We've got younger guys on my team that hem and haw about the fact that we only have vim on our hardware implementation (SAMA5 busy box), and straight up don't understand why I basically can't use VSCode without the extension, and this article hits on so many good points. Vim is extremely expressive, and everyone ends up using it in slightly different ways. For me, my movement tends to center around:
- 'e' and 'k' rapidly, or 'h' and 'b' rapidly to move left and right, or using 'f'/'F' and a target character, with '0' and '$' as needed
- For vertical movement, I tend to use ctrl+'d'/'u' to move the document up and down in chunks, then specific line numbers, as well as marks (usually at most 2-3, with 'a', 'b', and 'c') to hold on to specific areas, or I just end up remembering line numbers and jumping to them.
- Lots of yanking and deleting to specific targets, be it hori or vert
There's plenty more beyond that, but that really is the "crux" of my vim usage, and from what I've seen watching over the shoulders of many programmers over the years, it makes me way faster than most. Programming isn't about typing speed, but my work is often in doing large refactors in enormous codebases. I need to be able to move around as close to the speed of thought as possible, and I have never found a tool that comes anywhere close to providing that ability as vim.
Also, any chance I get to plug the greatest StackExchange answer ever, I will: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1218390/what-is-your-mos...
- 'e' and 'k' rapidly, or 'h' and 'b' rapidly to move left and right, or using 'f'/'F' and a target character, with '0' and '$' as needed
- For vertical movement, I tend to use ctrl+'d'/'u' to move the document up and down in chunks, then specific line numbers, as well as marks (usually at most 2-3, with 'a', 'b', and 'c') to hold on to specific areas, or I just end up remembering line numbers and jumping to them.
- Lots of yanking and deleting to specific targets, be it hori or vert
There's plenty more beyond that, but that really is the "crux" of my vim usage, and from what I've seen watching over the shoulders of many programmers over the years, it makes me way faster than most. Programming isn't about typing speed, but my work is often in doing large refactors in enormous codebases. I need to be able to move around as close to the speed of thought as possible, and I have never found a tool that comes anywhere close to providing that ability as vim.
Also, any chance I get to plug the greatest StackExchange answer ever, I will: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1218390/what-is-your-mos...