vim, zsh, & jekyll

January 28, 2015

These last couple of years I’ve used Vim on and off but was always put off by the fact that copying/pasting, moving code blocks, and indenting always felt like a chore. Well, a few days ago I found a video and subsequently the presenter, Mike Coutermarsh’s blog post about learning Vim in a week.

I’ve since rebound my caps lock key to escape, switched over from bash to zsh, am able to navigate my way through Vim using h, j, k, l and other movement keys. Although it’s only been a day of fully immersing myself in the command line, I have to say, it feels great. The more time I invest in actively learning how to accomplish something during this code journey has increased my confidence and ability to push through the difficult hurdles. I am less intimidated by blogs with more code than prose and am becoming way more comfortable with documentation.

By the way, I spent a large part of yesterday trying to install Jekyll to use it as my dedicated blogging platform. It was hell getting rvm and gems to behave with my new zsh shell. After hours of trying to modify zsh, rvm, what fixed it in the end was reinstalling Xcode Command Line Tools, go figure. Despite the headache, I’m pleased with the blog I’ve customized from @mdo’s Poole.

This process of changing up how I work has given me a much better handle on how to use vim effectively as well as a better understanding of how to configure dot files.

Some things to do next:

• get more comfortable with Markdown
• learn more Vim keyboard shortcuts
• version control dot files