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Vim is not that hard, actually
Everyone talks about Vim as if it is this incredibly difficult and mystical text editor and I think they are wrong.
You do not have to know everything about Vim to use it. I am serious. It looks intimidating because Vim is an incredibly powerful tool and it is full of things you have never heard of. You do not need to know all of them. I don't think anyone knows all of Vim. You genuinely only need a few bits to get started.
Do vimtutor
This rant is not a tutorial because I am lazy and Vim already has one. You can skip it, technically, but vimtutor is genuinely the best way to get to grips with how Vim works. Just do it. Set aside half an hour and do vimtutor.
Congratulations! You now know everything you need to know to use Vim for most non-technical use cases.
Learn new things when you need them
If it involves text manipulation, Vim probably has an easy way to do it. If you find yourself doing a repetitive action, search online for how to do it in Vim and use it. This is the way most folk should learn Vim.
As is a massive change in mindset from the editors you may be used to, here are some examples of things Vim can do quicker than you could manually:
- Change the contents of brackets without deleting the brackets first
- Edit multiple lines at once
- Sort a selection of lines alphabetically or numerically
- Increase or decrease written numbers
- Find the next occurrence of the word under your cursor without you needing to search for it
- Repeat the same edit again
- Delete every line containing a specific pattern
- Delete every line that doesn't contain a specific pattern
- Select an entire paragraph
- Change the case of a selection
You don't need to worry about .vimrc yet
Vim is majorly customisable. You are not obligated to immediately customise it.
The only things I would immediately add to your .vimrc are set number and syntax on; the former makes the line numbers visible and the latter turns syntax highlighting on.
As you develop gripes with Vim, you can search for more customisations.
Do not overwhelm yourself
This is the main theme of this note. You do not need to know everything. You do not need to learn Vim before using Vim; in fact, learning Vim before using Vim is a terrible idea because you will simply never use Vim. Use Vim.
Related to
- WYSIWYG editors are inefficient
- WYSIWYG editors encourage users to misuse them
- Nano is worse than Vim