I set all 376 Vim options and I'm still a fool

Instead of having encyclopedic knowledge of every feature, I think editor fluency is being really good at the few features you need such that the editor is no longer the bottleneck.

The few features you really need to know for VIM are mostly in `:help motion.txt`. Knowledge of other features is obviously helpful in actually editing text, but being able to navigate well should remove most of the bottlenecks, especially considering how most VIM commands take motion into account.

I think it took me about four months of daily use to know most of the editor basics without having to pause to look up things. Another eight for it all to feel natural. And, maybe about six years later, it remains my favorite text entry and code editing environment.

I've been using the LazyVim <https://www.lazyvim.org/> neovim setup and a handful of extras, but not too many. I still have to look up some esoteric stuff, but for the most part, it's completely natural.

And for the first few years, I was a hardline keyboard-only absolutist, but lately I've been using the mouse where it makes sense, and sometimes it does.

(MacOS, iTerm2, neovim, lazyvim, love this combo)

I've been using vim for over 20 years as my primary editor. I'm faster and more comfortable in it than I am in any other editor, but I still feel like a vim noob

I still have to look up how to do things I rarely do (like insert the contents of another file at the cursor position). And I don't really use many (if any) of vim's intermediate features, let alone advanced ones.

I've tried various ways to get more fluent, but nothing really stuck or kept my interest. This has always annoyed me a bit...

> The feeling of true Vim fluency—one where every keystroke is exact, I never make mistakes, and I’m exploiting every obscure feature—is a fantasy, at least for me.

Perfection is not particularly attainable, or necessarily the point. Nor would it be that fun, I think? It's nice to have some aspect to improve upon. See this Casals quote:

> A reporter asked Casals, "You are 95 and the greatest cellist that ever lived. Why do you still practice six hours a day?" He answered, "Because I think I'm making progress".

I applaud this project, “setting all the options”. I think it’s a really good idea to become close friends with the software you use all the time, and getting acquainted through the lens of configuration is one way. Messing around with stuff is good.

I feel it’s worth mentioning that there is a sense in which I think it might be a bad idea. It could be that you’d now be fixating some value that may be optimal right now, rather than benefiting from future improvements to the default settings. But it all depends, of course, on how close friends you plan to be.

I rerun vimtutor from time to time, because I still don't remember every trick from it. I've recently tried to read the whole embedded "introductory documentation" on a train, learned a lot, but probably need to do it again. Setting every option in the .vimrc seems a nice exercise, will need to do it some time! I like to nuke my config from time to time anyway. (My experience with Vim is about 14 years I think.)

Kudos for reading all those docs and sharing some nuggets.

Does anyone else feel vim clumsy like the author? I'm trying to understand how one could accidentally lowercase a whole buffer, or trigger scary messages or open unrecognized menus. Not condescending, just curious. I find the q: thing relatable, but not the rest.

> single keystroke could move the cursor halfway across the file to exactly the right spot.

sorry what is this? exaggeration?

I'm using neovim all the time, but I don't find this "zipping through the code" to be very critical. Most of the time is spent on thinking and analyzing it, not on fast typing or jumping through it.

I never understood the appeal of these command-line editors with a million commands for different edge-cases. Why not just use VSCode? It has every possible extension you already need and a simple GUI. No need to type commands just to edit text when there's a file manager... It has remote SSH and features for vm machines. To me the kinds of people using these editors are the kinds of people that love making everything more complex to seem smart.

… (For Your Love)” -Frankie Valli

"The feeling of true Vim fluency—one where every keystroke is exact, I never make mistakes, and I’m exploiting every obscure feature—is a fantasy, at least for me." - that's a wrong mindset. bash that jk hundred times and adapt when it becomes a nuisance

I never understood this idea that you should min/max your typing. The editor should serve you, not the other way around.

Then again, I'm an emacs user.

This feels like the "wrong" direction today with the advent of AI? Just seems like in the realm of "bending yourself to the tool vs bending the tool to yourself," it's the LATTER that's about to get a whole lot easier, if it isn't already.

So, sure, there are probably things you can learn, but e.g. I'm much more about "I think it should be THIS way so how do I make it do that."