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, you heard it right—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.
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 the 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, where 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.

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

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

Yeah, the learning curve is real.
You’ll look dumb.
You’ll be slow.
You’ll wonder why you are torturing yourself when you could just click around like everyone else.

But here’s the thing:

Once you get it—even a little bit—writing code becomes fun.
Editing text feels like magic. And after a while, you’ll realize you don’t want to go back.

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. I installed it from scratch.
Yeah, I was that guy.

Started with KDE (because it looked shiny), 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.

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.

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.

• Partitioning and Filesystems:
  You stop being scared of lsblk, fdisk, and mkfs.
  You know the difference between ext4, Btrfs, and XFS—not because you read it, but because you had to pick one.

• Networking:
  You realize Wi-Fi doesn’t “just work.”
  You learn about iwctl, wpa_supplicant, and why NetworkManager is a blessing.

• Graphics Drivers:
  Getting your GPU working—especially NVIDIA—was such a pain.

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

• Troubleshooting:
  You stop panicking when you see a kernel panic or a black screen.
  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 vim makes that part more engaging—at least for me—which in turn makes me way more productive.

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.