I’ve used VIM for a really long time. I think the first time I used it for more than just editing a file on some server must have been in the early 2000s when I was using either Debian, Mandrake or Ubuntu as my primary operating system. gVIM was my favorite choice back then as Kate et al. didn’t really do it for me. Eventually I learnt the basics and got not completely bad at it. Forsome reason I never even tried to learn the more complex features, though. You know, those that make you actually good at VIM.
Two days ago I came across Ben McCormick’s post-series about Learning VIM in 2014 and it once again made me consider moving back from SublimeText and Atom to good old VIM. In this series he describes basically everything that makes the editor special. From VIM’s operations as a language to the way in which plugins can basically change anything. If you haven’t read it, do so :) I got tons of good tips out of it. Most of them were refreshers but there we some gems like a nice explanation on why you actually would want to use the mapleader and keep it at its default setting.
Another thing I never learnt was VIMScript. Back when I used VIM the most over the last ten years I was always jumping around between enough languages to not wanting to add yet another to the mix. While that hasn’t changed I’ve grown tired of not knowing how the plugins I use all day actually work. So I purchased a copy of Steve Losh’s Learn VIMScript the Hard Way and plan to work my way through it over the next weeks.
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Alternatively, this website also supports Webmentions. If you write a post on a blog that supports this technique, I should get notified about your link 🙂