TIL: Vim motions
TIL (“Today I learned”) are shorter, less-researched posts that I typically write to help organize my thoughts and solidify things I have learned while working. I post them here as a personal archive and of course for others to possibly benefit from.
Vim motions
The “today” part in Today I learned is somewhat hyperbolic. It’s been two weeks now that I’ve been experimenting with Vim.
I originally started looking at it because I have been experiencing severe neck and back pain lately, probably because I’m not using the mouse in a very ergonomic way. However, I got even more interested, when I also got to know a bit more about the general philosophy of Vim and the plugin ecosystem, having experienced first hand how convoluted the development process for VSCode extensions is. (You know, you only need to install npm, Node.js, nvm, vsce, typescript and yeoman, and then you’re ready to go😬).
Looking around for information about using Vim as a modern editor, with virtually all IDE-like features, I quickly arrived at Neovim — an independent Vim fork which has Lua integrated and offers even more customization than regular Vim. Not only for setup (you can define a lua.init instead of init.vim), but also for plugins. Using this overview I was able to install quite easily fuzzy file searching, a tree explorer, language servers for Python and…
