For better or worse, learning Vim (text editor) totally transformed my use of IT and allowed me to geek-out to my heart’s desire. vim has become central to my daily life. I now keep all my personal and work notes in some kind of text file,

I regularly convert all of my markdown notes to PDF, and they get sync’d up to my Dropbox and then down onto my Android phones (by the Dropsync: Autosync for Dropbox app) where the PDF format is much easier to navigate in.

I’m obsessive (for better or worse) about things that interest me, so I note things every day. When I used to use ODFs for that (see wysiwyg document editing packages), I’d find myself needing to install some kind of heavy duty desktop search app that could constantly scan inside my many documents. This was a cumbersome business and vim freed me from that.

millions of words

To illustrate, without going into the configurations details: on one of my Arch linux machines, in my TextNotes directory, (using sharkdp’s fd,) $ fd -tf -e md | wc -l shows I’ve 510 markdown files, then $ wc -w **/*.md reports they contain a total of 4,038,098 words - all stuff I’ve accumulated over the last two decades. That’s a lot of words, but easy to search when you’ve learned how to grep. I can for example (using BurntSushi’s ripgrep, $ rg -tmd shark to get a colourful output in my terminal like this sample:

ripgrep for shark

Oh, I notice there’s a spelling mistake in one of those files, so, here in my vim buffer where I’m writing this, I’m configured so that I can search for enough of the mis-spelled word - in this case “wandrer” will do - place my cursor over it and (in vim’s normal mode) hit *, then I hit F3 which I’ve configured to use tpope’s excellent vim-fugitive command Ggrep, and in a flash I’m taken to the file and the line containing the mis-spelled word, already highlighted such that I can hit n (vim for “jump to next highlighted occurance”) then frx (vim for “find r delete”) and it’s corrected. With my configuration I then just (still in vim’s normal mode) hit f4 and that vim buffer is saved to the originating file, and closed.

all folded up

Another life-changing functionality is code folding, which I use all over vim to fold anything that’s getting too long for me. Here’s how one of my biggest files opens in my vim setup:

Private notes folded up

- it’s not code in there, but I use code folding anyway to fold up that huge file in vim, and pretty much everything else. I open and close folds with spacebar. If a vim filetype plugin doesn’t include code folding, I write my own.

for geeks only

The end result is I can whizz around my notes and my code, sometimes jumping over to terminal then back into vim, all with incredible ease and speed. But there’s a catch. I can only recommend this if you really like coding. Personally of course, I enjoy tweaking my vim configuration whenever I find myself repeatedly doing something that could be automated. Sometimes it takes hours, and I need to keep good notes to be able to recall my coded task shortcuts, but, as I say, I enjoy it, like playing a good game of chess.

My vim configuration is here: vimfiles.

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…almost forgot… about emacs…

If you do any serious configuration of vim you’ll know that there’s also GNU Emacs. I was attracted by vim’s focus on text, and once I began configuring it there was no need to look elsewhere. Nine years later, I was curious about Emacs’ Org-mode, so I put in the hours to make my own init.el, and in doing so discovered that I prefer vim’s tighter focus on text and more direct configurability. I got the feeling that Emacs focuses more on making you comfortable with a particular task while vim focuses on highly configurable text wrangling.

I realised that my own vim-based organisation strategy had become unbeatable.

Still I keep Emacs handy for one reason: readability - Emacs offers us the super comfort of Proportional Fonts. So I added keystrokes in my vim configuration to open exactly where I am in a file in Emacs (and vice-versa), which is sometimes so so helpful.