It's been about a month now since I started learning Vim. It has taken a while to make some of the commands into muscle memory, but navigating around text is becoming more and more natural. Moving forward and back with commands like w, b, and e has definitely stuck, but I'm also moving around chunks of text more effectively by remembering to move with G by line number, using brackets [ ] to move around spaces or paragraphs, and remembering the forward slash / for quickly searching. One game changer was changing the Caps Lock key to function as the ESC key. Getting quickly back into command mode is the key to the effectiveness of using Vim.
What's interesting is that by learning Vim I feel like I'm also getting wickedly better at using my IDE / Text Editor, which is WebStorm. And I know there's a lot of Vim purists out there, Neovim nerds that will scoff at emulators and plugins, but so far this setup is working great for me. Tho I definitely want to dig into Neovim.
Going through these Vim interactive exercises has also helped a ton. Hopefully they keep adding exercises. There's still more I have to learn and master. Selecting with v and then "yanking" with y, basically copy and pasting, is still clunky for me, and sometimes I can't help myself from reaching out to the good 'ol mouse, but my coding workflow has improved tremendously.
The job-hunt for that first dev job has been brutal. It's getting harder and harder to stay optimistic and confident. My confidence is in the dumps right now tbh. So I'm taking myself out of that race for a bit, until I get that confidence back. I want to get back to that place where I do this because it's fun. I want to do this because it's something I actually enjoy doing. The "job-hunt race" puts your head too much in "seeking validation" mode. You start working on projects not because they tickle your fancy, but because they can "potentially get you a job". Every time you hear from peers and experienced developers that you need to build a "real" project, you get into defensive mode, asking "wtf that even means bro?". Wtf is a "real" project? It's very discouraging. I'm gonna start stepping away from that as well. There are some communities out there that I have tried to be part of that are just toxic.
I have ventured outside of JS and Web Dev before by attempting to learn a bit of PHP and Python. Did consider learning Java for like 3 minutes. I have always been curios about the more lower-level stuff like C and C++, but always thought that those languages were way beyond my skillset as a "make believe" programmer. But I've being seeing Rust pop up a lot in different online tech circles. I think it was at the Party Corgi Discord were I discovered awesome folks like Chris Biscardi and Prince Wilson who got me more curios about Rust.
So I've been digging through the book. I even bought a printed version. Started going through the Rustlings exercises. So far I'm really enjoying the learning experience. Maybe it's because it's something new, but it feels good.