Vim

Original author: Rudis Muizhnieks
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It all began moderately innocently. In the first year, you experimented once or twice, but Nano and Pico were simpler, they were closer to what you already used in high school on Windows and Mac machines. But time passed, your knowledge base was replenished with what was given to you at the university, and you began to notice something: all really great programmers, people who could fit in 4 lines, what you needed 10 pages of code for, those who had a solution of a training project rich in functionality in a day, while you only suffered from a base for weeks, none of them used Nano or Pico.

Once, after sitting up late for tasks that were supposed to be ready by midnight, you glanced down at the shoulder of one of these quiet Uber programmers. The rows of monitors in the darkness of the computer lab flashed into your eyes, and in awe you watched the impossible patterns of code and text manipulations that lit up the screen.

"How do you do it?" You asked incredulously.

Your life was changed by a laconic answer, consisting of one syllable: “Vim.”

At first you were annoyed and much less productive. The history of the browser was a complete Vim documentation index, your Nano and Pico friends thought you were crazy, Emacs comrades begged to change their minds, you paid money for a laminated copy of Vim. Even after weeks of training, you still out of habit sometimes reached for the mouse, but then yanked your hand, realizing that you would have to search the network for the right combination to perform a routine operation that you had never had to think about before.

But time passed, you suffered less and less. You were not sure when this happened, but Vim was no longer a nuisance. He turned out to be better than you expected. He was not a simple text editor with keyboard shortcuts, he became an extension of your body. Moreover, it has become a continuation of your programming nature.

Editing only source code has become inappropriate use of Vim. You installed it on all your cars at home and used it to record everything from emails to essays. You installed the portable version along with a customized and personalized .vimrc file on a USB flash drive so that Vim is with you wherever you go as your companion, helping you, leaving a small piece of the house in your pocket, wherever you are.

Vim has entered every part of your online life. Unsatisfied with ViewSourceWith meager features, you quickly grew up to Vimperator and then to Pentadactyl. You surfed the net from it. Now you are the network. When you decided to write an iPhone app, the first thing you did was change the default editor from Xcode to MacVim. When you started working with .NET code, you immediately bought a copy of ViEmu for Visual Studio, not being satisfied with the functionality of its free brother, VsVim.

Late in the evening, when you leaned over the keyboard in your office corner, working diligently on a project that needed to be completed by the next morning, you chuckled quietly, knowing that no ordinary programmer could manually complete this task on time. You wrote down macros, you moved entire blocks of code with a flick of your finger, you filled in dozens of registers, you rewrote and refactored entire components without any touch on the mouse. And then you noticed in your own monitor the reflection of the face of your colleague who hatched his eyes in surprise. You stopped to let him know what you know about his presence.

"How do you do it?" He asked in a voice full of trepidation.

You smiled and prepared to say the only word that changed your life. A word that, if he follows it, can lead him into the same rabbit hole to the universe, filled with endless combinations of endless possibilities to create a form of hyper-efficiency, previously achievable only in his most crazy dreams. He reminded you of yourself, who was in that computer lab a few years ago, and you felt a tinge of his excitement while you spoke the word.

"Vim."

:wq

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