> It is important to remember that this tutor is set up to teach by use. That means that you need to execute the commands to learn them properly. If you only read the text, you will forget the commands!
And it's free, not 15 USD or whatever this site is charging.
Okay... but the difference between a piece of text just telling me to use the commands so I remember them versus an interactive trainer that provides a structured setting for me to use them is pretty significant, no?
is provided by vimtutor. I wish people would take a couple hundred milliseconds to research things like this before posting about them — most [GNU’s Not] Unix commands take less time to run than a webpage takes to load, and installing their packages takes no more typing than a web search.
> I wish people would take a couple hundred milliseconds to research things like this before posting about them
Have tried vimtutor twice. It is seriously confusing if you don't use US keyboard layout and there are probably a couple of other sources of confusion as well.
I did well at school, I do well at work but not so well at vimtutor.
So I think I'm kind of qualified to say that there's room for other resources besides vimtutor.
I don't see anything on this site saying that it accommodates any non us qwerty keyboard layouts. Does it?
Also vimtutor requires you to actually use the commands on the document. I don't think there is a single key press it doesn't explicitly tell you to press.
Maybe do a quick run through so you can give an example of a place that is confusing?
In a really minimalist way. I've been in the process of trying to hone my vim skills, and I've been through vimtutor more than once. About the only things I can say for it is that it's free and it works in a text terminal. This online course is promising, and I'm probably going to sign up. It's salient. Salient is good. Salience promotes faster, deeper learning.
vimtutor is interactive. It's a text file that tells you what to do inside itself, so you modify vimtutor directly.. you would've known this if you had spent 10 minutes trying it out.
Back in the day, playing /usr/games/hunt against other people would hone your VI movement keys muscle memory rather quickly.
On the multiuser Unix systems at Purdue, it was typical to have at least half a dozen people on the server, with explosions going off like fireworks. We ran the mod where you could collect 200 ammunition for the nuke, which would destroy a third of the screen.
We also had Larry Wall's (yes, that one) video game Warp, which was a lot more action-oriented than the original Star Trek video game. It also used the same hjkl movement keys.
Having seen machines that have hundreds of Vim sessions opened because “system integrators” didn’t know how to exit Vim, it should be the very first thing taught
Luckily vim finally got a bit better with that: on a Ctrl-C newer versions now show instructions for quitting.
I remember my first vi sessions (typically via something like `crontab -e` where it wasn't clear to me it picked my "default" editor ... thus didn't know where to read up on it ...) some long time ago, where i knew `kill` before the right command ...
I started with vimtutor, then installed IdeaVim in all my Jetbrains IDEs, it took me about a week to reach the same level of efficiency I had before.
I don't understand how some people can say the learning curve is too steep. Sure it's a bit annoying at first, but it quickly becomes natural, and you don't have to use all features at first. It has allowed me to improve my touch typing a lot. Learning a programming language is a lot more work but hardly anyone ever complain about it.
It's been maybe two months and I wouldn't think of using anything else than vim for serious code editing.
> I don't understand how some people can say the learning curve is too steep
I am doing fine with vim for basic editing tasks and use it a lot (mostly when I'm already in the command line). But there's just only so many shortcuts I'm capable of memorizing. This is not a problem for me exclusive to vim, of course. In IntelliJ I also sometimes find an amazing new function that I then don't keep using since I've already exhausted my limited "inclination" of learning new shortcuts. Also, I don't think my productivity gains at this point are going to come from faster input anyway. Sorry, vim, it's not you, it's me.
I’m a full time vim user now, and I would say the ‘productivity’ gains are a bit of a pipe dream. That’s not the reason I would recommend anyone learn vim. The best reason for me is that vim is just fun.
When you finally become competent, it is an absolute joy to work with. It makes me think about editing in a totally different way. However the road to get to that point is not fun.
I started out with basic tasks in the terminal, & vimtutor reps. Then graduated to using a VS code plugin. I would turn it on for 10-15 minutes at a time a few times a day. Usually turning it off once I realize I wasn’t getting anything done :) But solid reps everyday over a few months and I got to where I learned more complex commands/ movements. Eventually I never needed to turn it off!
Then I began the configuration & plugin rabit-hole :)
Yeah that's a good point. After a while you do start to realize the limitations of the VS Code plugin. That video is a good example. But once I got to where I could edit at equivalent speed I was used to, I dropped VS Code completely. I looked at the plugin as 'training wheels'.
I'm not as hardcore as some. I still prefer to use GVim/ Macvim. I'm not an 'everything must stay in the terminal' purist. I know some who are, but I still like being able to use the mouse to bail me out sometimes, and always have access to the system clipboard without having to recompile vim :)
I don't go crazy with config & plugins, but I got my setup to where I have all the features I missed from VS Code, and that's enough for me.
There is always more to learn though. I feel like I've been complacent lately, so you have to remind yourself sometimes to make an effort to seek out more advanced techniques.
That video is a great example of some of the incredibly powerful things Vim can do! I'm a big fan of macros for repetitive tasks.
That's one of the strengths of Vim, though. There's a lot of structure to it, so you don't need to learn nearly as many shortcuts as you otherwise would.
Yes! Sadly a lot of people skip over this despite vimtutor pointing to it at the end. Copy/paste below as the text doesn't need paraphrasing, but also because a lot of comments here seem to be advocating vimtutor as something more than the "brief overview" it is.
This concludes the Vim Tutor. It was intended to give a brief overview of
the Vim editor, just enough to allow you to use the editor fairly easily.
It is far from complete as Vim has many many more commands. Read the user
manual next: ":help user-manual".
