I first picked up Vim in 2016 while working at fictivekin.com. One day, I quit Sublime Text cold turkey and dove straight into vim. For the first two weeks, it felt like coding with one arm tied behind my back—every keystroke was friction, every task took twice as long.
Then, around week three, something clicked. The motions stopped feeling foreign, and I started to see patterns: Vim wasn’t just a text editor, it was a language. Key bindings were verbs and modifiers, each combining into concise ways of expressing intent.
Almost ten years later, that way of thinking is second nature. I use Vim bindings everywhere, and with the rise of agentic coding tools, the payoff has only grown. A tool like Claude Code in the terminal feels like it was made for this—fast, fluid, and effortless in a way I could only dream of back in those first awkward weeks.
If you want to learn the dialect I speak, my .vimrc is right here for you to borrow, steal, or adapt. Not ready to go all-in? You can still hop into Vim mode on this site and try some of my favorite keybindings here—no commitment.
Ready to try vim?
This entire page will become your vim editor. You’ll get step-by-step guidance through persistent status bars at the top as you learn my custom keybindings.
Don’t worry—you can exit anytime with :q or the × button