NeoVim fractured my brain

I learned Vim motions to edit faster. I succeeded. The unexpected side effect is that I am now mildly broken in every other application I touch.

The honeymoon

Modal editing, text objects, composable motions — ciw to change a word, di( to gut the inside of a bracket, 3dd and three lines are gone. Once it's in your fingers you stop thinking about editing and just edit. It genuinely feels like operating the text at the speed of thought. I was a convert within a fortnight.

The fracture

Then the muscle memory leaked everywhere else. I type jjjj into a Google Doc to move the cursor and just paste four j's. I hit dd in Gmail and nothing dies. I mash Escape constantly, at everything, for no reason my conscious brain endorses. I open a normal text box and feel a flash of irritation that I can't ciw the word in front of me.

IdeaVim is a methadone programme

Every IDE has a Vim plugin now, and I installed all of them, because for a while I genuinely couldn't use IntelliJ the normal way. But the integration is always slightly off, you spend a quiet amount of energy fighting the seams, and you're maintaining a second mental model of how the editor behaves on top of the IDE's own.

Honestly? Just use the IDE shortcuts

Here's where I've landed, and it's not where I expected. You do not need to rewire your brain to be a fast editor. Modern IDEs — IntelliJ, VS Code — ship excellent, discoverable, well-documented shortcuts: multi-cursor, expand-selection, move-line, refactor-rename, jump-to-symbol. Learn those properly and you'll be every bit as quick, without losing the ability to use every other application on the planet.

Vim was a fun rabbit hole and I don't really regret it. But if you're standing at the entrance wondering whether you have to go down it to be taken seriously: you don't. Using your IDE's native shortcuts is completely fine. Speed comes from knowing your tools deeply, not from which editor cult you joined — and the IDE shortcuts won't follow you home and break your email.