Why I use Vim in 2022 

I use vim just to confuse my collaborators. I love it.

You are the man who brought me to Vim and changed my perspective on programming. Thank you for your amazing content!

You put it so well. I always think people are missing the point about the efficiency and shortcuts in vim. It's not about the productivity. It's about relying as much as much on muscle memory instead of user attention in order to preserve the flow of thought. When you are going through the GUI editors, it constantly disrupts your flow of thought. But in vim everything is muscle memory.

The fact that your coworkers are the one introduced you to VIM is amazing. It proves you have really great work environments. 👍

I had serious tendinitis, I was even considering switching careers because of it, and then I met Vim. I learned it thanks to your Vim As Your Editor series, and I literally can't go back to "normal" editing anymore.

I know vim because my school teacher use it. And he told that we should learn vim. Then I found your vim series video. Thank you for bringing me to the vim world!!

I started vim when I got a job that required us to develop in a managed VM with no mapped drive. All editing had to be done IN the VM. The lag from typing to seeing the code change was driving me crazy. Then I saw someone SSH into their VM and use VIM and was blown away with how fast they were coding. I never turned back

I remember seeing your first video on your vim workflow and I was blown away by it. I used vim in a basic capacity as I started my career as a Linux systems administrator, but I never thought the dev workflow you have was even possible. Thank you Prime for nudging me towards neovim. I'm still learning my dev flow with it now, and boy do I feel _blazingly fast_ 😁

I was so burned out at my last job. Starting to get apathetic. Then I saw one of your videos, watched the dev hour with Theo, and have watched a lot of your skits since then. Now I'm reinvigorated and excited about programming again. Thanks for the content!

Honestly, I started using VSCode Vim Plugin around a month ago after being a long time prime-lurker. Now I realized to better foster my Vim/Developer learning, I need to switch to a Linux Distro as a primary driver. I feel it is the next logical step for any serious Developer, because Windows (and some degree Mac ) just don't give that extra 'umph' when it comes to developing. Anyway, thanks Prime. You are one of the youtubers I idolize along with Luke Smith, Mental Outlaw, and Dave's Garage, and I really owe it to you for making programming (especially advanced programming) seem fun and extremely welcoming 🙂.

You introduced me to vim and I am loving it so much It’s just flowing from thought into code thank you 🙏

My brother introduced me to vim name years ago, but i thought that was only for config files. It was only a little more than a year ago that I saw you coding in vim and saw all the possibilities. I now use vim as my only editor and can't be more happy about it

I'm gonna argue that vim also leveled up my "thinking" time when it came to programming. So much of that "thinking" time I find for me is really just reading other code. Fzf+ripgrep+go-to-definintion with an LSP let me read through code soooo much faster than I ever could before.

Why I use Vim in 2023? Because I can't quit it

I took a similar path to vim: Lighttable -> Atom w/ vim plugin -> neovim with someone's config off GH that made it friendly for a newbie -> straight vim (when v8 dropped). I haven't felt the need to check out nvim again since I switched to plain vim, but it's cool to see all the work they're doing. Tom Ryder's excellent blog posts on Unix as an IDE (including Vim) were a great resource along the way. And I also wound up moving from FED to DevOps, so being able to use busybox's vi without a learning curve was really nice.

In the first programming lecture, the teacher opened vim in a command-line window on Linux and started typing. Shortly after, I was blown away by how efficiently it was. I immediately threw Windows into the rubbish, installed Linux and vim and am using them since then happily (and of course, exiting vim the first time is always a bit troublesome).

I’m focusing all my time and effort on actually learning how to code, but man you’ve got me so hyped to jump into VIM from watching your streams and how efficient you are. You’re right, it literally is a superpower haha. Can’t wait to join the cool kids club

I've been introduced to emacs while learning lisp. There's something glorious about getting in the zone using all the keyboard shortcuts to switch buffers, run code, edit, etc. Reminds me of playing RTS games. I'm gradually leaning towards doing c and python in it too. I also have a plan to bind my entire numpad to open parenthesis so I can just smash my hand on the general area.

2 years in and I am rocking out with neovim, real programmer's dvorak, and a dactyl. You have defined a massive amount of my productivity flow that I simply could not live without.

Best energy of any tech tuber, would love to see some more coding videos! Hope this can replace the Netflix gig one day keep it up

I learned Vim because my old pc sucked so much especially when using electron-based editors with large codebases. Still sticked with Vim even with better hardware to code with. There's just something with Vim that makes me feel at home compared with other IDE"s and editors. Thanks for your videos about Vim, I was able to quickly scaffold my personal configs that really suits my workflow.

You're 100% the reason why I use VIM motions today and I've gotten really good with them. However, as you said, I know how powerful using the VIM editor can be, yet I'm quite intimidated by the experience. I know you have a playlist called "Vim As Your Editor" (which is damn good btw!) but for the most part (1-4) you only cover the VIM motions. Could you help us by creating another playlist for working with the editor VIM? Kinda like a structured progression to get us gradually acquainted with VIM...

As a linux developer, sometime I need to use Vim in non-graphical enviroment and has very low resource. But I will choose to stay with VSCode or Sublime Text whenever possible. Modern editor's shortcut is fine enough to me. No reason to use vim on a core i7 - 32Gb computer.

You're missing two reasons imo: 1. The motions are portable, have been and probably will be around for ever, you can use a lot of them in like all IDEs 2. It's fun - this is my main reason. I like it for the same reason I like programming. So I now enjoy the actual process of writing

I love vim. I love system tools. I still use vscode w/ vim emulation because I like minimal config when working on projects because I don't have to do much to get fancy features

I started with Sublime, then moved to VSCode and I keep trying to convince myself to like VSCode. Soo next step is learn VIM lol, never thought I’d say it. I’m still relatively new to programming, glad I found your channel, super down to earth dude

Used VsCode vim for over five years before making the switch to just using Vim. Navigation between files was always the hardest part of my switch and your videos helped with that. The argument that Vim is somehow old and so worse is strange. The biggest thing to happen to Text editors recently IMO is Language Servers, and now neovim supports it natively.

Well! When I started to learn programming i heard about vim and thought that it is just an old text editor and can be used on servers in terminal. I tried to open vim in terminal and I was stuck in it. I was unable to exit so I turned off PC. After 2 or 3 years later I was looking for best and customizeable text editor. I tried so many that I does not even remember names of these editors. Many people on many sites were saying were saying that vscode and other text editors and ide's are much better then vim. People use vim nowdays just to impress others. So I backed off But then I saw DT on Distro Tube channel on RU-vid who was teaching something and i was following him. That was first time i saw awesomness of vim and tilling window manager. I was seriously speachless. His speed of moving around in text file, switching between different windows, closing and opening. Mine mind was just blown after watching this. At that time I realised I need to learn vim and have to use tilling window manger. I still remember I was puasing video again and again because of his speed. I was unable to catchup to him while watching video. Now i'm learning vim. And soon will be very good at it

One old fashion reason to learn vi/vim was that back in the day if your machine crashed and/or was in single user mode the root partition generally wasn't big enough for emacs or other editors and you didn't have many choices unless you knew how to use ed or sed to edit files (also handy to know when using tee to connect to a headless server to get root access via serial)

I like the way you explained about vim , infact I get curious to learn the vim thank for pushing me into that and i subscribed your channel ❤

I've used Vim for two years, and recently switched to VSCode. It's just more comfortable and just as fast for actual development. If you really need to, you can even perform most of the Vim party tricks. Vim is an excellent software project, but so far I haven't seen any evidence to suggest that using it leads to greater productivity or code quality.

Thanks a lot for the video, I think it explains it very nicely :) you are also the reason i learned & started using vim (your tutorial series was a big help)

Subscribed a while back and you got me to finally try it. So far your 6 part tutorial series has been really helping out a lot!

Thank you for you content. I really enjoy it. I'd like to point out another reason I haven't seen commented yet (though admittedly I haven't read them all). I'm mostly a sysadmin, so even though most of my day is around code, I am on a shell 99% of my time, and when you're ssh'ing or even accesing a virtual console of a system that didn't boot and you need to repair that grub or go to dracut, you end up having to modify files with whatever you have available there. So being comfortable with one tool that you can use everywhere, and which is natively available all the time, is a really really helpful skill. All my colleagues struggle with using vim when they have to inevitably resort to it, and I just chose to embrace it.

My story is also same. One day I found one guy in our team who was using emacs for everything. I immediately started using emacs and that opened a new world of terminal editors to me. Used emacs for 2 months and finally started using vim. I have to use IDEs time to time but always go back to vim.

I started using vim after a little intro course I had at uni peeked my interest on it and you really got me to love it and learn to reeally love coding, thanks man!

Two thoughts: 1. The whole "spending more time thinking vs coding" misses part of the picture. We also spend quite a bit of time sending messages, responding to emails, searching through internal pages, googling, etc - there's great benefit to knowing your way around a keyboard, and getting good with vim helps this quite a bit. Especially with some of the less frequently used symbols :) 2. IDEs have a lot of helpful builtin tools. Debugger, quick language support, etc. The modal editing paradigm is where most of the speed gains are, and I sometimes wonder if it'd just be better to use IDEs if they had better vim support.

I have never been a fan of the "oh, most of the time I spend thinking" argument. Maybe it is just me but I can't quite recall a time when I have just done thinking in isolation when I am sitting in front of a computer. This thinking phase is usually comprised of trying multiple approaches / refining the taken approach / refactoring / etc and being able to do this fast can be quite significant in terms of the resistance that you face internally when doing the said activities. I have observed since I have worked on improving my typing speed, speed while working on codebases, also usage of copilot. I try more stuff out, refactor more often, and usually approach the problem from more angles, write more detailed commit messages, and jot down more ideas. And this is something other folks also resonate with who take this path (improving typing speed, learning vim keybindings, etc)

I started to use vim to feel smart I keep using it (or emulating it) because I feel dumb without modal editing, now

I seriously use Vim at the moment I saw your channel and I was surprised by the speed with which it moved, today I already built my first plugin, and I have unpublished more written in Lua.

have the same pc for 10 years (those in built cpu ones) , could barely run vscode without crashing so switched to vim 3 years ago and i couldnt have been happier

Been binging your videos for a week or so now... I really did think I was subscribed. That outro got me.

Cause it is blazing fast, of course

I appreciate the attitude. You want to zone in and crack out code afafp. I would never use Vim, because writing code in text is a tiny fraction of what I do, but I get it.

Great video, as always! I'm proficient in Vim and decided at some point to try out Doom Emacs and loved the ecosystem... However, I find that running Emacs on Windows comes with its own operating system-specific challenges, which limit the functionality of Emacs. I found out about Emacs with natively compiled Elisp, which resulted in a drastic performance improvement (but slower package installs), but still haven't been able to work out some Windows-specific kinks. I believe you run Linux and would not face those obscure problems. I would be interested in knowing why you switched away from Emacs (with Evil mode) to Vim. Thanks.

RIP Bram. I've been using vim since 1995. Tried other editors a few times, I just didn't like them. People don't seem to like it, they think I'm an idiot for not using VS code

This guy is truly the Dr.Disrespect of programming... Hilarious! I think I speak for us all when I say your work is awesome!

Yoo hoo! Another Vim Video! Keep up uploading content like this!!!!!!

Code completion, powerful intellisense and having the IDE shout at me sometimes are some of the things that I cannot leave IntelliJ behind and go to VIM. Specially smart code analysis. I have a feel that whenever I switch to VIM I lose all of this and it’s like running with 1 leg only. Thoughts?

for me Vim/Emacs’s usefulness is an extension of the usefulness of knowing how to touch type. I can type without looking at the keyboard, and I can navigate/edit text without hunting through menus and toolbars. It’s less about being quick for me (although thats nice too). Mouse actions never really become complete muscle memory in the same way keyboard commands do. Like everyone spams Ctrl+S to save without even thinking about it in most editors, but you can’t mouse over through menus in the same way without taking up some cognitive ability away from thinking about the actual engineering task at hand. Vim/Emacs enables me to place all editing on the keyboard to spend less time thinking about how my hands will do what I’m thinking of and more about what I’m actually doing.

Customization and consistency across languages is great, I love vim

Awesome video Prime! I started using vim about 2 years ago and it really changed my coding life, but my vim config is LOADED with plugins from everywhere and i'm now thinking of configuring a vanilla neovim with no plugins. Can you please do a guide similar or recommend something?

nice , i was trying vim since 2021, but i was so slowly, i wish understand use in 7 years, my teacher use emacs for 20 years and he is awsome.

I've been using only Vim for my entire undergrad education since first semester, because we had a course called "Computer Tools" in which we learned the basics of Unix and a lot of cool little stuff, including Vim. I think I was the only one in my generation that actually sticked to Vim. Years later, some of my peers still look at me baffled when I code like they can't believe I actually use Vim.... Until some months ago when I went to the dark side and started using (and very quickly adopted) VSCode. I'm not going to lie, if there is ONE thing I didn't like about Vim, it is its config file, syntax, and managing extensions. On VSCode, I only had to install the vim extension to have Vim-like keybindings. I still use Vim here and there but I mostly use VSCode. I fear returning to Vim "fully" might be too hard at this point. Send help, friends.

As always cheers for your vids on Vim. my lead dev uses intellij and one of the other devs just made the switch from vscode to vim. Lead dev puts on the whiteboard another way to get fired (among other funny shit) start using vim which of course is BLAZINGLY FAST

The greatest misconception in CS in general is that everybody wants "the best", be it "the best editor" or "the best tecnology". I've always hated when people say that X is crap because Y is better without any valid argument. My ex boss used to mock at me because at that time I was using a minimal arch install with i3 since the company gave me a really crappy laptop, and I had to do everything inside the terminal and with Vim, even though that wasn't really an issue, whereas he was using his MacBook Pro with Sublime Text. I mean, almost every tool has its own niche and you need to understand its philosophy to make the best out of it, if you use Vim expecting to click here and there you are disgracefully wrong. Every tool has to be learned, and I don't get why tools like Vim just because they are based on the terminal have this "stigma" of being uselessly complicated.

I came to vim the exact same way. Five years ago, I asked a co-worker to show me how he did something I was only moderately interested in. He was excited to show me the thing that I asked about and I was definitely interested, but that quickly took a back seat to his blazing-fast navigation of code and configuration files. I never actually got into the thing that I asked him about, but watching him navigate text files at a speed I could not _fathom_ doing with a mouse and a few motion keystrokes and other keyboard shortcuts. After a little while I even said out loud, how are you moving like this, what is this sorcery? And he pivoted to showing me all about vim and that was it for me. I was committed to giving it an honest try and it didn’t take long before I realized I was way faster with vim that I could possibly be with Sublime or Atom (both of which I had been using for a while).

I use vim keybindings in visual studio 2019, would love to use vim for .net development but doesnt seem possible for building desktop applications. For other tasks though your neovim videos have been amazing.

Personally, VSCode + VIM extension + GitHub Copilot is God-Mode. I feel like I learn a lot and do things in ways I never would have with Copilot, it’s amazing. However, I’ll turn it off when I’m trying to *really* learn something new.

a lot of people kind of suspect that vim is more efficient, but make up excuses as to why they don't have to learn it. i used ide's for ten years before i picked up vim. now i regret that i didn't do it sooner. all programs based on the "normal" text editing scheme are actually really, really bad, and you have to kind of step out to realize it.

Something I feel you should address in a video, oh mighty one, is project folder to file navigation, and project runtime execution. I believe it is equally important to understand these concepts to become a legend like you. When I edit a file I am sprinting but once I am out I tripped, fall on my face and slide to the finish line. Need tips right outside vim.

I really like how this channel is not mainstream yet. It's just a guy coding and checking out BLAZINGLY FAST libraries. Love you man, Whenever I am feeling down i goto some of your BLAZINGLY FAST comparison videos (they are extremely educative too).

Before when I was a VSCode wanker, I would have a million tabs open and positioned and blah, and if they got closed it was literally like I didn't even want to work anymore. Now after 3 or so years of Vim, I still get this oddly satisfying feeling when I just destroy all my open buffers and don't care because I can just Leader, s, h and have an instant list of the last 50 buffers I used, type a couple more key strokes to fuzzy find the file I'm wanting and hit enter. It doesn't even matter what tabs I have open now and what order, every file is at my fingertips, esp when a couple of key strokes takes me right back to all of my most recent edits.

Yes. I've been using Vim for years now. Mostly because I don't know how to quit it.

If you have a keyboard running QMK, and using layers, then using ctrl/shift and arrow keys can be done without taking your fingers off the home row. So for me, vim motion is already less of a "plus". Add to that the fact I type on Colemak, which means I'd have to re-create every vim binding... and vim motion is suddenly much less attractive :(

Will there be a tutorial for how you configure your nvim at some point?

I used Vim back in the old days and loved it but recently, I had been struggling along with visual studio code, using the Vim compatibility mode. Now and in no small part because of the videos from you and TJ, I have switched back to 😊Neovim and feel like I’ve gained superpowers :-) Coding Lua just makes me happy.

If there's something I can't do in vim, i use vscode then figure out to do it in vim in my free time. Eventually you run out of things you don't know how to do lol

Actually laughed out loud when you called me out for not subcribing. Probably watched 10 of your videos in the past week and it felt like you were calling me out specifically. Earned another sub :)

Recently switched from VS Code to vim. I thought C intellisense made my workflow faster. However, learning vim proved me wrong. I've never been faster in programming. Also, vim isn't that hard to learn. It took me around 2-3 days to build muscle memory for the common and basic commands. The more advanced commands can come later and isn't that difficult either.

You know how Buddha was enlightened? He used tmux with vim.

Vim is like the REAPER of text editors. Fugly UI, highly customizable with Lua scripting and a cult-like following.

I use vim only to appease you, mr. coconut man

After forcing myself to use nvim for the past week and struggling a lot I finally appreciate how easy it is to fly around without leaving the keyboard. Memorizing all the keystrokes takes a while but sure is worth it in the end. I'm still having difficulties with treesitter syntax highlighting with god damned lit-html, can't get my head wrapped around how to set it up properly.

First

I use Vim since I watched your "Vim as your Editors" videos. Thank you so much!!

Been using Vim as a developer for well over 15 years and motions has to be one of the best user interfaces for document editing and traversal .... it's like the manual transmission of a car, once you get it and have that "ah ha!" moment it becomes natural .... i use vim motions in just about everything I can even my web browser

Thank you for this great video. You just now inspired me to write a tribute called "The Zen of Vim" on Medium!

Your vim videos have helped me out tremendously! My coworkers think I'm a wizard. Maybe it's the coconut oil, maybe it's maybelline, but vim just makes everything better!

Started watching your lectures on Frontend Master 8 months ago , At first I felt like I won't make it. I landed my first tech job After a month. Thank you so much for the amazing content and lectures. I feel like a ThePrimeagen evangelist now. Trying to make my software related friends to watch you and learn from you.

I use neovim now

Big thank you to you, Prime! Your content inspired me to use vim. Happy to report I'm now a one year vim user! Also a filthy VOD watcher btw.

Heard about you from word of mouth. Literally subscribed on first video.

You are the main reason i tried out vim and I can't thank you enough. Now I'm sitting here after half a year using Vim with my Moonlander and I will never go back. Thank you!

Recently got into modal editing, but I went with Helix and got *hooked* . It's Kakoune-inspired so not exactly a Vim-analogue, but I just love it so much.

Using vim can definitely secure your job, cus it just simply asserting dominance over the rest of the crew, and especially when you fly through the config through SSH while your team is watching

About 2 years ago i started to code in c++, and i only used vscode, but i started an data eng course and one of my professord introduced vim to me and say smt like " if you like to code fast, you will love vim " so, here i am, using vim for almost anything and searching for new tips about it.

Migrating to Vim took me already 1 month, had to learn bash, lick a bit of lua, finished config for zsh and tmux for my wsl, and almost done with nvim config with all the stuff, i think i missing only debugger but will figure it out. Was funny journey, now i have full control of my dev env , i recommend it to everyone, it requires alot of time and patience but it will pay off for years.

Just get into Vim recently. I didn't do much on coding but pretty enjoy using it.

Practicing Golang with nvim, I kind more like (or love) coding, Thanks for all vim videos. Without your videos I probably will never touch vim editor.

I am pretty good at navigating code with vs code. I also use the terminal core utilities extensively. But I really like some features like debugging, useful extensions etc of vs code. After watching your video , I enabled vim extension in vs code and with vim motions , I feel even more efficient with all the good stuffs of vs code

newbie developer at amazon, my typical day starts with one of your videos. You are inspiration!!!! I wish to be lighting fast like you one day. 😢

0:19 “Atom is still funny when people actually use it.” That level of savagery was uncalled for man!

I personally use helix. I just feel the keybinds make more sense (select, then act), but it’s not necessarily even about whether or not you can type fast for me, but rather the elimination of menial and repetitive work, as well as the partitioning of my time. Even though I spend lots of time thinking, the speed at which I can type gives me more *time* to think, because my thinking and typing can only overlap a tiny bit. Just because you can’t think as fast as you type doesn’t mean faster, less menial typing won’t help

I am so happy to find this and really happy to see 5.2K likes.

Just learned a new thing in vim. Example file index.html and I want to make base template file that includes all my header/meta data but not the rest of the file. You can save just a part of the file by :1, 35w template.html. This will save lines 1-35 in a new file called template.html. OR, we can simply redirect a portion of a file to a different file :50, $w>>otherfile This will redirect from line 50 to end file to 'otherfile'. (From Inside Unix, 2nd Ed., 1996, pg 235) ;)

One of my friends jokingly dared me to switch to it but within like a week I was hooked on the vim way of doing things. I also think once you've got a language fairly understood, everyone should code without any autocompletion for a bit to really ingrain that knowledge and that was a handy side effect of the transition

The beauty of VIM is, that you can customize everything and turn every action into a macro. Doing so requires patience and a bit of time and I think, that is what invokes these "strong feelings" in some people. When I started learning it, it felt clunky. I even had to speak out each key before I pressed it, just to remind myself. 😅 Luckily, this only lasted until the muscle memory kicked in. Now I don"t want to miss all these motions anymore. Even if I am forced to work with PHPStorm or VSCode, the first thing I usually do is install their respective Vim-Plugin.

I think John Carmack said it the best about switching to VIM and giving it a good try: "...In the end it was kind of like my civil war reenactment phase. I am going out there doing it like they used to in the old days..."

Thanks to you, one year ago I started to use my terminal as my code environment. I couldn't use anything else than vim now. I feel complete.