The journey so far

I stopped using Sublime Text 3 and switched Vim about 4-5 months ago (judging by my config commits).

Working with Rails, Node, and other command-line-centric frameworks/tools, it's been great having an editor that runs in the same window. While I know inside that it's not that different swapping terminal tabs rather than tabbing to a different editor window, I appreciate the consistency of my workflow and the interfacs I use.

I've gotten very comfortable with the Vim basics, and do find editing text a bit clunky when they're not available. Installing Vimium for Chrome and Vimperator for Firefox have gotten me many of those basic command for use in the browser, which is awesome and I'd recommend for anyone trying to commit them to memory. Every little bit of repetition helps.

Room for improvement

I've found it more challenging than I anticipated to add more complex shortcuts and combinations to my repertoire. The general advice is to pause and lookup a more efficient approach when the opportunity presents itself organically, (which I do), but those situations (e.g. replacing the first letter of each line) seem so rare that the proper key combinatin to solve it never sticks.

Enter slow-vim!

I came across this post on the vim subreddit and plan to give it a shot over the next week (at least). The concept is super simple: adding a slight, 100 ms delay) before executing nearly any command. The idea is to encourage the user to make more key-efficient movements and manipulations. For example, using '3w' to move several words rather than holding down 'l'.

I'm hopeful that the slight-but-infuriating pause will force me to be more mindful about where I'm being inefficient, and be a great motivator for learning new commands, combinations, and generally 'thinking in vim' more effectively.

Closing thought

I'll install slow-vim right after wrapping up this post, and update or make another post on the results after giving it a solid tryout.