Improving Vim Speed

A grab-bag of tips to speed up your vimming!

Learn more from the developers at thoughtbot ⌨️

[SantiYounger]

Thanks for the amazing video here are some of my notes!
1:00 vim has a mythology of being impossibly hard.
2:30 Stay out of insert mode.
3:30 Disable arrows, to work on getting used to hjkl movement.
4:20 As you get more advanced let go of hjkl
5:00 learn advance shortcuts w instead of l (moving through words)
b (back)
e (ends of words)
ge (back end of words)
f (find)
5:50 advanced functions to delete chunks of phrases "t" "ct"
7:12 delete find df (delete til it find a specific symbol you are
looking for)
8:40 relative numbers (example -16, -1co.) this copy pastes a chunk above
the line where you are (or below)
9:20 H M L (migh medium low)

[KayOScode]

Vim is terrifying. Terrifying knowing that there was a time I didn't use it.

[willr]

when he said "most editors don't really do anything ... most people just spend time making it look pretty"
very true

[abelberiyoterefe]

Thanks for sharing your tips. I found this really useful.
vim-surround: s ( <--- space padded surround ( foo )
s ) <--- tight surround (foo)

[stillcuriouslychase]

“Your old editor is already eclipsed" 😂That was awesome.

[abhishekslab]

I just started using vim, added vimium to my browser too. This video has some really practical advice on the issues beginners like me face, thank you for putting this out.

[Mephistolomaniac]

if you add "set path+=**" to your vimrc, vim's own :find command becomes a pretty decent substitute for a fuzzy finder, provided your working directory is always set to a project root

[frozen_tortus]

whoever decide to install hard mode prepare for a lot of a frustration.

[HeadCodeMonkey]

I'm glad you called out the needless gatekeeping around vim.
I don't need my ego stroked, I need vim seen as a rational option so no one minds me using it and being happy.
I'm sick of being told to move to an IDE!

[MitzaGamer]

I was not aware of relative line numbers setting. It's super useful, thank you!

[prasannarajaram]

Watching this in 2022. Still makes so much sense.
Thank you folks!♥

[JoseRamonCanoYribarren]

Easy motion: the best vim plugin ever made. It gets you from any character in the screen to any other character with 3 to 5 key presses. Once you get used to it navigating in a Vim without easy motion is a pain xD

[richey]

I'm new to vim and never understood why people would use relative line numbers now I do ;) THX!

[TomaszWiszkowski]

one more cool thing about the motion actions (eg 'dt{') is that this is an atomic operation that has a single undo step.


pressing and holding 'x' for 15+ seconds will generate a bunch of undo operations for every single character. `dt{` is just a single undo. repeating this later has the same effect, so it's much easier to navigate my own changes (especially if i need to undo anything) - navigating, say, 3 undo steps is much more convenient than navigating 300...

[LifestyleLogger]

No way as fast editing in just two weeks as a regular editor like Intelij.. takes months to build the muscle memory to gain the real speed advantages... plus to configure and plug in the holes that vim falls short on.. having said that its really satisfying and well worth the effort... I'm loving it, it's my primary editor now!

[simonced]

My favorite motion is `}` that moves me to the end of a paragraph.
I realised that I tend to try to program blocks by paragraphs just to move arround by `feature`.

[christiansaborio]

LOL, I launched vimtutor after you mentioned it and started doing the tutorial while listening to this in the background. It started with the j/k keys to navigate...I said "nah, I'll just use the arrow keys", and of course that was at minute 3:31 when you scolded me for doing so - brilliantly timed! 🤣

[fukuyama]

One important thing I can remember about vimtutor is that you really should make a list of those commands to remind yourself of all those possibilities so that you don’t have to search them all the time.

[ReductioAdAbsurdum]

The example given for relative line numbers is an anti-pattern. Rather than "d7j" you should have used "d}."/ "dap" or "2d}"/"2dap". Ironically you had just finished explaining why it's better to operate at a semantic level, or at a highest level of granularity available, then you did an operation using line numbers (non-semantic, not repeatable) which could have been done semantically (operating on paragraphs).

[magetaaaaaa]

I learned the bare minimum of Vi simply because it ships with everything and I know it will always be available. I thought I was decent just being able to get around, but this stuff is on an entirely different level. These guys are like Vim gurus.