I have a confession to make...I'm one of those people - an avid Vim user. I do my absolute best to not reveal that fact. It can be a polarizing subject in the community. I'm here to confess I'm strongly on team Vim.

How I learned Vim

When I first started Software Engineering the developers I was working with used tmate to do pair coding. If you're not familiar, it's terminal sharing via SSH. This was a time before many of the now popular tools such as Teletype for Atom or Visual Studio Live Share were a thing. When in the terminal Vim is a natural choice. I learned by doing because I wanted to participate in pair coding. I also ran through vimtutor a few times.

Why I still use Vim

My professional background is actually in Finance - I used to work on Wall Street. In that field, there's a strong culture that you should N-E-V-E-R be touching your mouse when using Excel. It even got to a point where analysts were ripping off the F1 key from their keyboard so they wouldn't accidentally open the Help Me window which often crashed Excel.

Over time I was all-in on this idea of never touching the mouse to perform my work. I realized it's very efficient and actually kind of fun 🙈.

Once I discovered Vim I didn't need any convincing. It was a natural fit for me. I have tried several editors (Atom, Sublime, VS Code) with Vim mode enabled and they're all great for different reasons! But I can't help be drawn to the "purist" feel of using straight Vim where there are fewer helpers. And while most keyboard shortcuts work in other editors with Vim mode enabled, not all of them do without adding it yourself (looking at you :w).

My Vim setup

What's funny is overtime I've added several plugins to my Vim setup (including an autocomplete using YouCompleteMe). So in some ways I recognize I'm contradicting myself 🤷🏽‍♂️.

Here is my current Vim setup if you're curious:

What do you think?

Feels great to confess all of this! What are your thoughts? Do you like Vim? Do you hate it?