In this 5 minutes of Vim goodness we’ll break the shackles of convention and become slightly more productive when using Vim. Here we go!

I cannot believe another year has passed! And I really can’t believe that 2020 is upon us. The 2020 of flying cars, hoverboards and deep space exploration. But indeed it has, and that means that it is time for the traditional reflective year summary, a wrap-up blog, retrospective of sorts, on what I’ve achieved the past year, my biggest fails, what I’ve learned and what I am planning to do in 2020.

One of the best things about writing this article is that I will go back and read the ones I wrote the previous years. Which is really, really cool. It’s like having a conversation with past Jaime. And it’s also really surprising to see how many things happen and can be achieved within the space of a year. Just for these reasons, I encourage you to follow the same practice, even if you don’t publish it and it is for your eyes only. It’s a really enjoyable habit.

So! Let’s get to it then: In 2019…

It has been a looooong time since the last time I wrote a wizard log, yet I haven’t been idle. Not quite. But some context may be needed.

Last year I embarqued on a quest of sorts: I wanted to make Vim more approachable to everyone. So I started writing Wizards Use Vim, an introductory book to Vim that teaches you all you need to know to be an effective Vim user in a fun and light manner.

Svelte is a modern web framework that takes a novel approach to building web applications by moving the bulk of its work from runtime to compile-time. Being a compiler-first framework allows Svelte to do some very interesting stuff that is unavailable to other frameworks like disappearing from your application at runtime, or allowing for a component centered development with HTML, JavaScript and CSS coexisting within the same Svelte file in a very web standards friendly fashion.

In this series we’ll follow along as I use Svelte for the first time to build an app. I’ll use my go-to project¹ to learn new frameworks: A Pomodoro Technique app, which is a little bit more involved than a TODO list in that it has at least a couple of components (a timer and a list of tasks) that need to interact with each other.

In this part 3 of the series we continue our project by making it possible to create a list of tasks and estimate the number of pomodoros it will take to perform them. Let’s get started!

Vim comes with basic support for tons of languages out of the box like syntax highlighting and sensible rules of indentation. However, even with popular languages like JavaScript you won’t get great autocompletion, semantic navigation, diagnostics, etc… Features that you may have come to expect in this day and age. And when it comes to more modern or niche languages like Svelte, JSX or TSX, the syntax highlighting isn’t even there.

In this article you’ll learn how to setup Vim to get a better developer experience with both popular programming languages like JavaScript and modern languages like TypeScript, Svelte and JSX.