Musings of a software engineer, dad, and geek at heart.

Vim is the best editor for software developers, full stop. Here's 5 reasons why I'm right

Vim is the most impactful development tool I use.

Don't worry, I'm not looking for a Vim vs Emacs comments war (it would be a slaughter anyway 😆). I know full well how productive other editors can be. There was even a time I played rockstar coder armed with Visual Studio and Resharper.

To each their own. But for me, the right choice is Vim and its variants.

If you've never given it consideration, here's a few of the reasons I think it's amazing:

Less memorizing, more mnemonics

By most measures, I'm a keyboard junkie. But even I forgot if that shortcut was ⌘-⌥-S or ⌃-⌘-S. Vim let's me skip the modifiers and focus on mnemonics.

Go to References is simply gr with my cursor on a symbol. Easy peasy.

Your hands and wrists will thank you

Years ago I had brutally painful, early carpal tunnel.

Turns out, modifier keys, even remapped to better locations, are not my friend. The stretching of the fingers caused too much stress. Since switching to Vim, this is gone.

I hardly ever need a modifier beyond the Control key, and with that mapped to Capslock, there's no stretch needed. It took many hours of wrist, forearm, and grip training (thanks deadlifts) to recover.

A Vim a day keeps the Carpal away.

Most of our time is spent reading and navigating code.

Modal editing is natural and very powerful. But it isn't something that can be explained, only experienced. Give it a couple weeks and you'll love it ... or hate it. But you'll understand either way.

As simple or complex as you want

Zero plugins, or over-powered-IDE, Vim has you covered.

Integrate an LSP server and you have all the power of VSCode. Add as many features and snippets as your heart desires.

Or don't. It'll still be an exceptionally lightweight, powerful editor.

Opens the door for the best remote pairing tool available

This is a topic for another day, but once you're living in Vim-land, you gain access to the best remote pairing solution I've ever used.

And pairing remotely is one of the most important level-ups a remote working software developer can do.

Long story short, Vim is awesome. Give it a chance, just take it slow. There's a lot of power in there.

This Day 15 #ship30for30 #atomicEssay was shipped with this tweet:

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