10 ms·

Great idea, vim is intuitive ( -ish?) once you understand what each character means ( y for yank being a simple example ). If anyone is looking to learn vim or

• tkjef 10y ago
  +1 for shortcutfoo.com been using it since beta. has grown to cover quite a bit more since then.
• klue07 10y ago
  Call me old fashioned, but I still think the best way to learn Vim is vimtutor. Then just google whatever you might need or consult :help.
  • ycitm 10y ago
    Some nice intuitive stuff in the help, too. :help paragraph [...] The default is "IPLPPPQPP TPHPLIPpLpItpplpipbp" [...] (they're nroff macros, but pretty baffling to a beginner)
  • mrb 10y ago
    +1 to vimtutor. I learned with it 15 years ago and this was the fastest way for me to memorize many vim features.
• wodenokoto 10y ago
  It seems to me there is a lot of VIM vocabulary that is very different from what is common on the desktop today. I don't know what yank means. I don't think I have a desktop app that has a yank function. The current front page example is using 'z' to "redraw the cursor". I know what all those words means, but put together they are complete jibberish. Looking at the gif, it appears that redraw is VIM-speak for scrolling. Also "z doesn't do anything on it's own. But it pairs with a number of other things. It is used for redrawing the screen, saving and quitting, as well as manipulating folds." doesn't sound intuitive at all.
  • jzymbaluk 10y ago
    It's intuitive once you already know what it means and have sunk dozens of hours into memorizing what the shortcuts do /s
    • HiroshiSan 10y ago
      Next you're going to tell me you don't know quantum physics...
    • MichaelGG 10y ago
      I did VIM Adventures. Then I installed VsVim for day to day work. A while later, it just makes sense. I'm so fast, it's like magic. Vim macros alone make it worth it. At any rate, I never spent much time memorizing keys. I'd look up a thing or two, apply it, and it'd just sink in.
    • cpdean 10y ago
      Actually it takes more like 2 months for the Stockholm Syndrome of vim to sink in and then you don't want to use anything else ever again.
      • Spivak 10y ago
        And that's not a bad thing. I don't think it's right to call Vim intuitive unless you're used to reading a book to understand 35% of the features of an editor. But Vim isn't about being intuitive, it's about being efficient. Once it 'clicks' you will be able to express incredibly complex text manipulations in only a few keystrokes. And with configuration you'll build the most powerful but comfortable environment that you'll miss anywhere else.
        • TeMPOraL 10y ago
          In other words, Vim is a professional tool, not a toy for causal user. It offsets steeper learning curve for much more powerful and efficient way of editing text. It's a feature.
• optimuspaul 10y ago
  What!?! vim is the most unintuitive application I have ever used. Having to understand that y means yank (and then what yank means) is one of the very reasons it is not intuitive. it's like the masonic editor, don't know the right handshake or password you don't gain entrance to productivity.
  • CaptSpify 10y ago
    I love vim, but it really is the anti-thesis of intuitive design. I think that's actually it's strength, in a weird way.
    • cgag 10y ago
      Yeah, I'm not here for intuitive, I'm here for power.
      • beefield 10y ago
        I find it somehow odd that often many people equal good UI with easy to learn UI. They _can_ be the same, if we have an application that is rarely used more than once, but for an application that is used often and a lot, they typically seem to be very different animals. Notepad has probably the easiest UI to learn while being as probably the crappiest text editor for any serious use with any significant installation base ever created. Vim is the other way round. It is extremely easy to do something with data using Excel. For any serious data management you are doing much better working with a database.
  • joemi 10y ago
    > vim is intuitive ( -ish?) once you understand what each character means That is a much different statement than simply saying "vim is intuitive", which is the statement it appears you're arguing against. I doubt there's anyone in the world who would attempt to make such a bold claim as that. I've found the "vim is intuitive once you understand what each character means" claim to be pretty accurate. Before learning what the keys did, it seemed like a laughably impossible-to-use program, but after learning what the keys do, it feels very natural and composable. Sure, some of that is due to muscle memory, like hjkl for movement, but a lot of that are things like "p for paste", "d for delete", "n for next", and so on. Those, to me, seem like very intuitive mappings.
• gnaritas 10y ago
  > im is intuitive ( -ish?) once you understand what each character means If you have to understand it first to find it intuitive, then it isn't intuitive.
  • nemetroid 10y ago
    Once you understand what c, 2, a and w mean (individually, in context), the command "c2aw" is intuitive.
    • gnaritas 10y ago
      That command might be intuitive to a vim user, but vim itself is anything but intuitive to someone who doesn't already know it. I'm disputing the intuitiveness of vim, which is what was claimed, not the intuitiveness of a key combination to a vim user.
    • aninhumer 10y ago
      Is it? I know what those characters mean, and I used to use vim, but I'm really not sure how they'd compose here. What does it mean to change and append at the same time? In fact I just tested it and I'm still not clear what c2aw does. It seems to just do the same thing as c2w.
      • jonchang 10y ago
        It does something similar to c2w if your cursor is at the beginning of a word. But if your cursor is already in the middle of a word c2aw may be faster / more intuitive than doing bc2w. "a" can mean "append" but in this context (as the argument to a command) it means to change "a word". See :h aw for details.
        • JetSpiegel 10y ago
          It's better to think of it as "all word", as opposed to "iw" as "inner word". It's easier to think about with "it" for "inner XML tag", apply stuff only between the opening and closing tags, of "at" for the whole thing, tags included. So "dat" would delete the tag and its content, while "cit" would change the content of the tag.
• _virtu 10y ago
  Just want to plug that it's worth the money. I mastered all sections of the vim course and it has definitely proven me useful over the last year. I don't normally develop in vim, but IDEAVim for Intellij products seems to be enough functionality to make me happy. Just remember, it takes consistency, lots of consistency.
• randomdrake 10y ago
  Understanding what each character means isn't necessarily the goal, however. They're the basic words and commands to manipulate text, but really you should be learning how to speak to Vim to get it to do what you want. You need to string together multiple words to make a sentence sometimes. Vim lets you do that. If you're not willing to take the time to do this: you're right, Vim isn't for you. It definitely takes more effort and practice than a lot of other editors. Intuitiveness becomes more clear once you realize you need to learn the language to make things intuitive. You can't just start speaking Spanish to someone and expect to get them to do what you're asking if you don't know how to speak Spanish, yet. You can poke and prod at words here and there (memorizing what each character means) but you still aren't very effective at that point. Can you ask where the bathroom is? Sure. But can you effectively tell someone where the correct bathroom is? Probably not. "I want to yank those two lines, paste them over there, select them, and replace all instances of 'foo' with 'bar'." Vim: > 2YjjpVj:s/foo/bar/pg Like speaking other languages, there are a number of ways you could tell Vim to to do what you want. Now let's look at other editors when you want to tell it what to do. Other editors: > Remove right hand from keyboard and put it on mouse > Move cursor to appropriate position > Click the button down, and drag it until the two lines are highlighted > Crtl+C > Move the mouse cursor > or move your right hand again to the arrow keys > Ctrl+V > Ensure your text is still highlighted in some way > (May require repeating previous steps) > Ctrl+F or Ctrl+R or something, depending on the app > Get into one box and enter "foo" > Get into another box and enter "bar" > Ensure you have selected "selected text" so everything doesn't get replaced > Hit <enter> or click The infamous Stack Overflow answer, "Your problem with Vim is that you don't grok vi," is an oldy but a goody. http://stackoverflow.com/a/1220118 http://stackoverflow.com/a/1220118
  • aninhumer 10y ago
    Of course, if you expand every input out to a full line, it's going to look worse than a string of keypresses. However if we compare more fairly: vim: 2YjjpVj:s/foo/bar/pg Sublime: ^L^L^C↓↓^V↓^Ffoo<Esc>^Dbar (This assumes there are only 2 instances of "foo", but you'd just have to press ^D a few more times otherwise.) And sure moving your hand to ↓ takes slightly more time, but it's still no where near as bad as your screed makes out. And if you really care, you can make new shortcuts for movement (by editing a simple JSON file). Personally, my experience is of using vim for several years, and then becoming approximately as proficient in Sublime in a matter of weeks, and then much more productive in a matter of months. And sure, I wasn't putting that much effort into learning vim, but then, I wasn't putting that much effort into learning Sublime either.
• pawelduda 10y ago
  +1 for shortcutfoo.com. This is the tool that made my transition into Vim really easy. I cannot recommend it enough.