Recently I’ve been spending a lot of time in the terminal, doing some operations type work on Kafka. Since I’ve been spending a lot of time in the terminal, I naturally wanted to get familiar with a terminal text editor. I have used vim for the past few years quite casually - I knew how to open a file, save and quit, and quit. That was about it. Otherwise I was dead in the water.

Recently however, due to a coworkers obsession with vim, I started to play around. It started with learning a few hotkeys, then a few more. The I started installing plugins. Now I’m setting up all my workflows in it. I’m definetly falling in love with vim, which is funny to say - it’s just a text editor! But it’s a well built tool, and there’s nothing I love more than a tool that’s incredibly well designed.

What this has really taught me is the value of gradient descent - all it took for me to become good at vim was to pause and go “oh how do I do this better?”. That pause is something I’ve lacked for most of my life - I always have felt stressed to complete things ASAP, which means I never take my time to research and understand the depths of what I’m working on. That has always kept me stuck, as I never invest time to learn and get to the next level. I always just finish the problem at hand and move on quickly.

Now that I’m re-discovering my curiousity, I’ve never learned something faster. Sure, I’m spending “work” time learning vim which isn’t strictly productive. But that’s improving my ability to do writeups, improving my attention during boring tasks (I get to track it in Vim!), and just helping me enjoy my job. So I’m glad to invite curiousity and playfulness back in my life, and glad to have the first fruit - my knowledge of vim.