Writings blog posts with Vim is awesome! Obviously, if I thought otherwise I wouldn’t currently be writing this in Vim. Writing posts on my local machine works perfectly for me as interruptions aren’t as big of a problem as they would be when I’d be writing in some textarea online. I can just close the file, pick up whatever is interrupting me and continue whenever I want. Another nice thing is that I often write posts while traveling by public transport and writing the posts on my local machine means I don’t have to rely on the internet the public transport offers (which actually isn’t too bad in the Netherlands). Another thing that blogging in Vim makes possible is that you can just open a single terminal screen, set it to fullscreen and write without any distractions.

When navigating through Vim you’ll search a lot using the / command, which works ‘ok’ by default but there’s a couple of settings you can make to increase Vims search functionality a lot.

Once you’ve installed Vim(didn’t install it yet? check out this blogpost) it’s time to setup your configuration file, where the Vim magic happens. Vim configurations are different for each developer, you start out with a blank configuration file, or maybe with a copy of a vimrc of a developer you know and over the years as you grow as a developer your vimrc will grow with you.

I’ve started using Vim about a year ago, so I’m definitely not an experienced user. But along the way I’ve learned some neat tricks which I would like to share with you.