Vim Gives You Superpowers

February 21, 2021

Vim is the closest thing to telekinesis that I've experienced. Teletypekinesis, if you will. Once you learn how to control it, you will be able to move chunks of text around on a whim, teleport around the page, and Thanos-snap whole chunks of your document out of existence. And what you may not realize is: you don't even have to use vim to benefit from learning it.

Pretty much every editor and IDE has some kind of vim extension/plugin that lets you use vim keybindings alongside the tools you're already comfortable with. Vim-like keybindings are even present in some of your favorite webapps, and you may not even have known!

Some editors have better vim emulation than others, to be sure, but you may be surprised how much of a benefit it can be to incorporate into your normal workflow. The only problem is that once you start, you may wish that you can have this functionality everywhere.

I hope this post will inspire you to want to learn more about vim, but it is not intended to be a getting started guide. To actually start learning vim, install it on your system (if it's not already pre-installed), and then run vimtutor from your terminal. This will walk you through the commands you need to start using vim.

What is Vim?

According to


Efficiency is core to the vim ethos. It is designed to get you where you want to go quickly, and to do what you want to do with minimal keystrokes.

In order to achieve this, vim was designed as a modal and extensible editor.

A Modal Text Editor

One aspect of vim that trips people up is that it is a modal text editor. In other words, there are various "modes" with specific behaviors. Practically, what this means is that pressing a given key on your keyboard will do different things depending on what mode you are in.

"But that's confusing"

But is it, though? Let's not compare vim to other text editors for now. Instead, let's compare vim to playing a video game on your computer. When you are playing a game, pressing the WASD keys likely won't type those letters into the in-game world. They probably move you around that world.

Obviously, the main things you do in a video game are generally not typing characters into the game, so keystrokes are bound to other kinds of actions when you load the game. There may be a way to send messages to teammates, however. In that case you probably press a key to pop up the chat panel, where you can type and send your message.

Video games are modal!

Depending on what mode you're, in pressing a key on your keyboard will do different things. Pressing w in the normal mode of your game will move you forward. Pressing w in the chat will insert a literal "w" into the chat box.

This is exactly the same in vim! Pressing w in normal mode will move you forward one word, and pressing w in insert mode will enter a literal "w"!

The Takeaway

In vim, keys are bound to different actions depending on what mode you're in. Normal mode is the mode that vim starts in, and it's all about moving around your file and manipulating text. Insert mode is the mode that will allow you to type characters into your document. If you are not actively typing code/words, you will likely want to be in normal mode because it will allow you to move around your file(s) and refactor easily. It's like having every key on your keyboard be a hotkey for some kind of action.


You may be thinking "that sounds like a lot of work to memorize all those keybindings". Well, yes and no. There are a lot of things you can do in vim. A lot a lot. But one of the key things about vim is that they took great pains to make the keybindings follow a logical pattern. If you say the thing you want to do in your head, that will go a long way to helping you memorize the keybindings until they become muscle memory.

There are keys that you might use to do something:

  • d is to delete some specified text
  • c is to change some specified text (it will delete the text and bring you into insert mode to type the new text)
  • y is to yank (copy) text
  • p is to put (paste) text
  • u is to undo

There are keys that you might use to move around the page:

  • w is to go forward by one word
  • e is to go forward to the end of the current word
  • b is to go backward by one word
  • ) is to jump to the next sentence (okay, they can't all be mnemonic winners)
  • ( is to jump to the previous sentence
  • } is to jump to the next paragraph/whitespace break
  • { is to jump to the previous paragraph/whitespace break

Other keys put you into a specific mode:

  • i to enter insert mode
  • v to enter visual mode


The real power of vim's keybindings is that they combine with each other in predictable but powerful ways. If you know what the keys mean separately, you can guess what they will do when combined together. Once you learn a basic set of actions and motions, you can start to combine them in really useful ways.

Combining Actions and Motions

If you press d to delete something, you have to tell vim what you want to delete.

As previously mentioned, w will move you between words (much faster than moving 1 character at a time, although there are other keys that will move you by whole sentences, paragraphs, or more; we're taking things slowly to start). If you press dw, vim will delete from your current position to the next word. db will delete from your current position backwards to the previous word. d} will delete to the next paragraph/whitespace break.

YOU DO NOT HAVE TO MEMORIZE THESE SPECIFIC COMMANDS! In fact, they are not standalone commands. They are combinations of actions and motions. You can mix and match actions and motions in powerful ways.

If you remember what d means, and what w, b, and }, you can figure out dw, db, and d} will do! And then, you should be able to figure out what cw, cb, and c} will do!

Once you get comfortable with these, there are a ton of motions and text objects that you can operate on. For example you may want to ci), or "change everything inside the parentheses". Or you may want to dap, or "delete around the paragraph" to delete the whole block of text (including the surrounding whitespace). You could then Gp to "Go to the bottom of the page and paste your text".

Other Common Patterns

There are other useful conventions that many commands follow. Often times, pressing an action key twice will do that action on a whole line. dd will delete a whole line, regardless of where your cursor is. yy will yank a whole line. cc will change a whole line, etc.

Pressing a capital action key will often do that action, but bigger, in some way. D will Delete from your current position to the end of the line. I will leave it as an exercise to the reader to figure out what C will do.

Motions work similarly. w goes forward by one word (i.e., consecutive alphanumeric characters), and W will go forward one big Word which includes all non-whitespace characters.


Vim is truly a tinkerer's editor. There are tons of plugins for vim, and plenty of built-in options to configure. The positive side of this is that you can tweak your editor to be exactly what you want. The flipside is that it really does require some degree of configuration out of the box. Vim plugins add all sorts of functionality, including adding extra actions, commands, or text objects for you to use and combine with the built-ins in ever-increasingly useful ways.

There are lots of plugins on github. Some of my favorites are vim-exchange, vim surround, and anything else Tim Pope has ever done.

Wrap Up

I hope this has inspired you to take a closer look at vim. But don't forget, the lessons here can be applied to other editors/programs, as well! VS Code has a robust vim extension, RStudio has vim keybindings that you can enable in your global settings, Emacs has the unparalleled evil-mode for vim emulation, and many more.

There will be deeper dives into each of the vim modes on this blog in the future, if you are interested in digging in further.

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