Why Vim Is More than Just an Editor – Vim Language, Motions, and Modes Explained
Why Vim Is More than Just an Editor – Vim Language, Motions, and Modes Explained
Vim is a powerful text editor that improves coding speed & efficiency through its shortcut-based Vim language. While learning Vim can be challenging, it is a valuable skill that can enhance your career as a computer professional.
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I saw the video by noBoilerplate. How useful is knowing and using Vim-Shortcuts when writing a letter or an email? Does it only make sense to learn it if you write or code all day or is it useful enough for moderate tech users or office workers?
It's very good for navigating and editing text quickly, and fantastic for situations like "I need to do the same thing 100 times" with things like macros. Coders are frequently opening a big, complex file, jumping around it a lot, changing big and small parts of it, and doing repetitive tasks. For something more like writing out thoughts for an email, editing them slightly, then being done with that text forever, there aren't as many advantages, you're spending most of your time in "insert" mode which is effectively "normal text editor that people are used to" mode. That said, it's one of those things where when you do get used to it and start to enjoy it instead of being frustrated by how different it is, you start wanting it wherever you have to type anything.
That would be Emacs.
Emacs is like an operating system bringing various tools into the same editing interface, including email. Emacs is very adaptive, you can get VIm like bindings through evil-mode.
I would Emacs, but my pinky can't.
Oh I feel you. Typing too much too fast is terrible on the wrists.
I remapped some keys for the key combos and have no issues with those now. Regardless of editor, good posture may help. I find good posture easier with split keyboards which often include a thumb cluster.
Perhaps multi-modal editing is better and you can do that with evil-mode. I've created some prefix key combinations with Alt-Gr and with the super (windows) keys to create something like it whilst keeping most most common commands close to the default. Namely C-x is now s-c which is way more relaxing on Dvorak layout.
Doom Emacs includes evil-mode by default perhaps that's your cup of tea.
I'd love to say yes, but I really don't think it's worth the time in that scenario. Learn keyboard layering instead; much less time consuming and probably better for normal E-Mail writing et al. Check out dreymar's extend, which is extremely useful and can be used on any platform with any keyboard layout: https://dreymar.colemak.org/layers-extend.html