Vim For Everyone

Vim For Everyone — at

— is a work in progress that I put up early in 2021 to extol the benefits of Vim for non programmers.

Vim is a really fast text editor. Most people use it to edit code, but it's also great for maintaining your own personal knowledge base (wiki, notes to yourself, etc), which is the use case I'm advocating on the site.

The main motivation to use Vim is speed. Going from hunting and pecking to regular touch typing is big jump. Going from regular typing to Vim is a similar jump.

I'll save the evangelizing for the site, but suffice to say if you're interested in taking notes on, and ingesting and making connections between information — and you like keyboard shortcuts — you should definitely check out Vim.

I've been using Vim for about 10 years. Initially, it was for code, but within a few months typing in anything else was too slow and frustrating. Since then I've been using Vim to take and manage all my notes (what I'm reading, meetings, to plan my days, etc).

I was inspired to create

after hearing a lot of hype around other personal note taking tools — Roam, Notion, Workflowy, Evernote etc. After looking into them, it was clear (at least for me) they weren't going match the setup I had in Vim.

Out of curiosity, I poked around to see if there was a thriving community of non technical Vim users (like the

but for Vim) and found... exactly one

from 2015 with 38 upvotes.

Hence the site. Vim isn't literally for everyone, but the non-coder Vim space is criminally underdeveloped.

The purpose is more to get non-coders intrigued by Vim than to be necessarily definitive source for learning how to use it.

Part of the issue is I learned it ~10 years ago and haven't thought recently about the best way to get it across. However, I will probably write up some thoughts at some point.

Here's how useful the non-coding, note-taking aspects of Vim has been for me: if

gets a few new people to try Vim, and a handful of them get as much out of it as I do, it'd probably be the most valuable thing I've built to date.