Ved Panse • 3 March, 2020
Like many good stories in tech, this one begins with a keyboard and a healthy amount of confusion. I was working on a side project when I noticed my dad — a seasoned developer — doing something strange. He was editing code at alarming speed, making surgical text edits without once touching the mouse. No clicks. No dragging. Just keypresses. To me, it looked like he was inputting cheat codes into a game.
“Vim,” he said, noticing my curiosity. “You’ll either love it or hate it. Probably both.” Then he sent me a YouTube playlist and returned to his buffer-hopping sorcery. I, of course, bookmarked it for later — which, in typical fashion, turned out to be the following summer.
When I finally sat down to learn Vim, I expected a quirky niche editor. What I found was a different paradigm: one that values composability, precision, and above all, speed. Vim isn’t just a text editor. It’s a language — one that rewards fluency with an almost unfair level of control.
For those unfamiliar, Vim is short for Vi Improved, a keyboard-driven editor designed to make editing text fast — really fast. Its modal structure separates editing from navigation, which at first feels unintuitive and later feels indispensable. Features like macros, registers, and split windows help you perform complex manipulations without ever lifting a finger off the keyboard.
The learning curve is... sharp. I spent three solid days wondering why I couldn’t quit (literally and metaphorically), but something clicked after a week. Thanks to the tutorial my dad had sent me, I started to see the patterns — and once you do, Vim stops being a tool and starts becoming a mindset.
The feature that sold me was registers: small recorded sequences of actions that can be replayed like macros. Imagine writing one command to delete a line, insert boilerplate, format it, and move to the next line — then applying that across 50 files. That’s what Vim lets you do with just a few keystrokes and no plugin overhead.
These days, I don’t use Vim for everything. But I use it somewhere in everything — whether that’s embedded inside VS Code or as my go-to for SSH editing sessions. I don’t evangelize Vim; I simply use it, and let the speed speak for itself.
If you’ve ever been curious about Vim, I’ll say this: it rewards those who commit. You don’t have to memorize every keybinding — you just have to be willing to relearn how to edit, one keystroke at a time.
And once it clicks? Well, suddenly, the mouse starts feeling... optional.