For a long time, I have been sitting beside my dad, watching him code software all day while I switched between studying and working on personal projects. One day, I noticed that he had changed the way he typed. He pressed a sequence of seemingly random keys without using the mouse, and the text on his code editor would change. He could make large-scale text manipulations so quickly that it piqued my curiosity. I asked him what he was using, and he told me about Vim Editing and sent me an instructional course on YouTube.
Although I never found the time to watch those videos until the summer break after my freshman year of college, learning this tool has completely transformed my typing skills. Vim stands for Vi Improved. Vi is a text editor used to perform similar large-scale manipulations using only a keyboard. Vim introduced several important features like window splitting, code highlighting, macros, and pattern matching, making it more user-friendly than Vi for beginners.
I rarely use the trackpad or my mouse now, yet I can travel seamlessly through the document buffer. I must admit that it took me more than three days to get used to Vim, but once I mastered the shortcuts from this cheatsheet, it wasn't long until I downloaded Vim plugins for all my code editors.
I found the register command the most interesting. It helps me record my repetitive actions, which are usually a combination of shorter actions, and execute them with a single command. So far, I am only halfway through learning the multitude of shortcuts Vim offers. I can't wait to learn more.