4 ms·

For me this is hard to understand. Either I haven't seen anyone who is able to 'mouse' as fast as you can. Or you haven't yet seen someone who is really good at

• masterj 16y ago
  I didn't understand until I saw one of my professors, who lives in vim, work on some code. It was mind-bending. I can only imagine that when watching me type code (at the time) he must have felt how I feel when I watch my parents use the internet.
  • ghotli 16y ago
    As a man who lives and breathes vim, the answer to your question is most certainly yes. Watching other people code without mastery of their editor is heartwrenching.
    • ez77 16y ago
      Anyone know of screencasts with keystrokes (I don't know how) that would reveal that mastery?
      • rbonvall 16y ago
        http://vimcasts.org/ http://vimcasts.org/
      • alinajaf 16y ago
        Screencasts unfortunately won't do it. Learning to touch type (not 'I have my own system' touch-typing, I mean 'Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing' with all ten fingers where they're supposed to be) and then spending a couple of minutes every day learning a new command or two for a few months is more realistic IME.
• jason_tko 16y ago
  Just went searching on the internet for a vim demo video and found this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QNAXa0W4OFg http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QNAXa0W4OFg Also, if you have a Mac (or most versions of Linux) you can also access an instant tutorial by typing "vimtutor" at the terminal.
  • unoti 16y ago
    For those of you looking at this video to get an idea of the power of vim in the hands of a serious user: although this person is using it quickly, he is nowhere near a master. The key to vi is that any time a user is pressing the same key multiple times, there is a faster way. In this video I often see the user using the same keystroke multiple times to get from here to there. Most notable, he routinely does this to get from his cursor position over to a spot later in the line (such as when changing the word "test" which was in quotes), or to get to the end of a section (such as when he was copying then changing the body of a function). If you're a vi user or an aspiring vi user that wants to get faster, then start consciously looking for times that you're pressing the same key more than about twice. Each of those times is almost certainly an opportunity to get faster. So in particular from watching the above video, these are two shortcuts that I use all the time that the video maker did not use. Let's say you have a line of text like: Img.save('roberto.png') and you want to change it to x.png. If your cursor is at the start of the line, you would never arrow over there. You would type fr (find r, which would move your cursor to the r in Roberto). Then you would type "ct.x" which means change until we get to the period and replace it with the letter x. It sounds complex, but after a while you just do it without thinking, and it's faster to type 5 keystrokes with 2 hands than a bunch of repeated keystrokes with one hand. Similarly, the } and { keys should be used to navigate to the next or previous blank line, which could have been used in this video to change the body of those functions in a couple of keystrokes instead of the arrowing around and highlighting we were seeing. I'm not trying to pick apart the video, the person is clearly fast and effective. The point is just that vi gives you the flexibility to always get faster if that's what you're into.
    • eggoa 16y ago
      We can shave another keystroke off your example. Instead of "ct.x", "cwx".