I have about 30 years of my career left. That’s not enough time for the return on investment of learning VIM to payout.

If you are actually interested in learning, it’s not too hard, you’ll be slow for a little bit but it pays off in the end.

First, understanding there are actions and objects and quantifiers. Actions are what you do to objects, so when you want to (d) delete, that is the action, then you’d want to specify a object. ($) being the end of the line, (^) start, (w) is word, (j), (g) is top of file and so on, these are already the words you’ll use to move along as well.

Then, for many of these we can add quantifiers, i.e. repeat x number of times.

So 3dw is delete three words and 3dj is three lines down and so on. If you want to select, it’s just swap v for d and off to the races.

Once you learn the basic concept, you really only need a few actions and a few objects to be functional.

Print/find/make a cheat sheet and put it up by your monitor or keyboard and give yourself a week.

Also, checkout the vimtudor or vim golf and play the game for a few minutes.

By the way, the vim extension for VScode is great, so why not combine both.

Drat, I’ve been working with vi for 35y now… (feeling old) I’m glad I now know how to kill the mouse functions in vim so X clipboard works. ;)

Tried emacs once (in '94)… opened an extra xterm and killed it as I couldn’t figure out how to save and exit. (it’s just what you’re used to ;) )

Helix > Vim (and neovim)

As a long time vim user with many macros and plugins, etc. and I love using it. But I have to say, it’s hard for me to actually suggest vim to anyone new, because of how long it takes until you actually start using it comfortably…

35 years ago (give or take) I used vi (no “m”) for email and Usenet. I doubt I could remember how to do anything useful with it now.

PSA: run vimtutor in the terminal

I get the feeling that every developer with this midnset still uses a tenkey.

VSCode has a vim plugin, you should try it

VSCodium