I started with vi on Solaris so Vim was a damn luxury to use. Not having to use a mouse or a GUI in server environment is a must. Even with all the cool editors out there now I still find myself using it even in X11 environments. Mastering it is a real achievement that you can be proud of because it’s never not worth your time.

For me, the moment it clicked was the first time I used it on my laptop. It was just so darn comfortable, and made me realize I was hesitant to do certain work without a mouse until that moment. My hands had to move around so much less, and that made for a much more enjoyable experience.

I use vim macros all the time. For example, you have a bunch of lines that need the same 3 operations done:

• insert " at the beginning of the line
• insert ", at the end on the line
• indent

Press qa, do what you need to do on one line and go one line below, press q again to stop recording the macro, then you can do it 50 times with 50@a.

I think these two talks by Chris Toomey sum up pretty well everything that is nice about vim:

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wlR5gYd6um0
2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lwD8G1P52Sk

If you’ve used vim for a while now and feel a bit stuck, they bring you to the next level and are pretty straightforward.

That said, other editors also have their pros and I’ve become a bit tired of looking for the most efficient one or so. It really doesn’t matter in my job if I need x hours or y hours to write something (although vim probably scores well there). I use it nowadays mostly because it works well for me, it feels kind of fun, it doesn’t eat my computing resources, and it’s here to stay (free).