Vim is already everywhere else

Here's the thing nobody tells you before you learn Vim: half your tools already speak it. The grammar from part 1 isn't an editor feature. It's a lingua franca that's been quietly spreading through the terminal for forty years. Learn it once and doors start opening in places you didn't expect.

A tour, roughly in order of payoff.

less, man, and every pager

You already use Vim keys daily and maybe never noticed. less scrolls with j and k, searches with / and n, jumps with g and G, quits with q. And less is everywhere: man pages, git log, git diff, journalctl. If you've ever searched a man page with /, you were speaking Vim.

Nothing to install. Just start using G to jump to the end of journalctl output instead of holding the down arrow.

Your shell

Bash and zsh can edit the command line with Vim keys:

# bash: add to ~/.bashrc
set -o vi
 
# zsh: add to ~/.zshrc
bindkey -v

Now Esc on the command line enters normal mode. ci" fixes the string in the middle of a long command. 0 jumps to the start, dw eats a wrong flag. For every readline program at once (psql, python's REPL, and friends), put set editing-mode vi in ~/.inputrc instead.

Fair warning: this one splits opinions. You lose some emacs-style defaults (Ctrl-a, Ctrl-e) that your fingers may already own. Try it for a week; keep whichever mode you stop thinking about.

tmux

Two lines in ~/.tmux.conf:

setw -g mode-keys vi
bind -T copy-mode-vi v send -X begin-selection
bind -T copy-mode-vi y send -X copy-selection-and-cancel

Now copy mode (prefix + [) works like Vim: j/k to move, / to search through your scrollback, v to select, y to yank. Searching scrollback with / instead of mouse-scrolling through 5,000 lines of build output is a permanent quality of life upgrade.

k9s, lazygit, and the new terminal tools

The modern terminal tool ecosystem defaulted to Vim keys. k9s navigates pods with j/k and filters with /. lazygit moves between panels and files the same way. fzf results scroll vim-ish. Even kubectl edit drops you into $EDITOR, which, if you followed part 2, is Vim.

This is the compounding return: every new tool you pick up is half-learned before you open it.

Obsidian

If you keep notes in Obsidian: Settings, Editor, toggle "Vim key bindings". Now dap deletes a paragraph of your meeting notes and ci( edits inside a link. Writing prose with text objects is quietly great, because prose is made of the things Vim has nouns for: words, sentences, paragraphs.

JetBrains, and everything else

IntelliJ, PyCharm, GoLand: install IdeaVim, which is good enough that plenty of full-time Vim users live in it happily. There are Vim modes for basically everything at this point. The pattern holds: the keys travel, the config doesn't, and the keys are what matter.

The point of the whole series

Notice what happened across these five posts. You learned one small language: verbs, nouns, counts, and a handful of motions. Then it turned out that language runs your editor, your servers, VS Code, your browser, your shell, your multiplexer, your Kubernetes dashboard, and your notes.

No other keyboard skill in computing has that reach. That's the real answer to "is Vim worth learning in 2026." Not speed. Coverage.

Start anywhere in the series. But start. The author of the post that kicked this off said it best: don't wait as long as he did. Or as long as I did.