I feel as though my website is not complete without sharing my vimrc file. I have been using vim for over a decade, and in the 2010's I learned to make it my main editor for professional work. I am biased, I admit, but I have tried other editors at times. I saw team members using sublime2text, intellij editors, or more recently VSCode. The features are cool and particularly with VSCode I like how easy it is to get started with another language. But it never really gave me the productivity boost I felt I had with vim, then when I started using a terminal multiplexer there was no going back (currently I use zellij — once you try it you never go back).

So at this point I would say I spend more time in Vim than I do a browser, and on that note, there is a cool web assembly project that is a port of Vim github.com/rhysd/vim.wasm. This is so easy to use that I actually embedded it in a page on my website, so if you feel like you want to try vim give it a go: Vim in your Browser. Kudos to the guys who wrote that!

Below I want to give you a few reason why I use and love vim. I won't go into detail here on how to use it, I just want to share my preference. There are many resources for learning, here's a fun game for learning called Vim Adventures.

3 Reasons I Like Vim

1. Speed and Efficiency

Generally when I'm working on projects I feel like Vim helps out with speed and efficiency by reducing context switching. I can go heads down into the code and stay focused there. There are a number of features that I use to help with this, all enabled by a keystroke. Because I'm writing code and I am able to navigate the editor with keystrokes, I can keep my hands on the keyboard and navigate to another file, or another pane, or open NERDTree to move files around. I can open all of the files I need in multiple panes on the screen and easily switch out files with a keystroke in the editor, and there are many other configurations I've made to make my development experience efficient. I find that I'm able to work much faster than using the mouse and clicking through finder or an IDE file browser.

2. Minimal Resource Usage

Vim has been around for a long time, it was cloned from Vi in 1988 by Bram Moolenaar, and Vi was created in 1976 by Bill Joy. It was one of the earliest editors for unix systems and because it was designed to run on resource constrained systems it has always been a smaller program. This is a huge deal because I can have multiple terminal tabs open and in each one another vim editor, which is what I do with each local git repository clone. This makes it easy to switch between projects all in the same terminal window without completely consuming all of my computers resources.

3. Cross-Platform Consistency

I've worked on MacOS, Linux and Windows. I've managed to get a consistent editor on each, even in Windows. This is huge for me, being able to be flexible with my workflow helps me to work at full capacity even if I am not on my preferred OS (which happens to be MacOS).