How trying to learn vim motions pushed me into the linux world

This is about how a simple change of habit helped me become a total Linux wizard.
Yes, vim motions forced me into Linux (and I have never been happier).

How the f*ck did this start?

I watch YouTube. Lots of YouTube. More youtube than you guys spend on tokens these days.
Especially when I was getting into tech, I watched a ton of THEPRIMEAGEN. It fascinated me that he could fly through a new codebase like a wizard. Meanwhile, I was stuck on my Windows PC that took five years to boot, using bloated VSC*de, clicking around with a mouse like a peasant.

I wanted to change, but just the thought of investing more time into switching editors felt insane, especially in college, when you are already spending all your time learning the basics (yeah, the syllabus is trash, but I genuinely think you should learn your basics really well). It was a huge decision to make.

But the more I watched, the more I realized:

If you don’t at least try vim motions, you are falling behind. Its over for you guys.

If you don't at least try vim motions, you are genuinely falling behind

Hot take? Maybe.
But in a world where everyone’s vibing and letting LLMs write shitty code, there’s something different about vim motions.

Yeah, the learning curve is real.
You’ll look stupid.
You’ll be slow as fuck.
You’ll wonder why you are torturing yourself when you could just be a normie, download VSC*de, use default everything, and get all the work done.

But here’s the thing:

Once you get it, even a little bit, writing code becomes fun.
Editing text feels satisfying. And after a while, you’ll realize you don’t want to go back. Although you have done no work because you spent time updating config, learning hjkl, dd.

I started with vim bindings in my editor (VSC*de). I was so slow that booting up Windows felt faster.
But now? I can edit code faster than your parents calling you a dissapointment.(Oh yeah maybe not)

Neovim on Windows broke me

I was loving vim motions, but Neovim on Windows was so broken at the time. Basic stuff like grep, external tools, proper terminal behavior was broken, Atleast for me. The most annoying was that all the lsp's installed through Mason was broken for me. So i had to manually download all of them. I HATED THAT SO MUCH. Even after it was installed some of the autocomplete features didn't work at all due to obscure windows error (Partially my fault as well should have just used WSL).

So this gave me the final nudge to push over into the beautiful land of broken systems, Linux.

Linux said: "I can fix you."

I googled the most popular non-bloated Linux distro.
It was Arch Linux.

I didn’t use the archinstall script because i love pain. I installed it from scratch.
Yeah, I was that guy.

Started with KDE (because it was safe), then switched to GNOME (which, let’s be honest, is just Apple on Linux).
I really wanted to try out a WM so I installed Hyprland.
Then I bricked my system. Twice. Classic sudo pacman -Sy package.

Finally, I landed on Fedora and never looked back.

But the amount of things I learned while fiddling with Arch helped me understand how everything works under the hood, especially getting the GPU working. (honestly the gpu still breaks every major update ngl)

What Arch Taught Me:

• Boot Process:
  You actually see what a bootloader is. You learn how to chroot into a broken system and fix it. (oh boi when you succesfully chroot the ecstacy is insane)

• Partitioning and Filesystems:
  lsblk, fdisk, and mkfs. Honestly i dont know what they are but i felt cool writing these as i have seen them multiple times. You know the difference between ext4, Btrfs, and XFS. Because lets be honest we all looked up what is the best one to use during install.

• Networking:
  You realize Wi-Fi doesn’t “just work.”
  You learn about iwctl, wpa_supplicant.

• Graphics Drivers:
  Getting your GPU working, especially NVIDIA was such a pain oh my god.

• Display Servers:
  You figure out what X11 and Wayland actually are, and why your compositor sometimes just gives you a black screen.

• Troubleshooting:
  At one point you get used to black screen every bootup. You learn to Google like a pro, read logs, and actually understand what’s going on.

The Finale

Learning vim motions made me appreciate the process of writing code even more.
Because honestly, getting your thought out into code is the real bottleneck most of the time, and i love typing, its probably my favourite hobby by far, the amount of time i spent on monkey type is crazy. And vim makes that part more engaging, at least for me.

Guess what?
It was the same when I was writing this blog as well.

But more than that, it was vim motions that pushed me out of the Windows comfort zone.
They opened the door to Neovim, which opened the door to Linux, which opened the door to everything else.

What started as a simple desire to get things done in a more fun way turned me into a keyboard andy. All because of vim(motions).

That’s it from me.
I’m kinda active on Twitter. Mostly rage-baiting for views (just for fun).
So if you wanna connect about anything, the link is literally there in the footer.

Adios.