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Comment by xur17 | Hacker News Reader

I've tried using vim plugins with different editors before, but they're always missing a few of the shortcuts that are in my muscle memory and drive me crazy.

Also, being able to ssh into any machine and remotely edit code is pretty awesome.

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The biggest thing for me when trying to switch from console vim is `alt + <key>` will send ESC and the key, so you can use alt to exit insert mode and send a command at the same time. Doing alt+j or alt+k has become the way I always leave insert mode (or command, or visual).

Unfortunately most IDEs that have vim keybindings don't support this, and it has become such a baked in part of my muscle memory that it makes switching to anything else such a pain.

Many of them fail to implement macros in my experience. Though I've heard VSCode got this part right.

The most productive vim keybinding I ever came across was:

    noremap <Space> @q

Since the key to start a macro is q, you can quickly tap qq to record a macro to the q register (end it by pressing q again.) Then by whacking the space bar you can execute the q macro as many times as you'd like. Once you get into the rhythm of using it often even for small tasks, it can become a great optimization. Sometimes I use it with five or more different macros in a single minute. If you ever look forward in time and see that you're about to perform the same edit two or three times, pressing the q key three times total and the space bar once per execution (or only once with a count) will often be fewer keystrokes than had you performed the edit manually each time. Not to mention triumphantly smacking the space bar to repeat an edit is a great feeling.

(Simple edits can be repeated using . which is another indispensable vim feature that sometimes gets missed by vi-plugins in other editors.)

Since <space> is some peoples' leader key (not mine, but I see it a lot), just throwing it out there that `Q` is a fine alternative for that mapping too. It's also a nice semantic companion to `qq`! ...unless you are a heavy ex-mode user, of course :)

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