Learning VIM as a beginner

It looks cool okay, that's the main motivation.

Quick before I get into it, this is not a tutorial, this is just me being a beginner sharing my experiences with my first day of VIM.

My first encounter with VIM was uncomfortable. I don't remember how I opened VIM for the first time but it was something like merge branch and then VIM was opened and I needed to enter the merge commit message. Help, what do I do from here? This was 2 years ago and I had just barely learnt react at that point and was not used to working with git. My senior gave me a command to save me in this case and multiple cases in the future :wq. At that point in my career the thought of VIM was scary and quite frankly I saw it as an old archaic way of doing things and I saw no upside.

Fast forward to present day, as I've laid a solid foundation for my work in general I'm now much more comfortable with the idea of adding new tools to my belt. On top of that I've seen how fast my colleague can make edits through the power of VIM and to be frank, he looks like a badass. On top of this when, if you've spent any time what so ever on the web dev sphere online, you've inevitably come across the youtuber/ streamer/ netflix engineer thePrimeagen, and since every other word escaping his mouth is "VIM", you'll be primed for VIM being a possibility in your life. The breaking point for me was as short introductory video to VIM motions by youtube channel dispatch.

Fantastic, now I'm inspired, let's get this VIM thing started. At my job every other friday is a sort of hack day aptly named "Crazy Friday" and I figure wouldn't it be crazy if went out and spent an entire day learning VIM. The next question to answer would be "Where?", where do you learn VIM, the internet. My colleague had sent me a 10 hour youtube walk through, a bit too daunting for my taste and decided to look elsewhere. Through my job I also have access to Frontend Masters, so I figured why not start there. And what do you know, Mr PrimeTime himself aka Frontend Masteragen (dumb joke he does at the end of all of his videos) is teaching a course on VIM. Who better to learn from than the Frontend Master himself, the Primagen.

I didn't realise how underdeveloped my pinky was when it comes to typing before being put through military VIM drills provided by Prime. I'm half joking here of course, the exercises are great for getting used to using your keyboard in a completely different way. But when navigating with h j k l the obvious choice is to use the four fingers on your right hand to occupy these keys. And apparently I never use my pinky a rude awakening I wasn't expecting as I never really look at my fingers when typing, but now with these navigation exercises my lower arm is throbbing. Hyperbole, calm down guys.

You will not learn VIM in a day obviously, but this course has been a nice introduction to the whole concept of using VIM and now I feel comfortable enough to install the VIM motions vscode extension and try and incorporate VIM into my daily work flow. No doubt I'll be extremely deficient here in the beginning, but the future is bright. Maybe next month I'll check back in and will let you know how I'm doing, maybe I'm loving the experience, maybe I'm hating it, but for now I'm excited.

If you have any input on next steps please do leave them in the comments below. I'm very green in the VIM department and could use a bit of direction.