If you're in the NYC area, I know a bunch of folks who have had a really positive experience with http://www.kenwoodpsych.com/ - it's a practice that helps match you to a therapist that matches your needs, communication style, and financial/location constraints.

The Ted Chiang anthology is sooo good. Every story's premise was so unique - it blows my mind that one person can come up with so many out there ideas.

I know OP wasn't looking for dystopias, but if you like Parable of the Sower, I recently read two excellent new scifi/dystopia books: Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel, and American War by Omar El Akkad. American War was really cool - it's by a journalist who covered military trials at Guantanamo Bay and the Arab Spring, who transposes the stories/atrocities he witnessed as a reporter onto the future US.

I know you said that you like maintaining a super minimal .vimrc, but fwiw there's a couple of plugins that really helped me with the workflow issues you mentioned struggling with:

> Jumping around in longer texts: I know the basics, like searching (/), jumping to a matching bracket (%) or jumping to specific lines (for line 10, type 10G), but I still could use symbols more often for navigation.

vim-sneak is real nice for this, and has turned into one of my most-used movement commands https://github.com/justinmk/vim-sneak

> Using visual mode for moving text around: Sometimes it can be quite complicated to type the right combination of letters to cut (delete) the text I want to move around. That's where visual mode (v) shines. It highlights the selected text. I should use it more often.

vim-move was a game changer for me https://github.com/matze/vim-move

> Tabs: I know how tabs work, but all the typing feels clunky. That's why I never extensively used them. Instead, I mostly use multiple terminal tabs or an IDE with Vim bindings for bigger projects.

This is worth a read: https://joshldavis.com/2014/04/05/vim-tab-madness-buffers-vs.... Buffers + vim fzf is a really nice workflow https://github.com/junegunn/fzf.vim

Vim buffers are great. For me the best thing is that you can go to any buffer by ":b some-unique-part-of-the-file-path". If I'm switching between a ruby file and its spec file (tests), usually I'll just have to type ":b spec" to get there. Usually I'll have 2 open windows and will just be jumping to specific buffers all the time.

I like this kind of workflow because I have poor vision and selecting from a list of files, or a list of buffers is a really painful operation for me. Instead, I'm just thinking "What do I want to work on?" and type in part of the file name/path. If I forget, I can look at the list of open buffers, but it almost never happens.

One other thing I make great use of is ctags and vimgrep (just remember to use noautocmd with vimgrep so that it doesn't take a million years to parse all the files). Once I've got my working set up buffers for a problem, then it's just bouncing around inside them.

OP here. Thanks for the tips. I've used vim-sneak for quite a while (it's even built into Visual Studio Code's Vim plugin), but it just didn't work with me. I'm more of an easymotion (https://github.com/easymotion/vim-easymotion) type of guy. But even easymotion vanished from my workflow, because `/` works almost equally well for me and easymotion is not available on every system I use.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that I became more and more conservative about what external dependencies to rely on, because as soon as they become part of my workflow, I can't easily go back because they become part of muscle memory.

For vim-move I use `V` + `j,k` for the selection followed by `d` to delete and `p` for paste. Works quite well for me. The problem that I have with visual selections is, that I often want to "grow" a selection from inside of my current position. Say my cursor is inside parentheses, I'd like to hit a key repeatedly to select an ever growing region of text: first the entire content inside the parentheses, then including the parenthesis, then the entire line, then the entire function and so on. Is there a plugin for that?

Thanks for your article on buffers. Looks like a great workflow. What I'd like to have on top of that is a way to open a buffer based on the contents of a file. Say I have a file somewhere that contains a specific function, `myFunction()`. I'd love to just start typing `myFu` and vim would suggest the correct file to open. Bonus points for handling typos, e.g. `ymFu` should also work.

I think vim-expand-region (https://github.com/terryma/vim-expand-region) is what you're looking for.

It allows you to repeatedly 'v' to select ever larger parts of text.

Well that's exactly what I was looking for. Thank you!

For content-based buffer opening, I use fzf's Tags command - it fuzzy searches ctags and open the file containing the definition.

Ok, I've found my easymotion replacement: I love vim-sneak! And it's justinmk, so you know it's gonna be solid. Thanks, just when I think I know the plugin landscape, someone reminds me of something new.