I am writing this in Vim emulated VSCode because using Vim straight from the terminal might make me dislike it and never look at it again, ThePrimeagen also recommended emulating it in VSCode and so did the Learn Vim extension on VSCode marketplace.

The hardest part for me right now is the navigation, hjkl don’t make a lot of sense and my fingers try to go towards the arrow keys and I have to fight the urge to use arrow keys 🗿.

Regardless, everything I do from today onwards shall be in VSCode emulated Vim.
For some reason, my shortcuts do not work(like opening markdown preview using ctrl k v), but I guess I’ll have to live with that since I don’t think that will be in Vim.

I would also like to mention that by one week I mean 168 development hours in VSCode, which includes writing this blog post. Because I could sleep for a week and tell the world that I used Vim for a week and regretted it. I won’t measure the time but hopefully my git history will be the evidence of what I did.

Day 1

Today was incredibly tough and quite painful, though it really wasn’t because of Vim but because of VSCode messing up a few functions due to Vim emulation, again, can’t really blame either because it works as it should.

I would say that the Vim experience was rather good and made me feel quite happy because I could actually feel the speed and I didn’t use arrow keys as much!
Although it is quite annoying to constantly switch between insert and normal mode, I think I’ve gotten quite good at it.

Some of the major problems I faced were:

  1. Going to the end of the line to put a ; in Rust.
  2. Going to the beginning of the line.
  3. Going to the position before " in a line like println!("hello");.
  4. Copying and pasting, yanking feels ODD as HELL.
  5. Duplicating a line.
  6. Accidentally entering visual mode, how do I enter visual mode randomly? Perhaps CTRL + V?
  7. Starting a new line.

Solutions to those major problems:

  1. A;<ESC>
  2. 0
  3. f"; - didn’t bother finding another way
  4. yanking and putting yyp
  5. yyp again
  6. No idea. Probably accidental.
  7. o for a line below, O for a line above, {n}o/O for n lines above/below

Besides that, maybe I’ll hang out in vimtutor for a bit.

Day 2

Nothing much besides learning a few more controls, getting the hang of vim bit by bit and surprisingly, using those keybindings in places I shouldn’t use, like Chrome or MS Word.
New discoveries involve:

  1. a to enter insert mode in front of the character
  2. A to enter insert mode at the last character in line
  3. I to enter insert mode at the first character in line.

Day 3-7

Long time no see, didn’t bother making an entry because stuff was happening. Journey with Vim was rather pleasant, perhaps it would’ve been even better if I had a mechanical keyboard but that’s on me.
Mostly used the common shortcuts and shortly shifted to Neovim because of it’s customization options, using plugins was rather easy thanks to Plug, did not really have a good experience making plugins(didn’t make any), luascript is beyond me.

Overall, I don’t think I would use Vim as my daily driver because VSCode has made a lot of things VERY convenient and I’ve been accustomed to it, not to forget their incredible support for various languages and frameworks(looking at you Jupyter notebooks!).