Afterword: Where Should I Go From Here?

And so it seems like we’ve come to the end of the trail. Congratulations on finishing the book! May awesomeness and success befall those that finish things!

We’ve covered a lot of ground for such a small book and I hope you’ve found it a useful guide to using Vim in Visual Studio Code. All that remains is for you to practice little by little until you become more and more comfortable and proficient with Vim. In fact, the knowledge that you’ve attained after reading these pages means nothing if you don’t practice and incorporate it into your daily development.

Here are some tips that you can use to get the most out of this book and VSCodeVim:

• Practice everyday but don’t try to apply everything you’ve learned in this book at once or you’ll be overwhelmed. Just pick some of the operators you find most useful and slowly go adding them to your workflow at work and at home.
• If you don’t know how to touch type, then work on improving your touch typing skills. Vim benefits from touch typing because its commands are laid out in the home row and surrounding areas. That’s exactly where your hands rest when you’ve become a touch typist. typingweb.com is a great resource that can help you learn and practice touch typing.
• Expect that it will feel weird and uncomfortable at first, like learning any new skill. Don’t be too hard on yourself and have patience. You’ll get better as you practice, and there will come a time when you’ll wonder how the heck you could code without Vim.

As a supporting material I have created a YouTube series that shows you how to use Vim in VSCode in practice. I definitely recommend it as Vim is one of those disciplines that really benefits from showing how you do things. The series is composed of a collection of very short videos, of between 1 and 3 minutes length, designed to give you the most information in the least amount of time.

I’ve also created a cheatsheet that you can use as a reference throughout your learning journey and that offers a possible path to levelling up your Vim skills in the upcoming weeks. You can get the cheatsheet as a bonus material with this book and it’s also available in HTML format in my blog.

Even though we’ve covered a lot of ground there’s tons of things we didn’t get to talk about:

• There’s even more plugins available in VSCodeVim. Take a look and see if there’s anything you find interesting
• One of Vim’s core features is its amazing customizability. Take a look at the VSCodeVim docs for more great examples on custom mappings.
• Consider installing Neovim using your favorite package manager and enabling it in VSCode. It allows for an awesome command line mode support capable of some amazing stuff.
• Here is a complete list of all the features available right now in VSCodeVim. Yep. It is humongous. Lots of goodies yet to explore.

Now go! Enjoy your newfound knowledge, improve your skills and productivity and if you ever want to learn more about Vim, I have more awesome stuff for you:

• I continuously add more videos about Vim in my YouTube channel.
• Try the Exploring Vim series in my blog for more involved articles about Vim.
• Or the 5 Minutes Vim series for shortish condensed articles.
• Or even better get Wizards Use Vim my beautiful book on all things Vim where I guide you step and step in how to be more awesome with Vim.

Take care and go kick some ass! And don’t hesitate to let me know how it goes or ask me if you have any questions. My DMs are open at twitter.com/Vintharas.

Jaime.
On March 2019
Stockholm. Sweden.