4 ms·
Strongly endorsing the "make the pain go away" path to learning, but I'd also like to mention a secret weapon for really nailing down the more powerful movement
by tomku 10y ago
Strongly endorsing the "make the pain go away" path to learning, but I'd also like to mention a secret weapon for really nailing down the more powerful movement and editing commands in vim: macros.
Macros are immensely useful themselves and everyone should learn and use them, but they have another benefit beyond simple utility - writing good macros requires using commands that generalize rather than "eyeballing" how many times you should press a key. If you want to move to the next paragraph in a macro, you can't just mash j until you're there because every use of the macro might require moving a different number of lines. What you can do is use { and }, vim's built-in commands for moving by paragraphs that are underused because holding down j is "good enough" for interactive use. I find that after I start using a command to make better macros, it filters into my interactive use soon after.
As a bonus, using more powerful motions instead of repeating weaker motions makes your macros execute a lot faster.