Why you should consider drafting in Vim
I met a colleague 4 years ago who introduced me to the full capabilities of Vim. I could see him fluently floating around a document from side to side, top to bottom instantly transforming the contents to his intention. It was an inspiring sight!
Until that day, I had only heard of Vim as a fundamental text editor. Including some jokes at its address like:
If you want to generate a random string, ask a person to quit Vim.
I’ve been using Vim for centuries, basically because I don’t know how to quit.
And so on!
Now that I know how to quit — I don’t want to!
Vim’s basics are not intuitive. But as it’s official built-in tutorial says: “Learn by using, not by memorizing”! I followed this advice. And the app just opened up to me. It started to make perfect sense!
I am a developer, but I found Vim’s generosity to extend way beyond my tasks as a professional. It’s scalable and highly configurable. It can be as dull as you want just as well as a powerful tool.
When it came to relaxing after a long workday writing an article, I’ve always admired Ommwriter for its simplicity and helpfulness to get into the mood and concentrate. But at one time, I was in the middle of a bare UNIX shell and had an inspiration — something that I simply HAD to write down. So I just went into Vim and wrote it. That felt good! It was the same isolated from distractions environment where you can only see your thoughts flowing and transforming into words!
Black and white. White on black. Just you and your article.
Sometimes we avoid things that we consider not worth the time to learn and may even look intimidating and complicated. But Vim actually turned out to be made very simple! And it’s power comes from the concept of almost verbal commands. It’s like you are talking to a person how you’d like your text edited. Beautiful.
You don’t need to be a tech person to consider drafting your next Medium article in Vim. Past the first stage of confusion lays a giant time-saver!
As always, thank you for reading!