(if you were triggered by this title, you’re gonna love this article)

I love Vim. Lots of programmers love it. It is to a programmer what a pencil is to an artist, or a pen to a poet. But that’s not what I’ll be writing about today. What I will be writing about, is the ways, both funny and unfunny, in which using this beautiful editor has affected my social life (Assuming that such a thing exists.)

So before you go further into this article, you should probably be warned that it contains lots of nerd humor. So, don’t complain later that you weren’t warned.

Also, to make this a little funny to the people outside the nerd-dom, I’ve added comments at appropriate places.

 

  1. How to save and quit a boring conversation

The other day I was having a not-so-interesting chat with a friend whose identity I’d like to conceal for obvious reasons. Then, this happened.

 

As you may have probably guessed, :wq is the command used to save and quit Vim.

  1. What do you want to print?

Everytime I see a person use ‘:p’ in a chat, I start wondering what they want to print. After five minutes of breaking my head and sometimes even asking them what they wanted to print, I realise that they actually meant this-

:p is the print command in Vim

  1. jjjjjkkkkkhhhhllll

Huh? That doesn’t make sense? That’s exactly what I think, until I realize that I’m not in Vim anymore. So the next time you see any stray h-j-k-l’s in any of my documents, you know why.

(The basic navigation keys in Vim, other than the arrowkeys, are h-to

move left, j-to move down, k-to move up and l-to move right.)

Informative tip : Facebook probably identified this problem and came up with a brilliant solution – you can use ‘j’ to scroll up and ‘k’ to scroll down posts in your newsfeed. Now, the next time you’re on Facebook, you have something interesting to do rather than see why Angel Priya is feeling sad with 49 others. I hope.

  1. Escaping reality?

Whenever I use the computer to type something, I keep hitting the <ESC>key              – whenever I stop thinking or even pause for a second; no matter how much I try not to. Well, old habits die hard – or in this case, old habits never die.

  1. A Side Note

Share this on: