I Came Looking For Copper And I Found Gold: Vim motions

Huh, what's the crazy year? The war that changes our lives... Also, I had some old dreams of moving away from the mouse control. Starting from tiling window DE adoption I used i3/sway I really impressed with the power of tiling and shortcuts (btw I use arch). So what if I will go further? I decide that it will be nice to move out from mouse using.

Vim motions

Probably the simplest way to move out from the mouse its use Vim and Vim motions for navigation. Firstly I'm sure exploring vim navigations with Vim. Even if at the start I used vim more like a text editor. I've explored vim shortcuts in different ways. Starting from simple articles like Moving fast with the core vim motions and Vim motions cheatsheet. Straggling at the beginning but with time it's really improved navigation time.

Best Vim learning channel

Just following the Rust content I surprisingly figured out an awesome channel with content about programming languages as well as a bunch of Vim learning videos moving fast with the core vim motions. strongly recommend The Primeagen channel and especially vim as your editor playlist for learning vim.

Not ready for NeoVim as the main IDE

And yeah NeoVim configuration and plugins it's another challenge that you may face. Different LSP for different languages, and a bunch of plugins (such as Telescope for navigation) to make your hardcore life a little easier. And it takes time. Just following the Rust content I surprisingly figured out that there is a vim like editor named Helix. The main feature of which is pre-configuration(that includes LSP/navigation/etc.) and good multiline editing support (despite that it's blazing fast coz written on Rust lol). But yeah, even with this simplification of Helix I'm not ready to move out of Intellij IDEA. Not yet... And this leads me to try IdeaVim plugin which brings vim features into Idea. And I would recommend to check Sebastian Daschner blog series about how to use IdeaVim and even provide some config samples. IdeaVim have pretty a lot of issues with shortcuts conflicts with Idea shortcuts, but I still find IdeaVim option like a compromise between powerful IDE and vim features at the same time. Who knows probably later I will find a straight to fully move into neoVim.

What to do with Browsers navigation?

If you decide to move out from the mouse probably the most confusing part will be - how to interact with the web in Browsers. In my case, I'm using Firefox Developer Edition, and it's having some default key bindings to scroll and change the tabs, but it's far away for regular using without a mouse. And I'm open to themselves one more useful Firefox plugin - Vimium-FF. It follows vim motions shortcuts idea and tries to handle all navigation parts with it. Yeah at the start it's pretty confusing, but later you will be ready to surf websites and even complete navigation by opening all links with special shortcuts. And still - there is no any way to fully escape from the mouse, you should be ready that a lot of sites use some Native maps/ Frames that don't provide you with the ability to use navigation/link-opening without a mouse.

To be continued

It's just the start of my journey to use more keyboard/vim motions and reduce using of a mouse, but let's see how it goes.