Ask HN: What Vim habits did you need to unlearn?

4 points by WonderAlmighty a day ago

If you don't use Vim, know that it has probably the steepest learning curve of any text editor (or at least non-IDE editors) and many users pick up habits along the way they need to unlearn.

I'll start: I need to unlearn pressing `i` when I mean to press `a`. `i` moves one character back while `a` doesn't which is what I want most of the time.

And apparently many users need to get used to `h j k l` over arrow keys, though I already binded `CMD h j k l` on my mac since that's much more efficient than arrow keys.

wruza 16 hours ago

Not particularly a vim habit but doing this:

  function foo() {|

  function foo() {
  }|<esc>O<sp><esc>x

  function foo() {
  ....
  }

I know that I can just {<cr>}, and then o/O any time, but for some reason I want that empty indented line which I delete half of the times anyway.

qup a day ago

I press ESC twice instead of once every time I want to get out of insert mode.

And the real problem is I have a binding to do ESC with 'jk' instead, but I always forget to use that one.

djaouen a day ago

> And the real problem is I have a binding to do ESC with 'jk' instead, but I always forget to use that one.
I can remember to use `jk`, but I can never remember to use `.` for repeating the last edit. :(
- qup a day ago
  
  most people do `jj`, i thought i was the outlier.
  I use '.' a lot, but not nearly as often as I could if I planned my edits a little better.
  - djaouen a day ago
    
    I picked up both habits at my first job in the industry. That was over 12 years ago now!

Twizzlewhisker a day ago

I use `:wq!` every single time instead of `:x!`, and I think of it every single time. The muscle memory is faster than me recalling to use something different.

wruza 16 hours ago

Why do you need ! that often? Also ZZ (which I never use).

djaouen a day ago

`I` and `A` for opening at the beginning and end of lines respectively (rather than `0i` and `$a`)