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This article is well written, but it has nothing to do with mastering Vim. It goes no further than running "vimtutor" at the command line. It has all the same t

This article is well written, but it has nothing to do with mastering Vim. It goes no further than running "vimtutor" at the command line. It has all the same tips and shortcuts as any other vanilla Vim tutorial. This is a common problem among Vim articles and tutorials. Authors title them as if it will give you Vim mastery, but instead it only offers the basics. Mastering Vim means going beyond vanilla movements and learning all of Vim's nasty warts to replace good GUI features. It means learning the wonky, dead Vimscript language. It means knowing how to use the arcane arglist. It means knowing how to go into insert-normal mode, and when to use the expression register. It means knowing everything about very magic search, and why default search is poorly designed. These are all randomly chosen examples, because mastering Vim involves mentally juggling a very large playbook of oddball features to complete editing tasks. The main resources to help you master Vim are the book "Practical Vim" by Drew Neil, and if you're ever in the unfortunate position of needing to write or edit a Vim plugin, "Learn Vimscript the Hard Way" is invaluable http://learnvimscriptthehardway.stevelosh.com/ http://learnvimscriptthehardway.stevelosh.com/

melling 11y ago
Drew Neil also has this worthwhile video: Vim - precision editing at the speed of thought https://vimeo.com/53144573 https://vimeo.com/53144573
danielmiessler 11y ago
Article author here. The irony in your comment is that I recommend Drew's book in the primer, and Drew has recommended this primer as well. Maybe they're both good ways to learn Vim.
- stevebmark 11y ago
  Then title it "Vim Primer," which is accurate.
  - coryfklein 11y ago
    This is hardly a primer. If somebody is using the motions and actions described in the article they may not be a complete wizard in obscure vim features, but they are certainly far beyond being merely "primed" to use vim. I've been an avid vim proponent for years and I still picked up new things from this article.
deleted 11y ago
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edanm 11y ago
I heavily disagree. For one thing, not all of the things you said must be mastered, vim is plenty big enough to support various ways of working. E.g. I never use the arglist. For another, from a pedagogical perspective, there's different levels of "mastery", and there's nothing worse we can do to scare off people trying to learn a new editor than to tell them "oh, no, to be considered a real master you need to put in months of learning".

melling 11y ago

Drew Neil also has this worthwhile video: Vim - precision editing at the speed of thought https://vimeo.com/53144573 https://vimeo.com/53144573

danielmiessler 11y ago

Article author here. The irony in your comment is that I recommend Drew's book in the primer, and Drew has recommended this primer as well. Maybe they're both good ways to learn Vim.

stevebmark 11y ago
Then title it "Vim Primer," which is accurate.
- coryfklein 11y ago
  This is hardly a primer. If somebody is using the motions and actions described in the article they may not be a complete wizard in obscure vim features, but they are certainly far beyond being merely "primed" to use vim. I've been an avid vim proponent for years and I still picked up new things from this article.

deleted 11y ago

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edanm 11y ago

I heavily disagree. For one thing, not all of the things you said must be mastered, vim is plenty big enough to support various ways of working. E.g. I never use the arglist. For another, from a pedagogical perspective, there's different levels of "mastery", and there's nothing worse we can do to scare off people trying to learn a new editor than to tell them "oh, no, to be considered a real master you need to put in months of learning".