The Loneliness of the Mid-Level Vimmer

I use NeoVim. It's the professional programmer’s text editor of choice—excepting those people who write languages that weirdly only be written with a special, sometimes expensive, text editor.

Using NeoVim is cool because it's incredibly powerful and flexible. You can edit text much faster than in any other environment, you never have to touch a mouse, and if you're willing to learn LUA, you can program it to do pretty much anything you want. If you don't want to learn LUA, there's probably someone out there who's already made a plugin that does whatever you want anyway. Finally, using NeoVim makes you look cool.

But there is a downside to Vimming. It's a weird fringe interest, even amongst software developers who are already a weird fringe group. Most people who know what Vim is don't know how to use it, are scared of it, and are happy to keep it that way. People don’t want to engage with it on any level—see all the “jokes” about exiting vim—and a lot of this is because all the people who do use Vim are completely insufferable. Using Vim drives a wedge between you and everyone else you might work with.

Pair Woegramming

Once you start using Vim, if you try and pair program with someone who isn't familiar with it, then they won't be able to take control of the keyboard and participate. And when you've been Vimming for a while and have developed bizarre muscle memory, and hyper-abstract ways of navigating a codebase¹, it becomes difficult to work even with other people who use Vim. They’ll have their own ways of doing things, which won’t overlap with yours. The more interested you become in a topic, the tighter and less populated of a niche you sink into—until eventually, you are the only person in the world who can operate your text editor.

At the same time, when you sit down with someone who uses a normal text editor and try to work with them, you'll be utterly confused. Friction will be added where you don’t expect it. In VSCode, I feel a huge disconnect between how I expect to navigate a codebase and what is actually possible, and I spend half of my brainpower trying to prevent myself from hitting the capslock key after every line I type.

So by using Vim, I have, I think, increased my own productivity at the cost of alienating myself from everyone else. And while I'd still encourage you to use Vim², this is a genuine problem that you will run into.

What to do about it

I have no idea. I used to think that everyone around me would see that NeoVim was “the right way,” and that they would gradually converge on using it. I hoped that I could go through life not changing my own behavior, and that the world would change to suit me. Unfortunately, this has not turned out to be true.

So I would like to be able to pair program with people effectively, but I want to keep using NeoVim. Maybe I need to set aside one day a week where I will only code using a very plain, boring, mouse-driven text editor. To keep my skills sharp.

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¹ I mostly don't look at a file tree view. I move around by hitting a shortcut, typing the first few letters of the file I want and then having it open. Or else I jump to definitions and references once again by hitting keyboard shortcuts. To someone who doesn't do these things, it looks like the open file is just changing at random while I tape. Baffling!

² If you do want to learn Vim, email me! Or maybe watch the Primgean’s Primagean’s Primeagen’s Vim course - I haven’t watched it but it’s probably good.