VIM Pays Excellent Dividends: Learn it early, if you can
I can&#x27;t claim to have ever &quot;tried&quot; to get into vim - in the sense of ditching my daily driver (Sublime&#x2F;VS Code) and going 100% vim. I&#x27;ve done the vimtutor, I even know how to do basic text editing (cut, copy, paste, find-and-replace, visual mode highlight) in vim, plus some of those &quot;magic&quot; things where you can repeat an action multiple times (:2wi or whatever). And I&#x27;ll happily fire up vim if it&#x27;s something really quick, like making a list in a plain text file or something.<p>So what&#x27;s kept me from going 100% vim?<p>1. Plugin&#x2F;add-on support - I have no clue what&#x27;s going on here. There&#x27;s no clear guidance on what to use (vundle? pathogen?). I haven&#x27;t really grokked how plugins really work - where do they come from? how do I search for them? where are they really installed? how are they organized in the install directory? do I need to care? etc (I&#x27;m aware this is all documented somewhere, and maybe I just need to make more of an effort). Whereas in something like Sublime Text there&#x27;s an easily installable package manager that takes care of all these things for you. And if you really care to learn, you can drop into one of the packages and find easy-to-understand Python and JSON. Versus vimscript, weird config files and whatever else vim uses to configure things.<p>2. Multi-file support - Sublime has a Cmd + T fuzzy filename finder right out of the box. With vim (for a beginner) your choices are either: a) open multiple terminal windows with a single file in each, Cmd + Tab endlessly or b) open multiple files in the same editor and drop out of insert mode every time you want to switch files (way more keystrokes than Cmd + T or Ctrl + Tab; maybe there&#x27;s a toggle file shortcut in Vim also). I&#x27;m aware that there exist plugins for fuzzy-file searching in vim also, but because of 1 I don&#x27;t know how to find or install them.<p>3. Buffers and marks - I&#x27;m vaguely aware they exist. I&#x27;m not sure what they do and why they&#x27;re important. Again, this one is probably on me rather than the tool itself.