Editing my Blog in Vim

I edit this blog in my favorite text editor, vim. Have been using vim since I was a teenager so it’s habitual. After 25 years with Vim I still learn new habits.

Today since I was editing a few blog posts at once I realized that long lines in markdown, paragraphs in other words, are the most tiring thing to navigate in vim.

So far I’ve been using 55h or 55l to jump 55 characters to either left or right in the line of text.

Since talking to some vim gurus on IRC I think my new method should be f<c> which searches for a character forwards, F<c> to search backwards.

In this line for example fc would jump to the first c character, and if I hit ; I will continue jumping to the subsequent c characters. If I hit , I jump backwards through c characters.

I don’t want to think too much.

There are other ways to navigate text in vim but there is a careful balance between over-thinking each move you make in vim, and making a more intuitive move several times instead. The former makes text editing more tiring.