HAhashhar·Dec 13, 2016
I will try to answer your questions as I have seen both sides of the fence.
I initially used Visual Studio (around 2012) and really loved the power it gave me. I never felt slow or inefficient until I saw a screencast about Apache config that used vim and I was amazed to see how the person could simply jump to places he wanted. So I set out to try vim. I switched it for all my hobby work but it didn't catch on. So I went back to Visual Studio and in 2014 I thought I should give it another go. This time I started by installing the VsVim extension for Visual Studio.
This is how I got good with Vim:
- In the beginning (I think 2 weeks) I only focused on using the motions (word, next character, paragraph, blocks and regex motion), common commands like d, c and R.
If it helps I saw a screencast (one of the Vim London meetup videos) which broke
Read the rest
down Vim into a grammar to be thought of as "operator + count + motion".
I also slowed the key repeat rate to make sure I don't hold arrow keys to move. DISABLE ARROW KEYS IN VSVIMRC.
- After around 2 weeks I got comfortable with that and switched to pure Vim whenever I could. You can set up an external program to call up on the current file in Visual Studio. I also learned to touch type in the next 2 weeks so that I could reap more benefits.
- After a week of moving to Vim, I started writing my vimrc with things like colorcolumn, autoindent and other simple stuff. I also installed relevant text object plugins [1]. I installed some language specific plugins and started reading the :help pages. :helpgrep is very handy. At this time I think I felt I was back to my old productivity level if not above it. It took around 3 weeks I think.
- I then proceeded to learn about jumplist, named registers, location list, differences between buffers, windows, splits and tabs and how they are INTENDED to be used. It took me around one week.
- At that point I simply started looking at some Vim screencasts [3], [4], [5], [6], [7], [8] and [9].
CONCLUSION:
I am more productive in Vim when writing anything other than C#, F# or Java. Visual Studio excels in that department.
I debug NodeJS in VSCode.
For all other things I use Vim and am noticeably faster now compared to other editors.
Although yes, I really miss Visual Studio a lot when using Vim. But thankfully Visual Studio has the great VsVim plugin.
[1]: https://github.com/kana/vim-textobj-user/wiki
[2]: My .vimrc https://github.com/hashhar/dotfiles/blob/master/neovim/.conf...
[3]: https://vimeo.com/vimlondon/videos
[4]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xZTkrB_tEoY
[5]: https://www.youtube.com/user/ThoughtbotVideo/search?query=vi...
[6]: http://derekwyatt.org/vim/tutorials/index.html
[7]: http://vimcasts.org/
[8]: http://tilvim.com/
[9]: https://sanctum.geek.nz/arabesque/vim-anti-patterns/