Trying NeoVIm (Well Kindof!)
I joined GitHub in January 2022 and have been using VS Code ever since, right up to today (July 2026). For the past year, I’ve been a little obsessed with mastering VS Code’s best shortcuts to enhance my overall development experience — and honestly, it’s paid off. Quick search, file search, occurrence search, toggling panels, jumping to the terminal — these are just a few examples. Things have gotten so much better that going from spotting an error (knowing the file and line) to actually reaching that line and fixing it now takes me less than two seconds. I count that as real progress.
Alongside this, I’ve also spent the past year trying to improve my typing speed. That effort hasn’t gone as well — I’ve been stuck at 72 WPM for the last six months.
It had also been an early goal of mine to learn Neovim, ever since I saw experienced developers rave about its features. I did try installing it once, but that’s as far as it went — I was so new to it that I couldn’t even move the cursor a single word.
Enter Zed
This past weekend, I had the idea to try a code editor other than VS Code. After asking Gemini for a suggestion, it recommended Zed. Installation was easy, and within five minutes of using it, I was genuinely impressed — the speed, the performance, the minimalism, the aesthetics. I wanted to dive deeper.
That’s when I discovered Zed’s built-in Vim mode. The kid in me got excited — this felt like it could be the perfect stepping stone toward learning Neovim properly down the line. So there I was, using a code editor I never planned to try, thoroughly enjoying it, paired with a mode I’d always been eager to learn but too intimidated to start.
Below are the shortcuts I picked up over a three-day period, using VS Code’s default keymap as a mental reference point while working in Zed’s Vim mode. These include all my go-to commands — the ones I used constantly in VS Code.
The Absolute Basics
Everything starts with the one shortcut that governs everything else:
- Normal to Insert mode: i or a
- Insert to Normal mode: Esc
Get comfortable with this pair, and you can survive any situation in Vim.
The Everyday Commands
- [Normal] Shift + P — paste
- [Normal] Select text + yy — copy
- [Insert] Ctrl + Z — undo
- [Insert] Ctrl + R — redo
Going a Bit Deeper
- Ctrl + Shift + G — Git tracker
- Ctrl + Shift + E — file tree
- Ctrl + ` — terminal
From here, it’s really up to you. You either stay on the surface and stop digging, or you keep going and eventually become genuinely proficient.
The Shortcuts That Made Me Fast
These are the ones that let me get from “I know the file and line” to “I’m there” in a couple of seconds:
- [Normal] Ctrl + P — fuzzy file finder
- Ctrl + Shift + F — global search
- Ctrl + Shift + P — global command palette / Zed settings
- :[line number] — go to a specific line
Getting a Better View of a File
- gg — jump to the start of the file
- Shift + G — jump to the end of the file
Zed-Specific Commands
I’m not yet sure if these map directly to the same keys in Neovim, but here’s what worked for me in Zed:
- Ctrl + B — toggle the functions/outline tree
- Ctrl + / — find in file
- n — find next match
- N — find previous match
The Ones That Took Real Digging
These took a fair bit of trial and error, along with some scattered research, to figure out:
- Ctrl + Insert — copy selected text
- Ctrl + Alt + B — collapse/expand Git tracker
- Ctrl + : — toggle line numbers
- g + A — find all occurrences of a function
These, more than anything else on this list, are what will genuinely improve your dev experience once you get the hang of them.
A Quirk Worth Knowing: Keybindings Depend on Focus
One thing I noticed along the way is that keybindings behave differently depending on which panel is currently focused. Shortcuts that work fine in the Terminal or the Editor don’t necessarily work the same way in the File Tree or the Git panel.
How I work around it:
If I’m typing a Git commit message and suddenly want to search for a file, I first switch focus to another panel. For example:
- Ctrl + ` — switch to the Terminal OR
- Ctrl + Tab — switch to the Editor
Once I’m focused in one of those panels, Ctrl + P works normally again for file search.
The One Thing I Never Figured Out
Saving a file. To this day, I don’t know the default way to do it — and I’m fairly convinced there isn’t a straightforward native shortcut for it in this setup. This ended up being my first custom keybinding, and honestly, setting it up was easier than I expected:
- Ctrl + S — save file in Insert mode (needs to be added manually in settings)
What’s Next?
To be clear, I didn’t install Zed with the intention of using it forever — at least not for now. My actual goal is to move to Neovim eventually, and this has simply been the stepping stone in that direction. My plan is to stick with Zed’s Vim mode for a minimum of one week and a maximum of four weeks. After that, I’ll decide whether to keep going deeper with Zed or make the full jump to Neovim.