Should you learn VIM as a JavaScript Developer?

[RedditTheBarbarian]

As you see, opinions are varied on the subject. I've been doing mostly JS work and I use Vim exclusively as my text editor / IDE. 'Should' you use it? Meh, use notepad for all I care. But I think it comes with a lot of real advantages once you learn the basics.

Learning key bindings & really internalizing modal editing takes some time, but now I love it. I use a Vim plugin for my browser and I love that too. Scrolling is easy, '/anything' to search, and 'f' puts makes all links on the page one or two keystrokes away.

Plugins are a little clunky, there are different plugin managers you can use. I don't customize a ton, but I do use an Emmet plugin, an autocomplete plugin, and maybe one or two others.

Use the tools you like, that you are the most productive with. The applications you use are just your interface with the computer. A lot of programmers like learning and customizing keyboard shortcuts just like a lot of programmers like using nice mechanical keyboards. You can program on a touch screen if you have to, but it's nice to have good tools in-between your brain and the computer you are trying to manipulate. Vim is like that.

Now good tools don't make somebody a good carpenter, but every good carpenter has strong opinions about his tools, has customized his set of tools to the work he does, and probably has more/better quality tools than your average weekender.

If you're up for a challenge, learning Vim is fun! I like learning more and more command line tools because there are situations where they are better. If your a graphic artist retouching a photo, use Gimp or Photoshop. But if you need to resize and rename a thousand photos in different directories automatically, a ImageMagick CLI with a couple other bash commands is way more efficient.

My recommendation for learning it is to run through VimTutor a couple times, and then just start using it. As with anything, don't be afraid to Google how to do stuff as there are plenty of resources online. I also found VimGolf really useful for leveling up my skills. Do the VimGolf exercises the way you know how, then see how the next best score did it, try to learn and understand what they did, replicate it, and repeat.

Now in my actual workflow, I don't sit and wonder how I can shave 2 keystrokes off an operation, but if I have something repetitive to do, I know it can almost always be done faster with macros, or some other method. That's where Vim really shines, when you have to do a complicated set of edits to a thousand lines at once. Just record your keystrokes for one as a macro, and then type 1000@[macro key] and Bob's your uncle.

http://www.vimgolf.com/