Description of my proposed vimconf 2022 talk

Switching to Vim opened a whole new world to me for interacting with a computer and for getting things done. Before I adopted Vim I used GUIs for everything because I thought that's how it had to be done... Notes in OneNote, code using a GUI editor, different notes in TiddlyWiki, slides for work in PowerPoint, slides for church using Logos, etc... Adopting Vim allowed me to disconnect a specific tool from the problem that tool is solving - because usually I just need to write text (notes, code, slides, etc.). Now, very nearly everything I do is from a text-based and git-based workflow... I put all my notes on basically anything just in my blog, which is all markdown and deployed to GH with Markata on every push (living dangerously pushing to main) - and that's all done easily from Vim with nice syntax highlighting, fast response, integrated git-plugins, etc.. I keep project-specific task lists just in markdown files and I have Vim/tmux shortcuts to quickly add todos for any project (todo list is done with markata todoui) and I can get there fast because my Vim workflow dovetails with Tmux nicely. Also I can pull that list up right from the terminal, which I'm already in because Vim.... Vim also pushed me into the cli more - because Vim is so easily extended with cli tools and I'm already in the terminal... The builtin functionality also made things make more sense - no more right-click, find "refactor all" or "rename symbol" (for some stupid reason)... Vim find-replace is so intuitive and if I need it extended then I learned what sed was because of Vim. Moving quickly in Vim also enables me to do my job incredibly fast because I hop into several projects a day in a coaching role - if I was bound by GUIs I'd be waiting forever for startup, would lose which GUI instance was which project, etc... Being in the terminal also made Tmux a trivial choice - now I have 90 tmux sessions, all named appropriately, ready for me to jump back to and all while keeping the majority of RAM still free for Chrome. Vim as my IDE also forced me to learn way more about Python (I'm a python developer primarily), how LSP works, how to configure a development environment, etc... things I took for granted in my GUI workflows, or never knew, or worse - thought I knew but deeply misunderstood. Now that I understand them better, I can coach my peers more effectively even if they are still in a GUI-based ecosystem.

Basically, (Neo)Vim actually did change my life and I'm really thankful for it (maybe that should be the title?)