It’s time for New Year’s resolutions, so I’m going with something I’ve put off for a while, and that’s finally switching to hjkl for moving around Vim. Oh sure, I could learn another programming language or something, but hjkl just seems like a change that I’ll appreciate the rest of my life.

Years ago, as I stumbled through my first real programming job, I started paying attention to my text editor. You can run through a haze of text editors before you get Serious About a Text Editor. I had tried nano, kate, and a whole bunch of others that I can’t recall the names of anymore, but my first Serious Text Editor where I actually read the manual was Gedit.

Now, how do you guess I came upon Gedit? Was there extensive research into the pros and cons? Nope, it was the standard Gnome editor, and I liked using Gnome (think Gnome 2, AKA ’the good days’). Was I happy with it? You bet. It used Python for its API, and I was on a hard Python kick at the time. When your baseline for a text editor is syntax highlighting, the selection is great.