Text Editing Outside of Vim

Sep 30 2016

There are a fair number of people at my company that use Vim. I feel confident saying that half, or even more than half use Vim. As a Vim user, it is pretty easy to jump into a pairing session with another Vim user, even if the .vimrc is nothing like mine. hjkl are still there.

As Vim users, perhaps we feel empowered by our ability to jump around text and mold it to our needs via text object manipulation or our command of (vim-flavored) regular expressions. It is easy to succumb to the idea that our method is superior.

Today, I paired with someone who does not use Vim, and I was forced to face a hard truth.

I am terrible at manipulating text outside my favorite text editor.

On OS X I can’t select a hunk of text with out the mouse, or navigate a line by word with the system key bindings. I can’t even cut, copy, or pasta very well!

Just as I strive to be a generalist when it comes to the technology stack that I work in, I think that it is important that I strive for the same goal in terms of the tools I use, including my text editor. Further, improving my editor fluency outside of Vim allows me the flexibility to go to other environments, where I might not be able to use Vim, and still be productive.

How can I remedy this? I think the approach I might take is to spend a week doing a kata in an editor like Atom or Sublime Text. This will help me to work on my text editing fluency with the OS X system key bindings.

tags:codingvimtext editing

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