I bet you are a gamer. Even if you don’t consider yourself one, you have played videogames.

So, at least in one game you’ve gone deep. Not necessarily too deep to get a world record but deep enough. Deep enough to get a ton of information, get to the point where deciding what to do is not trivial anymore.

You should really learn vim if you code and are a gamer.

You learnt pokemon type matchups? All recipes in minecraft? all maps on Counter-Strike? The trillion champions and combinations on League of Legends?

But Vim? “Too hard.”

I get it. I really do. I spent years clicking through menus in VS Code thinking I was being productive. Then I watched a coworker navigate a codebase in Vim and felt like I was watching someone play piano while I was still hunting for middle C.

The difference isn’t that Vim is harder than games. It’s that games give you dopamine hits. Vim gives you… slightly faster text editing.

But here’s what clicked for me: your job is literally manipulating text 8 hours a day. That’s it. That’s the game. And you’re playing it with the default controls.

Imagine playing an FPS with arrow keys to move and clicking a menu to shoot. That’s you in VS Code.

It’s not complexity. You’ve proven you can handle complexity. It’s that learning Vim feels like work. Learning a new game feels like play. Even though you’ll use Vim every single day for potentially decades, and you’ll probably move on to the next game in a few years.

We’re optimized for the wrong game.

You don’t need to learn all of Vim. Just like you didn’t learn every Pokémon on day one. Start with i to insert, Esc to get out, :w to save, :q to quit. That’s it. Four commands. Simpler than most game tutorials.

Then maybe add dd to delete a line. yy to copy. p to paste. You’re already more productive than before.

The modal editing will feel weird for exactly one week. Just like WASD felt weird the first time you played an FPS on PC.

Here’s what nobody tells you: once Vim clicks, every other text editor feels broken. It’s like going back to 30fps after playing at 144hz. You can do it, but why would you?

You navigate with thought-speed. Delete a function? daf. Change everything inside quotes? ci". Jump to any line instantly. Macros that replay complex edits. It’s the difference between clicking through menus and just… doing the thing.

“But my coworkers use VS Code.”

Who cares? The output is just text, you can do it with whatever tool you prefer.

You can go that far for games and dopamine? Maybe learn the tool you use to make actual money