Intro
I am a Vim user(and now Neovim, wish that it wouldn’t be “was”). To be honest, I am not an expert on vim, and configuring my own vim really takes some time, but I really find something useful during my “playing” time. Apologies for my poor English in advance.
Fun
This is the most important thing. Defining my own editor is just like playing LEGO, even more interesting. There exists infinite possibilities in this amazing editor (So is Emacs/VSCode/…). You can almost create anything you want about text editing in this environment. Thanks to Bram, may he rest in peace🙏 .
Perspective on things/problems
It really changes my points of view on many things.
- Dig out how things work. In particular for coding, I started to inspect the source codes, whether to find out how the functionality is implemented, or why there is “the” bug. It improves my code-reading skills and piques my curiosity about a lot of things.
- Thanks to the ubiquitous tool, I can easily and quickly try/test many things on different strange servers, which really improve my efficiency.
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My cognition about inspecting the world. For example, from “trees” to “networks”. It’s really hard to explain, so I wanna give you an example. Before I use Vim as my main code editor, the idea of “file-tree” stuff was deeply implanted in my mind, and I wanted to organize everything in a tree structure. I won’t say that it is bad or wrong, but for now it really doesn’t suit me. I realized that what I get in my daily life, the ideas, the points, the TODOs, the reminders, the knowledge characteristics, are all connecting with each other. Maybe trying to organize everything in “trees” is just a waste of time. What we need are: a suitable “tag” based system, a performant searching tool, and a “frequent-reorganize” methodology(maybe a system of different levels of knowledge). The most important thing is that we should build our own knowledge/notes system, maybe pure text is better. Then we are able to build or produce what we really want from our growing accumulations.
- Simplify things, not complicate them. And do realize the power of pure text.
- Make things from scratch if I have the time. It will help me learn things, and remove the things I don’t need, i.e. simplify my life, think and get rid of what I don’t need.
- More freedom. The freedom is not about what you should use, but what you can choose not to use. By using an open source tool and even making my own tools, I can really in charge of my workflow, my data, my tools, and try to not to be hijacked by commercial vendors. I’m not saying that what they do are all bad things, I’m just saying that we should have the “freedom” and “full control” of our life, e.g. your notes.
Drive me to express myself in text/blogs, and even in videos
It sounds strange right? But that’s the truth. Editing and writing something interesting for myself or for others is now a hobby of me. I have the feeling of creating things when I write posts, write codes, express my points in my videos. They may be or may not be reacted, but I feel like I am just talking to another me. I don’t know why, but I somehow enjoy it.
