I Cant Quit Vim
Intro
The reason I cant quit Vim is simply because Vim might be one of (or THE) best software ever made!
In this article I will explain what is Vim, how I came to know Vim and why I am learning it now in the big 2025.
What is a Vim
Vim is a highly configurable, efficient, minimal and powerful text editor. Although I think calling it a “text editor” is a big understatement of Vim’s full power.
Like all good programs, Vim was written in C, in 1991 by the late Bram Moolenaar. Vim is an improvement to the original vi, a text editor made for UNIX and present on most UNIX-like OSs.
Why Vim
“Vim is hard to use and will not make you a better developer!!11!!” - generic soydev
Well, Vim is hard, I will not sit here and say that its easier than a traditional IDE. However, when you do actually learn Vim (which might take months to actually master) the productivity you gain from it is 100% worth it. Even with my limited Vim knowledge of just a few days, writing text and code has never felt better, switching between the multiple modes and running commands to delete words, lines and edit lots of text in seconds is like directly communicating with the text with your mind (not even exaggerating).
With Vim you never take your hands off the center of your keyboard, every edit you want to make you can with simple key presses. The more you type and get familiar with Vim, the more the commands come up naturally, you don’t even need to think about them. Unlike a traditional IDE where you have to constantly take your hands off the keyboard and focus on that mouse pointer to click “RUN CODE” or to edit code. In Vim all you need to run the code is to press “esc” and type :make run assuming you make your own Makefiles (as you should).
My history with Vim
I’ve been using Linux for 3 or 4 years, started on Manjaro-Linux but quickly went to Arch and then 8 months ago I got Gentoo, never really cared about minimalism and efficiency until very recently. So a few weeks ago, I installed DWM + ST + VIM and even made my own status script!
I’ve ignored Vim for years, thinking it was just a meme (I had the same thought about Gentoo), massive waste of time, I wish I had learnt all of this years ago when I got my first computer. At least I didn’t waste basically any time on windows and my use of non-foss programs was basically discord and steam (actually just steam since vencord is an open-source client for discord).
How to learn Vim
Vim comes with a tutorial!
Simply type vimtutor in the terminal and read it carefully.
ez vim!!!!11!
Conclusion
Vim has a big learning curve, but you can see the results of your learning in just a few hours.
I absolutely love Vim, I haven’t tried neoVim yet, but I definitely will.
My biggest regret with Vim was to not have learnt it earlier, that really was an epic fail. Don’t be like me, learn Vim as soon as you know about its existence!
Here is my Vim:
