano, I find it easy to just run a sudo apt update -y && sudo apt install -y vim

So should you? Use vim?

Short answer, yeah, why not? Give it a try.