Radhika Ghosal

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Vim-tastic!

Vim changed my life. Okay, I wouldn’t say life, but it certainly changed text editing for good for me. It’s universal across most Linux distros, and you can easily use it via SSHing into a server too. Until a while back, I never quite had the guts to start using it, courtesy the holy wars on Vim v/s Emacs and their learning curves.

learning curves

xkcd real programmer

There’s plenty of good resources for learning how to use Vim, but it’s sometimes hard to find one which inspires you to stick to it.

Once you get the hang of it, you’ll find yourself wishing wistfully for regular textboxes to have the Vim keybindings (keyboard shortcuts), rather than highlighting text using a mouse. And also, you’ll turn into a text ninja.

So I started off with entering $ vimtutor into the command line, and have never looked back since.

My favourite Vim resources:
Vim Adventures: Learning Vim through an online game
Vim Awesome: Popular Vim plugins
What are the dark corners of Vim your mom never told you about?: Useful Stack Overflow thread
Vim Creep: A lovely write-up on Vim
Vim Koans: Another blog post
Turning Vim Into a modern Python IDE
A Vim Tutorial and Primer

Oh, and shameless self-plug, check out my own Vim configuration here. It’s rather nice (according to me), so fork it if ya like it.