Vim For Everyone
Vim For Everyone — at
vimforeveryone.com
— is a work in progress that I put up early in 2021 to extol the benefits of
Vim for non programmers.
What is Vim?
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.
Motivation
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
Vim For Everyone
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.
Market Research
Out of curiosity, I poked around to see if there was a thriving community of
non technical Vim users (like the
Roam
cult
but for Vim) and found... exactly one
reddit
post
from 2015 with 38 upvotes.
Hence the site. Vim isn't literally for everyone, but the non-coder Vim space
is criminally underdeveloped.
Goals
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.
Bottom Line
Here's how useful the non-coding, note-taking aspects of Vim has been for me:
if
Vim For Everyone
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.