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In my opinion the only way to learn vim is to fully commit to it: Use it as your only editor and every time you hit a wall, spend the time to learn and unblock yourself. Productivity will take a serious hit for weeks, likely months.

I did this 10 years ago and never looked back. Although in the last years I have evolved to an 80/20 JetBrains/vim split. Using the excellent IdeaVIM plugin to bring all my vim skills and configs to a full IDE.

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What do you think about using vim emulation in VSCode?

For me it seems impossible to be productive without the ecosystem of extensions VSCode provides.

I am intrigued by the power of modal editing, but going all-in vim seems a step back with regard do "modern" development workflows.

In vim it appears you have to configure every piece of it from scratch, while in VSCode if you pick a new language it's usually enough to install an extension and you're good to go.

I suppose vim emulation also works if the emulation plugin is good.

The point is to make the switch and stick to it even though you will be slower for a while. And spend the time to look for better approaches when you feel like you are repeating yourself. (Just like you get that DRY itch to refactor when repeating the same code snippet a few times)

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