This week has been an incredibly rough parenting week for me but somehow I’ve been able to muster the strength to create some more awesome articles and videos for you! Wihoo!

How To Be More Productive In Visual Studio Code By Using Vim

Yesterday I published a guide to help you bring all the awesomeness of Vim into the amazing Visual Studio Code editor.

It starts like this:

Visual Studio Code is superb. It offers an unparalleled user experience with great support for many languages and development ecosystems. It comes with great defaults and is super easy to use and to get started with.

Vim is awesome. It’s modal nature and text editing features make it unique amongst other editors. Vim offers a complete different level of text editing proficiency, speed and accuracy from anything else out there.

The combination of both couldn’t be anything less that amazingly superbsome (yep, I just did that).

In the next few minutes you’ll boost your Visual Studio editing skills by bringing in lots of incredibly useful tools from the Vim editor right inside the comfort of your favorite editor: Visual Studio Code.

It’s a shortish guide that requires no previous Vim knowledge aimed at making you more productive with your favorite editor. In it, I have attempted to summarize the essentials and removed any unnecessary cruft to give you an awesome intro to VSCodeVim.

I, myself, started using Vim in Visual Studio back in the day (about 6 years ago) and I haven’t stopped using it, and have become better and better at it since then. Vim has accompanied me through my journey as a developer, in Visual Studio, IntelliJ, Android Studio, Atom, VSCode and, of course, Vim itself. I think that if you give it a fair try you’ll find it amazing and increasingly so as you use it more and more.

Videos Videos Videos!

Showing how to use an editor in words can be quite challenging. So in addition to the written guide I have started creating a series of short and condensed videos where I walk you through the different features available in VSCodeVim. (We are talking short, short here with videos between 1 to 3 minutes)

So far the series has 6 videos and growing. Hope that you find it useful!!

Wizards Use Vim

Wizards Use Vim is meant to be an inclusive book, not only for those interested in hardcore Vim but for any developer that wants to become more productive at coding. Therefore I have added the VSCode guide as an add-on to Wizards Use Vim. At present it is part of the book, but I’m considering making it a bonus material that will be a free give-away with Wizards Use Vim.

I’ve also been making good process on the chapters about the command-line mode. The book is now about 250 pages. And a lot more stuff is coming!

Hot This Week

Hot Interesting Reads

• @geddski released a new chapter of his gamified course on Service Workers: Service Workies. This is a really high quality and free course. Check it out!
• Jason Miller and Addy Osmani did a great write up on rendering on the Web.

Our understanding of this space is informed by our work in Chrome talking to large sites over the past few years. Broadly speaking, we would encourage developers to consider server rendering or static rendering over a full rehydration approach.

• React Hooks was finally released this past week! Wihoo!
• Stephen Fluin shared more info about the future of Angular and the Ivy compiler.
• In the book department, I’ve been reading and enjoying Good Omens and The Lifechanging magic of tidying up. Looking forward to some cleaning and decluterring.

Hot Stuff To Listen To

• I discovered the Stacking the Bricks podcast (a entrepreneurship podcast), and although it doesn’t seem to be very active anymore I found it very fun and interesting to listen to (which I did from the beginning).

Hot Things to Watch

• The Chrome team made these internal Google training videos available for everyone on their YouTube channel. This is awesome!

And that’s it for this week. Have a wonderful week ahead and be kind to the people around you!