Note: I will be using NeoVim for this series. I address why below. But _99.99% of everything I cover will work exactly the same in Vim8**. So, if you’d prefer to use Vim8 you can still learn a lot! From here on out I will use Vim and NeoVim interchangeably, unless noting differences._

What is Vim?

Once I, a dog-lover, was talking to my friend, a cat-lover, about cats and their general disdain for humanity. That’s when he said something I’ll never forget. “The thing you don’t understand about cats is they’re not dogs”. Woah. Profound. What he meant was if you approach a cat the same way you would a dog, it’s just not going to work. With that in mind:

The thing about Vim is it’s not an IDE

Vim isn’t an IDE, it’s a text editor. It’s a lightning-fast, feature-packed text-editor with more secrets than Hogwarts, and I’d argue that with a little tweaking it has the potential to be as good, if not better, than your current IDE.

I’ve been working as a software developer for circa ~2.5 years now, and for the last ~1 year I’ve been using Vim as my “daily driver”. About 80% of my time is spent with Javascript, and the other 20% in Python. Prior to using Vim I used VS Code and the IntelliJ IDEs (WebStorm and PyCharm in my case). All great tools, but all had their weaknesses and left me wondering “is there something better?”.

I started noticing some of the coding superheroes (you know the type) at my company were using Vim. At first I assumed it was something they used because they superheroes. But, soon I started to wonder if they were superheroes because they used Vim. Well the truth is Vim won’t make you a 10x developer by itself, but if you commit some time to learning its ways, it certainly can help (or can’t hurt). If you’re willing to take the plunge read on.

#vim #python #javascript #neovim #web-development