For the last couple of weeks – I lost track honestly – I have been using Vim as my editor. I do this when I’m not working. I don’t want it get in the way. So, I’ve spent quite a bit of time reading the docs. Like reading as much of the docs as I possibly can without going insane.

It’s been really neat to see and learn about how much can actually be done within Vim. There are, of course, some limits to what can be done – then again that’s pretty true for just about any text editor.

The thing to keep in mind is that I really don’t have a lot of experience with many text editors. Over the years I have looked at, and used, NotePad++, Atom, Sublime Text, Coda, Brackets, and dare I say DreamWeaver. For a long time I did consider trying to use GoLive but never got a chance to really see how that all worked. I did try PHPStorm but never did fully get behind using it since I had to really think about having to learn new keyboard shortcuts

Yeah, I am not a fan of that.

That is only because I am a bit of a creature of habit when it comes to my development experience. It sounds strange to say that. Okay, writing it out but you get the idea.

I’ve come to like editing files on Vim because it makes me think a little different when it comes to editing and typing. It’s not always standard, control and z, control this or that, or any random combination of clacking that some of us are used to.One thing that did get my attention was actually repeating things. For example, if I add seven spaces to a line, typically I would select, copy then paste and keep pasting until I wanted. In vim I can type out far less because using the.makes it so much faster to repeat the last action.

I’m sure there are a lot of other things I still haven’t learned but I’m looking forward to reading and doing many of them. I mean I did manage to get NerdTree working on my first try so that has to say something right?