Hey there!
You’re reading Nat’s Neovim Newsletter, a (mostly) weekly newsletter that helps you get better at using your favorite text editor.
I started this newsletter to help me write book-like-things, and now I’ve launched my first book-like thing: How to Quit Vim, a free zine that uses “quitting Vim” as a way to explain the basics of modes and the relationship between files and buffers.
If you’ve been enjoying this newsletter and find what I’m doing here useful, you can help support my work by adding a few extra dollars when you checkout. If you’d like to really help me out, I’d love if you shared the zine with friends or coworkers, or on social media. I am still figuring out how to do this whole marketing thing, but word-of-mouth referrals are the most effective way to find new people who like the work that I do.
Why this particular zine?
Partly it’s because I was getting frustrated with not-shipping — the book that I set out to write (first about Neovim entirely, then scoped down to configuring Neovim) hasn’t been coming together. I keep writing new outlines for it and then not writing the text — getting hung up on how much I should be trying to re-use what I’ve already learned and written about here, vs. how much to do new research just for the book.
“How to quit” is something that I noticed comes up a lot in general-purpose guides to Vim. “Absolute newcomers to Vim” isn’t what I think of as my audience, but I am interested in helping folks get clear, sharp understandings of how Vim fits together as a system. “Quitting” occurred to me as a pretty good way to talk about why quitting in Vim can be hard, or can fail — and as a topic that I could bang out a draft of in a weekend.
Another motivation is marketing. One of the standard bits of marketing advice is to have a “lead magnet” — something that you give people for free in exchange for an e-mail address, so you can start talking to them more about what you do and what they’re interested in. This newsletter is kind of a lead magnet but it’s one that requires continuous ongoing effort — I’d like to get some more highly shareable things out there that can help me find more people who’d like the newsletter and other things I might write about Vim.
Mostly though— this zine is a kind of love letter for Vim and its fundamental comprehensibility.
The thing I love about Vim — the thing that keeps me using it, even when my coworkers are gently nudging me towards IntelliJ, and that keeps me writing this newsletter — is that it started as this mysterious and temperamental entity—
This thing that sometimes did what I told it to and sometimes did— something else—
and over time has become a piece of software that I like and trust and feel confident that I can basically understand.
It still does weird and confusing shit all the time. The other day I typed something — I don’t remember exactly what — and instead of doing what I’d asked the command prompt turned into what looked like a list of all the Ex commands that I’d explicitly registered in a plugin or my config. I didn’t know that Vim had that capability. I don’t know what I did that triggered it. But I could know, if I spent the time on it.
Even when I didn’t understand it very well I always felt that Vim had a clear (if cryptic) logic to it. A colleague of mine has described it as a “game engine.” It’s a set of parts that fit together to create complex behaviors.
—
Anyway—
Let me know what you think of the zine, and especially any questions, comments, or corrections you have. I intend to get a real “1.0.0” release out in a few weeks, once I’ve gotten feedback from a few more people about it.
Really appreciate having you here.
- Nat