What is your most productive shortcut with Vim?
- by Olivier Pons
I've heard a lot about Vim, both pros and cons.
It really seems you should be (as a developer) faster with Vim than with any other editor.
I'm using Vim to do some basic stuff and I'm at best 10 times less productive with Vim.
The only two things you should care about when you talk about speed (you may not care enough about them, but you should) are:
Using alternatively left and right
hands is the fastest way to use the
keyboard.
Never touching the mouse is the
second way to be as fast as possible.
It takes ages for you to move your hand,
grab the mouse, move it, and bring it
back to the keyboard (and you often have
to look at the keyboard to be sure you
returned your hand properly to the right place)
Here are two examples demonstrating why I'm far less productive with Vim.
Copy/Cut & paste. I do it all the time. With all the classical editors you press Shift with the left hand, and you move the cursor with your right hand to select text. Then Ctrl+C copies, you move the cursor and Ctrl+V pastes.
With Vim it's horrible:
yy to copy one line (you almost never want the whole line!)
[number xx]yy to copy xx lines into the buffer. But you never know exactly if you've selected what you wanted. I often have to do [number xx]dd then u to undo!
Another example? Search & replace.
In PSPad: Ctrl+f then type what you want you search for, then press Enter.
In Vim: /, then type what you want to search for, then if there are some special characters put \ before each special character, then press Enter.
And everything with Vim is like that: it seems I don't know how to handle it the right way.
NB : I've already read the Vim cheat sheet :)
My question is:
What is the way you use Vim that makes you more productive than with a classical editor?
