Jay Cruz Site

Like many coders, the first time I encountered Vim was when I typed git commit into a terminal, and forgot to type the -m flag. I don't think I even knew what Vim was when it happened. All I knew is that I had no idea where I was or how to get out.

Once I started digging more into Text Editors I eventually became aware of it, but only enough to know what it was. I read a bit about it, watch some videos, and went through the first free levels of Vim Adventures. I learned at least the arrow keys (hjkl), how to move by words with w and b but never stuck with it long enough to really like get to Ben Awad level skills.

It wasn't until recently that I started getting back into it. I think what re-sparked my interest was watching this talk were Ryan Florence explains how Hooks work and he just clackity clacks like some type of animal keyboard wizard.

So I installed the Vim Emulator on my Webstorm. Watched some more videos on YouTube. Went through the vimtutor. But things were still not sticking.

At some point I stumbled upon Michael Chan's series Vim from A - Z. Something clicked when I started going through it and for some reason I thought about KCD's Learning Clubs and how this could be an excellent curriculum to learn with a group.

So I went through his guide, took to it to his Discord. Kent liked it and asked me to add to his curriculum and templates ideas README which is pretty freaking cool!

I've be tracking my study progress by taking some notes and sharing it with the study group. I'm at the letter F, but I'm already doing w to move forward, i to insert, v to select, p to put(paste) and some more. There's still things that don't feel as intuitive yet, like remembering that you can add a [count] to a movement key. I'm nowhere near good at Vim and I know that there's so much more to dig into, but I think it's finally starting to stick.

I highly recommend learning at least the basics of Vim if you're learning to code. At least enough so that it will spark your curiosity to learn your text editor a bit more. I also recommend learning with others to some capacity. Having that bit of sense of accountability helps with the learning process tremendously. Kent C Dodd's Learning Clubs on Discord are excellent and it's pretty easy to start one.