Vim-Curious

I got a little Vim-curious. I started out with just a Vim extension for Visual Studio Code, I almost disabled it multiple times. Navigation seemed useful, a bit easier than using arrow keys and my scroll wheel. Jumping in and out of NORMAL and INSERT took a few reps. Writing a SQL Update statement on a production database was slightly terrifying. VISUAL mode was the most daunting, selecting text, yanking, and pasting required some extra neurons between my brain and fingers. Text started moving, COMMAND mode became a new weapon in my mouse-less arsenal.

Honestly, I couldn’t tell you if I’m more productive, but I can tell you it sparked a familiar feeling. Jake The Dog from Adventure Time put it bluntly, “Sucking at something is the first step to becoming sorta good at something”. I’m infatuated with feeling like I’m improving. Opening a terminal, navigating to a config file, and editing it in Neovim with instant feedback gives me the same dopamine hit as deploying cloud resources and seeing the health check succeed, integrating an API and getting a 200 response, or building a component that matches the Figma perfectly.

Fast forward another week. I’ve been using LazyVim along with tmux and Ghostty to replace all my other IDEs and text editors. My workflow required some adjustments, but similarly to the amalgamation of opinionated tools that is Omarchy, I can change practically anything I don’t like. The curtain has been fully pulled back, the wizard is actually just a bunch of Bash functions and Lua scripts.

I still love centering <div>s and figuring out why that one component just keeps re-rendering, but I’ve added more than just code . to my daily workflow. TUIs are earning a special place in my every day workflow. Using diffnav and gh-dash for reviewing PRs without having to navigate my tens of Chromium tabs (I still love my tabs and tab groups) has been a new joy this week.

The terminal isn’t replacing my stack, but it gave me another chance to get sorta good at something that always felt just out of reach.