I've Finally Made It to Vim!

Unlike Kier Starmer my father was not a toolmaker, today I’d like to talk about a tool, made by a toolmaker.

I can’t believe I’ve been on Linux full-time for over 10 years without learning how Vim works. It’s the preferred text editor of almost everyone I know, and it’s a crime I didn’t give it a try sooner.

When it comes to learning Vim, I was very fortunate to have Drew walk me through the basics, as well as some advanced Vim techniques. Since then, I’ve hardly used anything else.

In fact, I’ve started using Vim for tasks I hadn’t previously used a text editor for. I’ve adopted calendar.txt as my calendar and todo.txt to organise my tasks. My go-to approach for new tasks is now to see how they can be handled in plain text.

But it doesn’t stop there. Keeping information in plain text has made me more familiar with other command-line tools, such as grep, which allows me to filter and view specific parts of a text file. I also use the terminal file browser nnn alongside Vim to rename and sort files. It’s incredibly satisfying to have all these tools work together in simple, yet highly effective ways. I’ve always been a fan of “the UNIX way,” but I’ve never truly lived it until now—and it all started with Vim.

For those who don’t know, Vim is a text editor, similar to Windows Notepad, where you can create and edit text files. But unlike Notepad, Vim comes with powerful tools for coding and all other forms of writing.

Lately, I’ve changed my workflow significantly: I’ve moved from Xfce to i3, from Nano to Vim, and from GUI applications to plain text and their CLI counterparts. I’ll be journaling more about this journey, but returning to a command-line-focused workflow is proving to be incredibly rewarding.