30 days of VIM

Published Jan 21, 2018

The content here is under the Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license

I’ve been looking at vim for quite a while, and now I decided to take it serious. The goal of this series of posts is to write at least one tip that I learned along the way using vim as my main editor.

I started with netbeans, which was a good IDE to write PHP code and Java at the same time. After that I switched to PHPStorm, which is a great IDE to code PHP (or should I say web code? - PHPStorm gives an amazing support to write HTML and Javascript as well).

Finally I moved to Vscode, I like to think of Vscode as the best of the PHPStorm combined with a high customization editor. One of the bad sides of PHPStorm (and here I see as a lack of options to all IDEs of JetBrains) is the lack of appearance customization.

Challenges

Vim is known mainly to improve productivity in the daily basis of a developer, but is also true that the switch is not easy. Personally the biggest challenge is going to be to adapt in leaving the mouse alone and do all by the keyboard.

The second is the multi workspace that I am used to. Vscode has launched it’s multi workspace since the version 1.14 (Insiders build) and 1.8 (Stable build), which I rely a lot on.

Resources

Here I am going to mention only two, as this post is about getting started with vim (later posts will come with even more resources).

During this first research to use Vim, I found good resources and even puzzles which is played with vim, in order to remember the key combination that perform a sort of action. If this is your style just check Vimgolf. People around the world post the quickest way of complete an action with vim there.

Besides puzzles, there is a wonderful site to getting started with vim configuration. Vim is also known to be as customizable as it can be, which means to create our own key bindings, change the font color and much more (it is very common to see others people .vimrc file). For that I found Vim bootstrap. Which comes with a lot of pre defined configurations to help you out, just chose which language you’re going to use and download the file.