A godsend for saving time - the ab (abbreviation) command. This command lets you shorten a long sequence of characters (be it a text or a complex command) into another sequence of any length. It works in both insert mode and command mode. If you frequently edit text using a lengthy command, this feature will significantly save you time. For example: :ab ul s/\<./\u&/g to capitalize every word in a line. When you enter command mode (type :) and type ul, vim will automatically expand it to s/\<./\u&/g for you.

Additionally, the map command can save even more time, but IMO the ab command offers more control for handling various cases. In my example, you can use ul to only capitalize the lines that have a specific pattern using the global command g.

Another overlooked aspect is the .exrc file. Enabling it with set exrc in your config allows for different setups based on different situations. For instance, when writing notes, I prefer to have line breaks on to make the text look nicer on the screen. In contrast, when writing code, I don’t require this option. I simply need to place set linebreak in the .exrc file in the note-writing directory to adjust accordingly.

Coding in neovim, I don’t know that I am that much quicker or more efficient. Maybe with certain actions I am, but its probably n9t measurable.

What I do get though, is a sort of flow state. It’s like playing a video game where I try to edit text with the fewest keystrokes possible. It’s genuinely fun and I can code longer since its fun.

I’ve been using vim as my daily driver for development for the last 8 years.

There are a million things I could talk about regarding vim’s editing language, consistent interface, scriptability, performance (seriously, I’ve opened 1GB+ files and vim barely breaks a sweat), etc., but one thing I’ll highlight that most people don’t talk about is vim’s ability to interface with other tools. It’s what takes vim from a great editor into a full-fledged development environment. You can:

• Read the stdout of any shell program into a vim buffer (:help read !)
• Use the contents of a buffer as stdin to any shell program (:help write !)
• Filter a portion of the buffer through any shell program, replacing the contents with that program’s stdout (:help !)
• Parse the output of a program or the contents of a file into a set of entries for quick navigation (:help quickfix, :help make)
• Insert the output of a shell program into the current buffer (:help <C-R>=, specifically when used with the :help system() function)
• Control arbitrary jobs with vimscript and communicate back and forth with code

And much more. I use all of these every day: the output of git commands give me filepaths I can jump to with gf; a range in vim selected with the v command gives me line numbers to pass to git log -L to see the history of a section of code; the current filepath of the vim buffer is pass to many different shell commands to do processing with that file; the symbol under the cursor is passed as an argument to the open command on macos to lookup external (company-specific) documentation in a Web browser. And many, many other things. Unix is my IDE, and vim is at the heart of it.

I don’t think I like vim or similar for the “productivity gain”. It just feels much more smooth of an experience when I don’t have to target, point at something visually and click all the time. Or move my hand to a 4 keys that are as far from my hands resting position as possible. I don’t believe I have saved much time. But I had a blast working with it and want to continue this serendipity experience for the rest of my time.

Its not so much about the time saved its about being allowed to stay in a mental state of flow since all actions in Vim and similars are built from foundational navigation language chunks. It feels less like editing and more like communicating. All these random little “I can do this command” is just people trying to show examples of how the language of editing to do weird and interesting things. So the answer isn’t so much “I work faster” in Vim as it is “I work with less mental overhead in Vim”

I am logged into various servers via ssh constantly and nano or vim (or at least vi) are installed pretty much by default everywhere.

Where editors usually have editing shortcuts, vim has an editing grammar.

So you can copy (or select, or replace, or delete, or any other editing verb) N arguments or blocks or lines or functions or any entity for which vim has an editing noun, or around or inside either of these, and you only need to remember a few such editing verbs and nouns and adjectives in order to immediately become much more effective.

It’s so effective that switching back to a regular editor feels annoyingly clunky. (I guess that’s why many offer vim plugins these days.)

Better: you can record entire editing sentences and replay them. Ever had to make the same change on dozens of lines? Now you can do it in seconds.

Now of course, replaying a sentence, or several sentences, is also a sentence of its own that you can replay in another file if you want.

It’s neat. :)

One thing I haven’t seen mentioned is that not moving between mouse and keyboard so much reduces the risk of getting an RSI. So even if it didn’t make you faster it would still probably be worth it to find a keyboard based workflow.

I use Helix and would suggest you try it (at least to start off with) as it is easier to learn than vim and does not require plugins or a complex config. To answer your question I will go from the less to more advanced/complex:

1. Move a line to a new position in the file/another file (takes a couple of seconds)
   1. x then d to select a line (pressing N times will select N lines) and delete it (delete will also copy to the clipboard)
   2. navigate the cursor to the new location
   3. p to paste in a new
2. Navigating around a file:
   1. jumping to a function/class definition by pressing g then d when on a function/class usage.
   2. getting a list and navigating to class/function calls when the cursor is on a class/function definition by pressing g then r.
3. Multi cursor editing - I use this to make edits to multiple places at once. I most recently used this to extract the names of 30 tables that are used in a SQL file. This probably took ~5 seconds and I barely thought about it. To do this I used:
   1. % to select the entire files contents
   2. s to search
   3. typed "FROM "
   4. pressed enter to create cursor at all locations matching the search
   5. v then g then l to select the rest of the line
   6. space+y to copy to the system clipboard.
   7. paste into a document where I needed to list the tables
4. Using a terminal workspace manager (zellij) with helix and a git tui app (gitui) so that I can easily make code changes, commit, push, ,run tests, move to a new repo and more without leaving the keyboard.

There is actually a helix community on programming.dev: helix@programming.dev

I don’t use VIM but I once tried and although it may be faster in the long run, You’re absolutely not productive when learning it and it made me give up.

I use vim bindings in vscode, but I’m trying to switch to neovim.

It’s hard to talk about efficiencies without use cases but here’s some that I like:

• Compared to using mouse, text selection is just much easier in vim. Instead of accidentally highlighting an extra space and clicking somewhere on accident which gets rid of my selection, vim lets me go directly to the end of the word and be precise about where I’m selecting.
• I remember before I used vim, I would count the number of times I hit the backspace or delete when I had heavily nested parentheses. With vim I just type the exact number I want, and if I were to undo that operation I also know exactly what was changed, whereas when counting there’s always the possibility of miscounting or pressing delete without counting.
• I don’t have to scroll. I can jump 100 lines in less than a second. Instead of searching through long files to find where I left off, I just generally remember what line number I was at, then I can simply just jump back.
• Forces me to type better. Before vim I had really shitty typing form(I don’t know what it’s actually called) but switching to vim shone a light on exactly how I was typing wrong, and now I type faster.
• Using the % operator you can jump between brackets or parentheses. This comes in handy especially when you want to highlight the inside of a function call, or just jump to the end of a pair of brackets

Honestly the best bit is just not feeling the need to take my hand off the keyboard and use the mouse. I don’t think I can quantify the time saved, but I can tell you I really notice when I’m using software that makes me have to switch.