alt Hacker NewsI've recently reached a point where I feel I've reached an upper limit with how much efficiency I can extract from my usual toolset/editors. So I've gone on a journey where I'm finally exploring tools that make living in the command line a productive and pleasant experience for me.
I've long put off learning or even exploring tmux or learning more than a few handful of vim keybinds. So I started digging into configuring them and learning them well enough to be able to regularly use them for work and personal computers.
It's been very pleasant, to say the least. There's still a few ways I need to go where I do everything from the command line and the keyboard, but I think it's worth training your muscles to be comfortable with doing things purely using the keyboard.
I've switched to vim mode for a few tools that offer it. I started seriously using vimium on chrome and firefox (a friend had introduced me to it about 7 years ago but I never cared enough to learn it well).
Another reason I finally made the jump was that I've been having RSI pain on my right hand due to using mouse too much and in un-ergonomic positions. While I've taken measures to improve ergonomic use of the mouse and keyboard, I'm just totally impressed with the capabilities of keyboard navigation and how much value you can extract out of your keyboard.
My friends have been egging on me about the bell curve meme, but I think it's important for me to figure out the limits and then maybe I will finally go back to defaults and simpler tools. The only way to be on the right side of the bell curve is through the middle.
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For learning vim, I recommend searching for a "vim cheat sheet" that has an image of a keyboard layout with vim commands in it and printing that. Makes it easier to check and learn more, little by little.
Another one is online tutorials that make you practice interactively. Haven't used those much but the little I did, it was helpful.
I went back and forth over the years with vim. Lazyvim plus the ebook (lazyvim for ambitious devs or something like that, it’s free online) is what allowed me to stick.
I can’t be doing real work and suddenly realize I don’t know the way to do a certain basic action. Lazyvim makes it so that for everything you want to do, there’s an already configured way, and then you have all the time in the world to fiddle for a better alternative if you don’t like it.
Forget cheatsheets, tweets, videos, books, etc. Vim comes with a very well made built-in tutorial that will gently pull you toward maximum efficiency.