That’s just the surface of amazing shorthand things you can do with Vim. To delete everything in between two objects (parentheses, quotes, etc), it's as simple as:ĭi' Computer: Delete, inside, single-quotes. The biggest eye-opener for me was this little tidbit: You tell it what you want, and it does it for you. Vim is built around the idea that you are directly communicating with your computer. My favorite quote that describes what it’s like to code in VIM: “Code at the speed of thought” Yeah, okay, maybe that doesn’t sound so bad, but, those 3 minutes could be spent writing a function, or refactoring code, not flailing your hand about like you're Harry Potter! Speed Okay, so maybe 65 isn’t really that fast anymore, but hey, this was 1994! Whether that be to scroll, navigate to a new file, or something similar.Ħ00 (wasted time in ms) x 60 (times per hour) x 5 (hours I am actually coding) = 180,000ms wasted = 3. On average, for sake of argument, I do that once a minute while I’m writing code. It takes 600ms to move my hand from the “home keys” to the mouse. For the rest of us simple humans, it takes time. And hey, maybe you’re a black belt in mouse movement, and you can move back in forth with a speed invisible to the naked eye. When you are solely using the keyboard, there is going to be an inherent speed boost just from not having to physically move your hands. There are lots of reasons to use Vim, so here’s a few of mine. If you’ve heard about Vim, and want to try it out, I hope this article can provide a bit of familiarity you’d find from VSCode. I’m only writing this because I found a level of productivity in Vim that I haven’t had in any of the editors I used before (Sublime Text, Atom or VSCode). You can use whatever text editor you want.

I want to start by saying, this is not an editor-shame article. Hot tips to bring the awesomeness of Visual Studio Code to Vim.

Visual studio code theme for vim