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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-13T17:44:21+00:00

I consider myself somewhat familiar with Vim, hate the arrow keys (let alone the

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I consider myself somewhat familiar with Vim,

  • hate the arrow keys (let alone the mouse),
  • regularly look up tips and plugins to get the most out of this tool,
  • use it daily to manage my cloud servers, etc.

However, I always find myself doing the same mistakes probably inherited from the GUI-world:

  • too often switching to visual mode to see what piece of code I’m about to manipulate,
  • undoing changes to retrieve lost statements because I forget to utilize registers (and pasting code on temporary lines just to grab it after other edits),
  • relying on Ctrl-C & Ctrl-V when working with operating system’s clipboard,
  • keep pressing j button to browse through lengthy files to find certain functions.

Probably my Hungarian keyboard layout prevents me from being faster as most of the special characters (/, [, etc.) are only available as a key combination (with Shift or Alt Gr).

Given this specific situation, what pieces of advice could you give me? Have you faced similar bad habits when you were a Vim-novice? I’d like to see my productivity skyrocket (who wouldn’t?). Thanks in advance.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    This probably applies well beyond vim, but

    something that worked for me was finding a specific feature that I knew would
    be more efficient and concentrate on using that for a week or two.

    Just one feature at a time, and possibly using it excessively.

    After a couple of weeks it becomes automatic and you can move on to the
    next thing.

    I learn programming tricks the same way. eg. I’ll have a month of using lambda expressions for everything, then a month of mapping and filtering.
    (not on production code though)

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