I first saw Vim in use back in 2000. I was working at NuMega (Compuware lab at the time) and I was a Windows only user that was just starting to get very comfortable with the DOS prompt and I used Notepad for any editing that wasn't done in Visual Studio.
I had some huge file in which I had to do a bunch of refactoring. Some search and replace, and some reorganization.
I had been plodding away, copying, pasting, and repetitively hitting the arrow keys and typing a few characters in each place for about 5 minutes when a friend came over and saw what I was doing. He was an absolute *nix expert. After a few moments, he told me that he could finish all those changes in just a minute. I had seen him code in Vim before, and was impressed, but it seemed like magic at the time. I saved the file and went over to his desk and asked him to walk me through exactly what he was going to do. He loaded the file up in Vim and started with a quick regex that knocked out 80% of the work. He then recorded a macro that yanked the current counter number into a buffer, searched for the next edit position, pasted in the counter number, incremented it, then shifted position to the next code block and updated that reference as well. He then asked me about how many sections there were. I said about a hundred, so he typed 99@q and poof! There were a few more, so he did a :g/<some keyword>/p to see how many lines there were and then did that many more macro invocations and the file was done.
I was hooked at that point. He set me up with gVim and some tutorials and taught me the most basic fundamentals and told me that it didn't matter if I couldn't make vimgolf par for the first year or so. If I used it and every once in a while picked up a new motion or command, after a few years, it would change my coding life.
I had some huge file in which I had to do a bunch of refactoring. Some search and replace, and some reorganization.
I had been plodding away, copying, pasting, and repetitively hitting the arrow keys and typing a few characters in each place for about 5 minutes when a friend came over and saw what I was doing. He was an absolute *nix expert. After a few moments, he told me that he could finish all those changes in just a minute. I had seen him code in Vim before, and was impressed, but it seemed like magic at the time. I saved the file and went over to his desk and asked him to walk me through exactly what he was going to do. He loaded the file up in Vim and started with a quick regex that knocked out 80% of the work. He then recorded a macro that yanked the current counter number into a buffer, searched for the next edit position, pasted in the counter number, incremented it, then shifted position to the next code block and updated that reference as well. He then asked me about how many sections there were. I said about a hundred, so he typed 99@q and poof! There were a few more, so he did a :g/<some keyword>/p to see how many lines there were and then did that many more macro invocations and the file was done.
I was hooked at that point. He set me up with gVim and some tutorials and taught me the most basic fundamentals and told me that it didn't matter if I couldn't make vimgolf par for the first year or so. If I used it and every once in a while picked up a new motion or command, after a few years, it would change my coding life.
He was right.