Vim - I hate to love you

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2022-01-13 08:00:08

When I migrated from Microsoft Windows to GNU/Linux and FreeBSD back in 1998/1999 I cannot remember what text editor I was using for software development, but I do remember using Quanta Pro and Kate at some point for web development. Later I began using terminal applications almost exclusively because it's just so much more efficent, and I eventually also did all my web development in the terminal. At this time I kept it simple and used mostly nano and mcedit. I was quite satisfied with the simplicity of these editors and continued to use them for years. Whenever I needed to do more advanced search and replace I used greb and sed. This worked just fine.

Then one day a friend advised me to take a look at a "real" editor, as he called it, and he recommended Emacs. He also recommended Emacs Rocks and I was naturally surprised at some of the amazing stuff you can do. I decided to give Emacs a try, but after about a week or two I couldn't take it any longer, Emacs was unbearably slow and required a lot of plugins before it was really useful. So I began to look for other editors with similar capabilities.

I decided to use Vim exclusively in order to become more efficient with it. I printed out a cheat sheet which I placed beside my keyboard. I also took the Vimtutor and watched a bunch of YouTube tutorials.

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