Shit. I didn’t think this through well enough. Can I change my answer to yours?

Is there a .vimrc that already maps all the standard notepad++ keybindings in one go ?

You may find someone who has one, but I just did the ones I found myself missing as I encountered them.

I tried someone’s all-in-one .vimrc, but it broke too many community recipes while rebinding a bunch of shortcuts that weren’t in my muscle memory anyway.

I kept adjusting my .vimrc as my muscle memory transitioned. So having less to fiddle also made it easier for me to keep my .vimrc tuned to my muscle memory.

For example, I was using / instead of Ctrl+F because I liked it better within a month or two.

what’s good about neovim?

• NeoVim supports plugins written in modern languages without a Vim script shim. Vim script is utterly awful, and the sooner we can all pretend it never happened, the better the world will be.
• NeoVim can be configured and extended with lua a language that many people actually like to use.
• NeoVim is built client/server style, like VSCodium, so it can do the same remote/local mix and match tricks. Notably, VSCodium works nicely as a front end for editing files with NeoVim.
• NeoVim is somehow actually faster. vim was no slouch, but a full rewrite seems to have added some…ahem…vim.

I just drag my vi terminals to another workspace and launch a new editor.

I see what you did there. Lol.

Yeah. And VsCodium with NeoVim is fantastic.

But if ctrl+f doesn’t let me type a search term then I’m going to scream

It’s been awhile since I’ve bothered to remap a key in Vim, but adding this to .vimrc should do it for you:

nnoremap <C-f> /

I started with a bunch of these to let me keep using existing muscle memory while training new.

Exactly. So there’s no way to measure the exact egg that was first born to a species we would not recognize as a chicken.

Further, we might each choose a different arbitrary egg and declare that eggs parent “not a chicken”.

But for this question, that doesn’t have to matter.

If we can all agree that something in the ancestry of the modern chicken was not a chicken, and agree that it was likely still birthed from an egg, then we can conclude that that egg came first.

Even if we cannot agree about which exact egg hatched into the first chicken, or which exact animal was the first chicken, we can agree on their relationship such that we can agree that any selected “first chicken egg” came before any selected “first chicken” to be born from it.

The hardest part of this proposition is whether we can agree that the first chicken was born inside an egg. I propose that it must have been, by our own definitioms, because we widely agree that chickens are born from eggs. Not by any intrinsic property, but simply by our accepted definition of the word “chicken”.

So any hypothetical chicken-ancestor we choose as the “first chicken”, but not born from an egg, we should not be willing to call “first chicken”, after all.

So we must proceed forward in time from that failed choice of “first chicken” until something sufficiently chicken-like is born from an egg. Then we can call that animal our “first chicken”, and examine it’s relationship to “chicken eggs”. We will, by our method of searching, always then find that the “chicken egg” that our “first chicken” hatched from, came first.

Yeah. After that everything can be done with !sh.

(Edit: This is a joke. There’s a lot of reasons not to do this.)

I think I get what you are intending to imply by the word “intuitively”; it’s that it eventually becomes as reflexive and fluid as touch-typing itself.

Exactly like that!

It’s also another source of the many “I can’t exit Vim” jokes, because it is now genuinely disorienting for me to try to edit text without Vim key bindings.

Gosh you make it sound almost like you play Vim like an instrument more than use it…!

That’s a great analogy. It does very much feel that way.

Honestly that sounds cool ^_

It is pretty cool.

Wether it’s really worth the learning curve is probably unique to each person that tries it. But for folks who need to edit a lot of text a lot of the time, it’s pretty great.

It’s intuitive if your previous editor was ed(1) and you’re using an ADM-3A-like keyboard.

Exactly! Ha!

Nice.

I’ve been using Vim daily for about 20 years, it saves me 30 minutes at a time regularly.

I’m approaching break-even on the learning curve!

I’m kidding…mostly.

Doesn’t matter we will tell you either way.

• Instead of simply shortcuts, vim uses “chords”. Every new shortcut I learn can be combined intuitively* with all the other shortcuts I know.
• Because of this there’s no faster way to edit files than Vim in the hands of an experienced user.
• this let’s me spend almost no time editing code, freeing up the rest of my time for swearing at piss poor documentation.

* I use “intuitively” here in a way that not merely stretches, but outright abuses the definition of the word.

That’s a sell cue, for any shareholders reading along.

Yep.

I’m a die hard Linux nerd, but I would still Rather have a console.

But what I really want is a console that just runs Linux so I can keep it updated and fix minor issues without all the bullshit.

Just gotta pause faster!

Oh! You meant Moore’s Law is asymptotic!?

Yes! That is key to the joke I was making.

When I say Big O, I’m talking about the slick jazzy anime about rejecting true love and living with heartbreak because we believe a lie about our own superiority. This is always true, no matter what the discussion context. If I happen to say anything remotely relevant to mathematical Big O, that is just a deeply weird coincidence.

Sweet.

Fantastic summary. For anyone wondering how to get really really valuable in IT, this is a great write-up of why my top paid people are my top paid people.

Write more robust code.

Sure, I could read a book about best practices and Big O…but…What if we just table the idea for a few iterations of Moore’s Law instead?