In ancient times, a friend and I made a new website for a golf course, in exchange for free golf whenever we wanted it. We were traveling to Texas for work(we were Linux sysadmins for a defense contractor at the time) and found out that mechanical/logistic issues at the airport in Houston would delay our departure by two hours, but this wasn't until after the plane was fully boarded and had begun to taxi. So we sat on the tarmac at Kansas City Airport for two hours with nothing to do but release that website. We finished some perl hooks to site resources, and pushed the site live. This was on a laptop tethered to a phone with a CDMA data connection, before even EVDO was released.

Even so, it went great! I sshed into the server(running netBSD), swung over the necessary tags, and the site was up.

My workflow today is largely the same, just with git and a more elaborate .vimrc.

Awesome times 😃
About that . vimrc... Can I see yours? I'm having trouble getting mine started because I'm overwhelmed with the possibilities.

@Tisila About .vimrc, don't stress too much about it, and don't try to have a perfect one at first try. Start with nothing, or maybe just the bare sane minimum (set nocompatible, set absolutenumber or relativenumber, stuff like that), or maybe begin with vim-sensible (by tpope on github) and try to understand his config. You won't remember anything more complicated, and you won't understand it in a few months.
Use that simple config for a while, and everytime you identify something that bothers you or takes more time than it could take, make some research and adapt your .vimrc accordingly. It will develop organically, it will take time, but at least it will be yours, and will be adapted to your needs, instead of someone else's, or what you believed your needs would be. Also, you're less likely to lose time when you make adjustments when needed only, than to take hours trying to craft the perfect config only to change it again weeks later.

@pipe thank you very much for the well thought-out answer. I started using vim with the vim-tutor and haven't made any changes to my .vimrc yet.
I'm still using default vim config.

@Tisila You're welcome :-)
I've been using vim for several months now, but I remember all the time I've spend trying to get the perfect config without doing actual work, and it's not worth the time. Now, when I learn about a new plugin or feature, I take time to think about how it could apply to my workflow, and if it doesn't improve it greatly, I don't apply it to my config, however cool it can be. I find I have way more time on my hands this way.

Keep on learning, though, it's impressing how this piece of software can be powerful once you delve into it! And more than anything, use and abuse the :help command, it's your best friend.

@Tisila

Sorry I didn't answer in a reasonable time. I was struggling with what @pipe put perfectly into words. My .vimrc has grown with me. That's the best way to add content to it, in my opinion. Try something and see if you like it.

BTW, I don't use any plugins. I can't explain it, but it kind of feels like cheating to me. When I see a really cool set of functionality from a specific plugin in someone's config, I think, "I bet I can do that without a plugin!" Sometimes I succeed, sometimes I don't, but it's really fun.

@bahua thanks for the suggestion.
I can see you're a man who likes a good challenge.
@pipe Don't worry, I'm not installing all the plugins I see. I too believe that knowing how to use Vim is a powerful tool and I'm looking forward to grow with it.
Last question, how about vim resources, do you both have any go to apart from the documentation?

@Tisila

I really enjoy conference talks about vim on YouTube. Even now, after twenty years with vim, these talks always show me something I didn't know.

@Tisila I don't have a go to documentation apart from the help files, however when I don't have a satisfactory answer or don't know where to look, I just use [insert favorite search engine]. The links that show the most are from StackOverflow or https://vim.fandom.com/.
I also lurk https://www.reddit.com/r/vim for occasional tips and interesting stuff, and I know about http://vimcasts.org/, even though I've never looked at that site. VimCasts seems to get a lot of love from redditors at least, and I think it's featuring screencasts to learn to use vim.

@bahua @pipe Many thanks to you both. Looking forward to look up those resources. 🙂