How To Start Vim

People joke about how Vim is hard to quit, but I want to make it easier to start. Here is a collection of resources that I believe demystify Vim to great effect.

Why to Vim?

Personally, I prefer Vim to IDEs because I’m gradually building up complexity that I mostly understand. Even if I largely copy/paste default configurations, I’m selecting each plugin intentionally. As such, I don’t tend to use the richer distro-like config options like AstroNvim or LazyVim. I think they’re great and will poke through their docs for inspiration. However, I want my config to be based on my opinions and enjoyed largely building from the ground up.

That’s why I’d recommend kickstart as a config jumping off point. It’s less opinionated about what plugins you use and more about teaching you what these hard to search concepts are. I say hard to search because if you don’t know that an LSP is what drives your autocomplete… it’s hard to search LSP. Beyond the wonderfully documented code found in the kickstart repo, TJ has a very accessible youtube video to introduce you to the philosophy and tools.

What is the deal with Neovim!?

I switched to Neovim back in the Vim 7 era when there were more good reasons to do so than there are now. After Vim 8 incorporated many downstream improvements, my primary reason for sticking with Neovim became Lua support. Or more precisely, my reason was to avoid Vimscript.

I didn’t care to get good at a language that was only applicable in one narrow context. There are other (arguably better) reasons to use Neovim but Lua is enough for me (and I’m not even good at it).

This is my config. There are many like it, but this one is mine.

I don’t advocate that you fork my repo and use it “as-is”, but I offer my dotfiles in the event any part of them may spark curiosity. I do advocate that you share your dotfiles if you don’t already. If that’s a new to you journey, you may want to check out my post about Stow to make that more ergonomic.

You got this!

Vim can be intimidating because it’s clearly a deep rabbit hole full of wonderfully wacky yaks to shave. Relax, it’s just a text editor. Kickstart knocks down a few rough edges to make for a more ergonomic starting point. You don’t need to understand all the concepts of Vim as a prerequisite to starting. I suspect there’s a ton about your current editor that you don’t know and you’re fine with that. Get a little better every day and when you don’t like how your workflow feels, change it.