Wow, this is fascinating to hear. Other than the standard baseline of not touching the arrow keys, I use vim pretty differently:
- 'j' and 'k' to move up and down, with '{' or '}' or even something like '20j' to move quickly
- 'w' and '$' and '0' to move horizontally, with things like '5w' to move quickly
I also rely heavily on 'v' and ctrl+'v' to select arbitrary shapes of text for yanking/deleting. I'm not sure what the exact takeaway is from comparing our styles, but it's interesting to realize about how much of coding comes down to just navigating up/down/left/right.
I agree with your last couple paragraphs almost verbatim though! That StackOverflow answer is exactly the reason I decided to try vim and stuck with it.
The verb/noun nature of vim makes it so easy to enter a flow state. The text editor fades into muscle memory, and you can surf waves of code with no bottleneck between mind and machine. (To write this comment, I actually had to open a random file and navigate around it while watching my hands — it's been years since I've thought about it!)
- 'j' and 'k' to move up and down, with '{' or '}' or even something like '20j' to move quickly
- 'w' and '$' and '0' to move horizontally, with things like '5w' to move quickly
I also rely heavily on 'v' and ctrl+'v' to select arbitrary shapes of text for yanking/deleting. I'm not sure what the exact takeaway is from comparing our styles, but it's interesting to realize about how much of coding comes down to just navigating up/down/left/right.
I agree with your last couple paragraphs almost verbatim though! That StackOverflow answer is exactly the reason I decided to try vim and stuck with it.
The verb/noun nature of vim makes it so easy to enter a flow state. The text editor fades into muscle memory, and you can surf waves of code with no bottleneck between mind and machine. (To write this comment, I actually had to open a random file and navigate around it while watching my hands — it's been years since I've thought about it!)