Hello again, Vim mode
I'm back to Vim mode in Obsidian, VSCode, and my terminal, at least as an experiment.
Years ago I made a concerted effort to get decent at Vim.
I bought Practical Vim and worked through it.
As I learned more tricks, I built out vim-practice.md, an obstacle course template I would routinely run through to hone my skills.
I watched ThePrimeagen's YouTube videos and borrowed pieces of his rig.
And I loved it.
But I was writing more code back then, and as I got deeper into my career in people management, I was spending less time typing in my favorite text editor and more time elsewhere: Slack, Confluence, Google Docs, email, etc. I felt split-brained, having to hop between the Vim world, where I felt like a wizard (or at least his apprentice), and the rest of work life. Wouldn't it be simpler if I just embraced my less-technical role and went all-in on the macOS defaults?
So, I said goodbye to Vim. But I never forgot about it. From time to time, in a nostalgic impulse, I'd enable Vim mode somewhere and stroll around a buffer. I'd always turn it back off a few minutes later, assuming it was just a silly distraction.
But maybe that was too hasty a take. Like many of us here in the indie blogosphere, I hunger for nerdy little adventures — especially when I can justify having them at work, where I spend all day on my laptop. Perhaps Vim mode is a cheap and fun adventure I can pursue all day long, whether I'm taking notes in a meeting, managing my tasks, drafting an email, writing scraps of code to help me do my job, etc.
What about the hopping-in-and-out problem? I saw someone mention that going back and forth between Vim and other editors, while annoying at first, can become second nature, almost like a bilingual person hopping between languages. I'm aiming for that perspective instead of assuming this is entirely negative cognitive load.
So, Vim mode...
If I made you feel second best
I'm sorry I was blind
You were always on my mind
It's good to see you again. 💖