I love vim. I learned it in university when I saw some other students blazing around with it. That combined with my laptop’s trackpad breaking seeded my journey.

Over time I’ve switched between using (neo)vim as my primary editor, writing / porting some vim plugins, designed a comfy config, and learned the power of g <C-a>. I’ve read Practical Vim, been on Vim slack channels, gone down the YouTube rabbit hole.

I love racing around, ciw, dt", ca{. I love not having to think about things, and being able to edit at the speed of thought.

But with the advent of seriously powerful LLMs for coding (I’m looking at you Opus 4.6, Gemini Pro 3.1) I don’t really need to edit code anymore; my work has shifted towards being prompt-driven.

It’s really sad, but I’m not sure how useful learning vim is anymore. “Wait until you ssh into a linux machine and need to manually edit code”. Happens once in a blue moon, not worth it. “You can edit your markdown files”. Yeah, that’s true. But maybe speech-to-text will replace large chunks of manual writing? “For those times when you do need to edit code it will be wonderful”. True.

Would I recommend someone learn it right now? I’m really not confident. If you want to learn something new for the pleasure of that experience, by all means. But in terms of usefulness? Up until now I would’ve whole-heartedly endorsed it. Right now I don’t think I can.