{"id":8441,"date":"2022-06-18T17:08:01","date_gmt":"2022-06-18T15:08:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.main-vision.com\/richard\/blog\/?p=8441"},"modified":"2022-06-18T17:08:04","modified_gmt":"2022-06-18T15:08:04","slug":"playing-with-vim","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.main-vision.com\/richard\/blog\/playing-with-vim\/","title":{"rendered":"Playing With VIM"},"content":{"rendered":"Reading Time: <\/span> 2<\/span> minutes<\/span><\/span>\n

For a while I liked playing with VS Code but I grew tired of it because it autocompletes everything, to the extent that you end up deleting rather than writing code. For a while I was playing with Atom but Github have decided to retire that application so I decided to look for an alternative and that’s when I came across VIM once more. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Through modern eyes VIM looks like a simple, featureless app but if you dig beneath the surface then you see that it is a fully featured IDE, just waiting to be woken up, part by part. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

One of the unique selling points of VIM is that it is designed for a mouseless workflow. It is designed so that, for a touch typist, they can work at the speed of thought, rather than the speed of their IDE, mouse, arrow keys and more. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

You have a command mode, where you move around with the hjkl keys. These are familiar to editors (JKL for rewind, pause, play) (at various speeds). <\/p>\n\n\n\n

There are three key modes. Command, Insert and visual. You switch by typing i or v to go from command to insert or visual, and escape to revert to command mode. I find it fiddly and it does require for me to be focused but I can see how such a tool would be fun to use in the near future. I want to become fluent with it for two reasons. The first is that I like a challenge, and I feel that by learning this IDE I will be a better coder because I will be ready to work on any machine and two, because by not helping me as much, the code is encouraging me to think critically about the code I write, and how it is structured. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

If the IDE does all the work for me then I am just assisting it, but I want the situation to be reversed. I want to be assisted by the software. I want to understand what I, and it, are doing. I also want to know that if I am asked a question in an interview I can answer, at least theoretically, about how to resolve a task. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

And Finally<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

In the 90s educational systems said that I had terrible hand writing so someone suggested that I use a computer so I did. At the time I used Word Perfect, a DOS based word processor, where you had keyboard shortcuts functions keys and more. Many of the features that we find in VIM remind me of the functionality I knew of when using WordPerfect<\/a>. Wordperfect dates back to 1979. That’s it for now. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Reading Time: <\/span> 2<\/span> minutes<\/span><\/span>For a while I liked playing with VS Code but I grew tired of it because it autocompletes everything, to the extent that you end up deleting rather than writing code. For a while I was playing with Atom but Github have decided to retire that application so I decided to look for an alternative […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"activitypub_content_warning":"","activitypub_content_visibility":"","activitypub_max_image_attachments":3,"activitypub_interaction_policy_quote":"anyone","activitypub_status":"","footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[255],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8441","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-swiss-walks"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.main-vision.com\/richard\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8441","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.main-vision.com\/richard\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.main-vision.com\/richard\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.main-vision.com\/richard\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.main-vision.com\/richard\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8441"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.main-vision.com\/richard\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8441\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8442,"href":"https:\/\/www.main-vision.com\/richard\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8441\/revisions\/8442"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.main-vision.com\/richard\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8441"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.main-vision.com\/richard\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8441"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.main-vision.com\/richard\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8441"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}