HACKER Q&A
📣 WonderAlmighty

What Vim habits did you need to unlearn?


If you don't use Vim, know that it has probably the steepest learning curve of any text editor (or at least non-IDE editors) and many users pick up habits along the way they need to unlearn.

I'll start: I need to unlearn pressing `i` when I mean to press `a`. `i` moves one character back while `a` doesn't which is what I want most of the time.

And apparently many users need to get used to `h j k l` over arrow keys, though I already binded `CMD h j k l` on my mac since that's much more efficient than arrow keys.

  👤 wruza Accepted Answer ✓
Not particularly a vim habit but doing this:

  function foo() {|

  function foo() {
  }|Ox

  function foo() {
  ....
  }
I know that I can just {}, and then o/O any time, but for some reason I want that empty indented line which I delete half of the times anyway.
👤 qup
I press ESC twice instead of once every time I want to get out of insert mode.

And the real problem is I have a binding to do ESC with 'jk' instead, but I always forget to use that one.

👤 Twizzlewhisker
I use `:wq!` every single time instead of `:x!`, and I think of it every single time. The muscle memory is faster than me recalling to use something different.
👤 djaouen
`I` and `A` for opening at the beginning and end of lines respectively (rather than `0i` and `$a`)