I set all of Vim’s configuration options. I still feel far from mastery.
First impressions of Vim: wow
I first saw someone use Vim during an internship in 2012.
I had been coding for many years and I fancied myself pretty good at shortcuts, but I was quickly humbled. I watched in awe as experienced users zipped around the code. A single keystroke could move the cursor halfway across the file to exactly the right spot. Code was ripped apart and reshaped like putty.
“Wow,” I thought to myself, and probably said out loud.
13 years later, still clumsy
I vowed to master this editor but I was slow. When I wasn’t accidentally opening some unknown menu, I was taking an uneconomical path through the code. I pressed j twenty times instead of running 20j , or manually deleted code inside parenthesis instead of running di( . Sometimes I’d open another text editor to give my mind a break from all the key bindings!
Fast-forward to 2025. After tons of practice, I felt much more capable. Code did feel more like putty. I was working closer to the speed of thought. I could get code where I wanted much more quickly. 13 years of practice paid off!
But Vim still felt clumsy. I was still accidentally opening menus I didn’t recognize. I would do silly things like converting the whole file to lowercase, or trigger some scary error message. “Surely I shouldn’t be making these mistakes,” I thought. What could be done to finally master this editor?
My goal: set every Vim option
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