Author’s note: I wrote this post a few months ago, when I was just getting into Vim. I’ve since become much more accustomed to it, so this is probably a more negative writeup than I would give nowadays. I think this highlights an important point: time’s a healer, and most of the Vim-pushers have probably forgotten about what a struggle it was getting over that initial hump. I’ve also found that Atom’s vim-mode-plus package, while not a totally-accurate emulation of Vim, addresses all of my complaints against pure Vim, so is well worth checking out for the non-purists!
TL;DR: I’m a JavaScript engineer who’s recently gone through the process of switching from Sublime Text to Vim. If you want to know what I think of it, skip to the end (spoiler: I now use Vim vim-mode-plus for everything). If you want to know why I did it, or just fancy spending the next few minutes reading some words, then read on.
The List
You know that long-term career-development list that every ambitious front-end developer has? You know, the one that starts, 1. Get round to learning Vim?
I’ve had that old chestnut on my list for the last few years, and aside from the odd bout of vimtutor every now and then I wasn’t doing much about it. Whenever I talked to coworkers who used Vim as their editor of choice, the consensus seemed to be that once you’ve invested a couple of weeks and figured out how it works, you’ll never look back. The trouble is, I never reached a point where I could justify slowing my pace of development almost to a standstill for a fortnight, just so that I could become proficient in the dark arts of some prehistoric text-editing tool.
I was torn, because these Vim-zealots were people whose views I respected. But how about all those articles you read from people who used Vim for a bit but decided to go back to Sublime Text? Well, don’t bother clicking those links because those articles don’t exist. Just like you never hear about anyone switching back to Windows after going Mac, all of the evidence suggests the path to Vim is a one-way ticket to code-editing bliss. Or potentially suicide, depending on how you interpret an absence of evidence.
What always throws me is the lack of balance in any opinions I’ve heard about Vim: there doesn’t seem to be much middle ground between one side claiming it’s the best computer program ever written and the other side claiming it’s the work of some maniacal sadist. The Vim-lovers claim the Vim-haters just don’t understand how to use it, while the Vim-haters claim the Vim-lovers are obsessives with no sense of user aesthetics. The praise seemed so gushing that I always attributed it to an unhealthy emotional attachment formed by by years of tinkering with configuration files, combined with ignorance of Sublime Text’s more advanced features due to Vim lock-in. All the same, I couldn’t shake the constant nagging feeling that there might just be something in all this Vim talk, and so for me Vim remained shrouded behind a veil of mystery.
A twist of fate
Eventually, however, fate intervened. If this were a Greek tragedy, this would the point where Zeus hurls a thunderbolt my way as a friendly reminder to stop shirking responsibility. In my case, I caught my shoelace in my bicycle wheel while on vacation and ended up breaking my arm. As it happens, this turned out to have much the same motivational effect, despite being somewhat less dignified.
A week after my accident and back from my vacation I sat down to work, carefully maneuvered my right hand into position on the home row, and fired up Sublime Text. I remember feeling cautiously positive about the whole ordeal, that at least I’d have the opportunity to knuckle down to a prolonged stretch of distraction-free coding now that I was effectively chained to my desk for the next few weeks. How wrong I was.
My optimism turned to a mixture of frustration and despair as soon as I tried to write my first line of code. It was only then that I realized how much my right hand moves around when coding. Try it yourself – keep your right hand restricted to letter keys, and try to program as normal (Vim users are exempt from this exercise). If you make if past three functions without going insane, you’re a much more patient programmer than I am.
In one careless tumble I’d swapped my power-user status for the IT proficiency level of my grandmother, who a) has never used a computer in her life, and b) has been dead for several years. Flickers of ingrained muscle memory –
Never one to be dissuaded, I looked into the options for one-handed programming. Turns out there are none. There are keyboard layouts like one-handed DVORAK and various keyboard mirroring options, but none that pander to all those punctuation keys that we programmers love so dearly, and none of them help with replacing the arrow keys for navigating aroung code. Moral of the story: never break your arm if you write code for a living.
After pondering my fate for a while (which presumably is the fate of all those one-handed programmers, a demographic for whom I now feel great empathy) I decided it was time to take action. I knew what I had to do. It was time to learn Vim.
Learning Vim
The way I saw it, if Vim can make two-handed programmers significantly more productive, it must be even more effective for lesser-limbed coders. Even just cutting out the arrow keys would be a huge plus for me. I had finally found my motivation for learning Vim.
The trouble is, learning Vim is hard. Not in the sense that any one aspect of it is particularly complicated, it’s just that it does everything so differently to other tools. And there’s a hell of a lot of it to learn. It’s got hundreds of commands, a huge set of very-much-non-standard keyboard shortcuts (which behave differently in each of the several modes), its own proprietary programming language – it’s even gone to the trouble of inventing its own vocabulary (seriously, words vs WORDS? yank vs copy?). It’s particularly frustrating if you consider yourself pretty nifty with OS X’s keyboard shortcuts and all the ins and outs of its UI/windowing/text-editing behavior, seeing as it’s all completely different in Vim.
In short, I found learning Vim to be a bit like painstakingly deciphering the operating instructions for some complex piece of disused Soviet military apparatus which, once mastered, you can then use to repeatedly punch yourself in the face at a far quicker rate than you would usually be able to manage.
After a couple of days blundering around with Vim’s thorough-but-dense :help command and increasing StackOverflow’s ad revenue by 300%, I bit the bullet and bought a copy of Practical Vim. That was probably the best $23 I’ve ever spent, seeing as without it I’d probably have a permanent thousand-yard stare to go with my broken arm.
Now that I’m past the initial hump, and have regained rudimentary arm movement, I feel that I’ve finally spent enough time with Vim to give it a fair initial appraisal. Bear in mind that there’s still a huge amount for me to to learn, so these are only my impressions from the first few weeks.
What’s it like?
Although it pains me to say it – and I hope this isn’t just Stockholm Syndrome setting in – I’ve got to admit that Vim is a very, very good text editor.
Once you use Vim for a while, it becomes apparent that it’s all been very cleverly thought-out. As soon as you get used to the mode-switching it becomes second nature, and those myriad keyboard shortcuts all come in handy once you’ve gone to the trouble of committing them to muscle memory (ShortcutFoo helped a lot in my case). Many of the small details which seemed at the beginning to be unnecessary complications ultimately turn out to be vital components in a highly coherent system.
But that’s not to say that it’s perfect, by any means. While the core text-editing experience is brilliant, once you start extending it with a few basic plugins the niggles start to arise. Here’s a (hopefully relatively unbiased) round-up of how I’ve found the last few weeks working with Vim.
The good
- Mouse-free operation speeds things up no end
- Super-fast editing / text manipulation shortcuts. Now that I’m used to working with motions and text objects, I’m amazed they’re not more common across the board.
- Keyboard-controlled windowing support really helps when diving into a large codebase
- Macros are a powerful (if sometimes unforgiving) way to speed up repeated actions
- Fully integrated with the Unix ecosystem, allowing you to use your OS to its best advantage
- Tiny memory footprint, if that kind of thing appeals to you
- Whatever you want to do, there’s a plugin for it
- Heavily customizable and scriptable to create the editor of your dreams
The bad
- Needs a large amount of configuration to reach the base level of functionality provided by most modern editors (alternatively, use a distribution like janus, spf13-vim or my vim-quickstart)
- Feels very unpolished: e.g. find/replace is much less slick than Sublime Text / Atom, syntax highlighting can be somewhat hit-and-miss on large files, plus I also occasionally seem to get line rendering glitches
- Built-in features that “just work” on other editors are often missing in Vim, forcing you to rely on (often buggy or sub-standard) user plugins – e.g. multiple cursor support (via vim-multiple-cursors) is much clunkier than Sublime Text / Atom
- Non-standard keyboard shortcuts and poor discoverability of commands punishes beginner users
- Not as fast as I assumed it would be: even with relatively few plugins, the lack of asynchronous operations for linting/autocomplete/etc means that flicking between files feels way less snappy than Sublime Text, particularly when working with large files (although NeoVim aims to solve this)
- Plugin quality varies massively – some are great, some have been unmaintained for years despite bugs
- Lack of common standards across plugins (e.g. for key mappings) can prove disorientating
- No universally-accepted package manager for plugins
- Scripting-wise, let’s just say vimscript isn’t going to be winning any beauty pageants any time soon
- Relies on the user being able to touch-type accurately (although if you’re a programmer who can’t touch-type, you should probably sort that out first – it really doesn’t take long)
The ugly
- Even when heavily customized, the UI looks pretty ropey compared to a modern editor. Remember you’re going to be staring at this thing all day, every day.
So, should I bother learning Vim?
If you actively want to learn Vim then you should definitely go for it – I’m sure you’ll enjoy it. If you think Vim doesn’t sound like your kind of thing, then don’t bother learning it. It’ll only infuriate you.
If you find yourself in the position I was in, vaguely intending to investigate Vim when you find the time, that suggests to me that you’d benefit from biting the bullet and throwing yourself into it at some point. It won’t necessarily revolutionize your life, but it could well become your favorite code editor. I’d approach it a bit like learning a new programming language, and save it for a rainy day(/week) when you don’t have any deadlines looming. For reference, it took me a week or two of bashing my head against the wall with Vim to reach approximately the same level of productivity as with Sublime Text. If that rainy day never seems to arrive, I’d recommend a 3-part fracture to your proximal humerus to speed the decision.
Update: I’d now strongly recommend starting with Atom’s vim-mode or Sublime’s Vintage Mode, as these offer an fairly accurate simulation of Vim’s core editing experience without any of the shortcomings highlighted above.
Epilogue
As for me, I knew the day would come when I’d have to retire Sublime Text to the dusty shelf of discarded editors – leaving it to swap war stories with WebStorm, TextMate, Dreamweaver and FrontPage – but I’d always assumed it would have been a younger, better-looking model like Atom that knocked it off the top spot. Seriously? VIM? That old ugly-looking thing? Yes, it’s true: Vim is now my primary code editor. So if occasionally you see me at my computer, gazing off into the middle distance while simultaneously flitting through a codebase by touch alone, just know that I might be using Vim, but I’m thinking of Sublime Text.