Vim is something that I’ve wanted to learn how to use proficiently ever since I first learned how to use a terminal. The prospect of being super productive with text without ever having to use my mouse is super enticing to me.

I’ve spent the last couple of days getting acquainted with it, and starting to set it up the way I need it. But it definitely hasn’t all been smooth sailing.

The (what feels like constant) switching between modes has tripped me up quite a few times. I’ve deleted lines I never intended to delete because I got confused about which mode I was in, and I’ve done things that I don’t understand because some keys behave in ways I don’t quite grok yet in certain modes.

Other than stupid mistakes I’ve made because I’m not yet fully comfortable with modal editing, I’ve come across a few pain things that I miss from my current (previous?) editor, VSCode.

I thought I’d try to write down some of those things, mostly for my own benefit to see if I can come up with a solution.

1. Multiple cursors

One of the things that I use the most in VSCode is the ability to hold Cmd+Optand move up or down adding a new cursor at that column (or the end of the line if the text doesn’t stretch that far along the line) ready to insert, delete, paste or anything else I need to do.

2. Text Formatting on Save

Another thing I rely on heavily in VSCode is the ESLint integration. Most of my time coding is spent writing or editing JavaScript, and I have a relatively comprehensive ESLint config that VSCode will use to automatically lint and reformat my code to match.

3. Linting Alerts

VSCode has a “Problems” panel, that lists all linting and formatting errors that exist in the current file, which I lean on heavily when editing inherited code that doesn’t meet our coding standards. There are some errors that can’t be auto-fixed, and for those, I rely on the problems panel to point out where they are and what the error is.

Additionally, VSCode provides visual feedback inline for linting errors in the form of those red squiggly lines we all know and love from Word.

Solution: Install and configure Ale which allows you to run linters, and provides the :lopen command to open what is essentially the same thing as the problems panel.

4. Quick Select Matching Text

Along the same lines as the multiple cursors, VSCode has a handy little feature that allows you to highlight some text and hit Cmd+d to select the next instance of that string, ready to be manipulated any way you need to

5. Intelligent Home Key

It’s a little thing, but hitting home will take me to the first non-whitespace character on a line, rather than to the first column, whereas in Vim, so far I’ve only really learned to hit 0 in Normal mode to move to the first column of a line.

Solution: This one is simple. Hit _ or ^and it will take you to the first non-blank column in the line.

6. Indentation/Unindentation

Something I find myself doing somewhat regularly is indenting/unindenting lines or inserting/removing tabs within lines. I’ve grown very accustomed to using the VSCode keybindings to do this. Hitting Cmd+} or Cmd+{ will indent and unindent the current line, respectively, while Tab and Shift+Tab will insert a tab character at the cursor or remove a tab behind the current cursor.

I’m aware that Vim has Shift+>> and Shift+<< to indent lines while in Normal mode, but that is only half the problem.

Solution: Well… Not really a solution, but a realisation that I don’t really need this all that often, and when I do, it’s not particularly difficult to just exit to Normal mode and Shift+<< or Shift+>>.

Comment Toggling

Something I do quite often in VSCode is comment or uncomment blocks of code. It’s incredibly handy for debugging and quickly toggling things on and off. I’m yet to work out a simple way to do this in Vim without installing a plugin. What I have discovered is a relatively easy way to comment out blocks of code - turn on rectangular Visual mode with Ctrl+v then highlight the start of each line I want to comment out, hit I to insert text before the first non-blank characters on each line, type my comment leaders (i.e // in JavaScript) then hit <esc> and watch as my comment leaders are expanded to each line I highlighted.

I have a suspicion I could reverse engineer this to delete the comment leaders, which I’ll be putting some time into.