I watch in awe as vim experts fly with amazing speed. They have undeniable powers, built on top of highly personalized .vimrcs. And I try to learn, but get stra

I watch in awe as vim experts fly with amazing speed. They have undeniable powers, built on top of highly personalized .vimrcs. And I try to learn, but get stranded in the very basics. Example is searching for text on my system clipboard. There's no way to do this in vim: it insists on interpreting special regex chars. If you google it, you will find line noise that you can paste into your vimrc; these solutions inevitably have caveats and are now personalized to you. (I asked our resident vim expert how he accomplishes this, and he seemed confused why you would ever need to do that. vim is its own universe, huh.) Anyways looking for practical suggestions for getting into vim - a "cheat sheet" that has actually worked for someone!