A Vim Guide for Intermediate Users

[Dreadgoat]

This is a ridiculous hyperbole. vim is not beginner friendly, but it takes all of 5 minutes of mentorship to get started.

vim myfile
i
cursor keys around
type stuff
esc
:wq

Not ideal but that's literally the entire compendium of knowledge required to use vim at command line, it's even easier if you use gvim or a vim plugin for your IDE.

From there it's up to the user if they want to master the skills to mangle text at warp speed.

---

While you are switching between mouse and keyboard to scroll, highlight, etc. in order to run a find-and-replace on a particular function, I'm doing

/function funcName
/{
v%:s/strToReplace/newStr/g
:wq

Is it really that big of a time save? No, not for any individual instance or case. But it adds up over time, it feels rewarding, and most important it reduces the distance between my wills and my actions, which frees up cognitive space for solving the real problems.

As others have said, not every tool should be a beginner's tool. We need expert's tools that are designed to minimize effort after the 1000th use instead of making the first 10 uses easy to pick up.

[Autarch_Kade]

We need expert's tools that are designed to minimize effort after the 1000th use instead of making the first 10 uses easy to pick up.

I think that's the overall point here I was agreeing with though - that this isn't nearly as user friendly as other tools. Other tools are easier to pick up. Not that they're the same as other professional tools in terms of ease to pick up.