I first learned typing in a typewriter class. I loved the sharp, rhythmic noise the keys made, and even the silly mistakes felt like part of the journey. My goal was simple: increase speed while making fewer errors. Back then, I saw it as the first step toward using a computer.

When I joined my first job, I noticed some engineers typing effortlessly without looking at their keyboards, flying across black terminals. That immediately became my next obsession. Later, I learned it had a name—touch typing—and I've believed ever since that it's a must-have skill that should be taught in schools. It's one of the simplest ways to boost productivity. I've always been a fan of keyboard shortcuts; there's something magical about pressing a few keys and watching things happen instantly.

The terminal was the next thing that caught my attention. Every engineer eventually has to manage servers, so I started learning Linux from scratch. Linux is a file-based system, and to get around you inevitably need to know the basics of the vi editor. The first time I opened vi, I had to google how to exit. Coming from a GUI world, navigating files in vi felt like a struggle.

At first, I only knew about insert and normal mode, and I relied heavily on the ↑ ↓ ← → arrow keys to move around. I probably survived that way for six months to a year. But as I began managing more servers, relying on just the arrows became frustrating. That's when I dug deeper into vi. Back then, documentation was a bit fragmented, but one great thing about vi is that it ships with its own tutorial—you just need to follow it. The very first lesson I learned: don't use arrow keys, use h, j, k, and l.

By then my typing had improved, but I found the key repeat on macOS painfully slow. An engineer showed me how to tweak the setting, and it felt like bliss. From there, things clicked. I discovered in-built keymaps (keyboard shortcuts), registers, and even the basics of find-and-replace patterns. My productivity doubled. After that point, I switched my development environment to vi and, eventually, Vim.

Once you use vi/Vim for writing code, the mouse feels like a burden. Vim is an improved version of vi, and its community exploded thanks to its plugin ecosystem. Pretty much anything you can imagine has a plugin—syntax highlighting, color themes, powerline status bars, fuzzy search, file navigation, and more. Once you reach this stage, you curate a core set of plugins that keeps your productivity at its peak. Recently, I moved to Neovim for its Lua-based plugin support, and paired it with Alacritty to accelerate terminal performance. The combination is pure joy.

Looking back, learning Vim wasn't just about editing files faster—it taught me the value of mastering tools deeply. What started with typewriter clacks turned into a philosophy of working with precision and flow.

If you're curious about my Neovim setup, check out my GitHub repo: run_controls