Why I started using terminal based text editors
It actually wasn’t always like this, of course. I grew up using Microsoft software. I had never used anything besides Windows, except at a friend’s house whom had a Macintosh on which we played games sometimes. Up to college I only used programs like Word. Visual text editors seemed like the only rational way to write text on a computer. It was the only way I ever interacted with computers and I couldn’t even imagine there would be another way of doing it.
However, in college this all changed. As an early undergraduate student I had decided that I needed a new laptop. I got my old laptop at the start of high school. It was old and slow, the battery was getting old and ran out quickly and it had just generally degraded. So I started looking for a new laptop. I had two main concerns at this time:
- It needed to be cheap (I didn’t have that much money to spend on it)
- It shouldn’t be able to play video games.
It shouldn’t be able to play video games? Yes! I used to be an avid computer gamer back in my high school days. But in college I realised this could not go on as it was a huge time sink. So I decided that, whatever laptop I might buy, I should not be able to play video games. Given the above considerations, the type of laptop that seemed logical at the time were Chromebooks. Although I have my issues with these laptop now, they seemed like the perfect solution then. Leightweight, cheap, and above all: a custom operating system with no support for any video games.
During the 3rd semester at college, we had to take a course on data analysis as it would become increasingly important for experimental data analysis later on in our studies. At that point, all I had installed was the standard Chromebook operating system. The problem was, not only did it not have any support for video games, it had no support for any kind of IDE either. I knew ChromeOS was actually a Linux based operating system, so I started looking if there was any way to install Linux programs on my Chromebook. Well, it turned out you couldn’t just install such applications directly into ChromeOS, but there was an alternative: Crouton. Crouton was a way to chroot into a parallel Linux operating system. I installed Ubuntu on my laptop for the fist time and started using Linux. It took a while getting used to using a terminal, but in the end I changed my whole workflow and adopted the terminal as my main tool, over graphical user interfaces. Among the many terminal applications there was one application more important than any other: Vim.
If it hadn’t have been for Vim, I might have never even have kept on going using terminal applications. But Vim was a game changer! I’ll leave out the details of why Vim is such a great text editor here because I could go on and on about it, and that has already been done by so many people that I feel like it has been said a thousand times already. If you still need convincing on why you might want to use vim, maybe check out this article or this video. I love Vim so much that I don’t just use it for coding, but also for writing Latex. I even wrote my entire bachelor’s thesis in Vim!