A Weekend with Vim Motions

Last weekend I decided to finally commit to learning Vim motions. Not full Vim — I’m not that brave — but the keybindings via a VSCode extension. Here’s how it went.

Day 1: Pain

Everything took three times longer. I kept reaching for the mouse out of muscle memory. hjkl felt unnatural. I accidentally entered visual mode more times than I care to admit.

The only thing that kept me going was u for undo.

Day 2: Glimmers of Hope

Something clicked on day two. I started thinking in motions rather than mouse movements:

• ciw — change inner word. Suddenly renaming variables felt fast.
• f + character — jump to the next occurrence of a character on the line. Beautiful.
• dd then p — moving lines around without touching the mouse.

The key insight: Vim isn’t about memorizing commands. It’s about composing a language of text manipulation. d (delete) + i (inner) + w (word) = “delete inner word.” Once you see the grammar, new commands become predictable.

What I’m Keeping

I’m not going full Vim. But I’m keeping:

• hjkl for navigation (my right hand thanks me)
• ci + delimiter for changing inside quotes/brackets/parentheses
• / for in-file search (way faster than Ctrl+F somehow)
• . to repeat the last action

The Meta-Lesson

Learning Vim is a lot like research: the first day you feel like you’re going backwards, the second day you see the structure, and by the end you wonder how you ever worked without it.