Dear me,
I get it. You know how to use Sublime and like to think you’re pretty good with it. You’ve got enough on your plate without learning a 20 year old text editor which is going to slow you down for a while. There are deadlines to think of.
I hear you James. Really, I do. But here’s why you’re wrong:
- You’ll be much, much more efficient than in Sublime
- This will make you better at your job
- There’s loads of great plugins
- It’s totally themeable and can be made to look awesome
- It’s full of amazing little tricks to help you with laborious things
- You’ll become a better typist
- It’s the last text editor you’ll ever have to learn
That said, there are a few things you should know before you start.
- If you can afford to, use the upcase.com tutorials to learn. They’re video based and awesome. If you can’t just use vimtutor and practice.
- You need to delete Sublime and just use Vim. It’s the only way.
- Use Wezterm. It’s the best terminal imo.
- It will be incredibly slow and incredibly annoying for the first day or so
- It will be quite slow and quite annoying for another 2 weeks
- It will be amazing from then on
- Learn tmux (also through upcase) shortly after Vim. It makes terminal/iterm much faster to work with.
There are a few Vim plugins which will make life easier (install them with Pathogen). None of them are absolutley critical, mind you neither is central heating but I think we can all agree it’s a pretty good idea.
- NERDTree – a directory browser
- CTRL-P – fuzzy file finder
- AirLine – Status bar
- Commentary – Fast comments
- Surround – Quickly quote
- iTerm2 Spacedust theme – Kickass iTerm2 theme
Bottom line, it’s worth your time to learn Vim. I promise you.
Yours sincerely,
Future You