Vimisms

Don’t Ruin Your Vi Muscle Memory

The whole point of using vi is so that you can edit files anywhere on any computer and device. Vimisms defeat this entirely by training your muscle memory to be dependent on things that other systems won’t have. (Might as well use Emacs if you are going to use them.) You won’t have your precious .vimrc (which is another reason to keep your Vim configuration rather light and easy to Secure Shell scp over to any system when needed and allowed).

Vimisms are the things Vim would have you do — or that people invent — that damage your ability to be productive on a system that has only Vi (not Vim). The tragedy is that most of these are not necessary and not even efficient but people just simply do not know the alternatives, which very frequently are some variation of the Vi magic wands. Please consider avoiding all of the following when using Vim.

Vimism	Vi Alternative
Arrow keys	hjkl as God intended
Visual mode	Ex commands with :
Remapping ESC	Use built-in Control with [
Vimscript	Bash shell with variations of !
Split panes	Use TMUX or Screen instead
Number Increments (C-a/x)	Just change the number.

Table Vimism Alternatives