

The Vim Beginners’ Site - pythonted
http://vim.begin-site.org/

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funkiee
I'd recommend just doing vimtutor every day for a couple of weeks to get some
muscle memory in.

~~~
gnosis
I fully agree. vimtutor is just about the best introduction to vim out there.

After mastering it, I recommend hanging out on #vim on freenode. You'll get a
great education just from reading the questions/answers others have. And any
time you find yourself doing something complex in vim multiple times, ask
about it on #vim and you'll probably get some suggestions on how to do it more
efficiently.

Another thing that helps is reading the documentation for every option you put
in your ~/.vimrc, and trying to fully understand what's happening there and
why. And try to avoid blindly using other people's .vimrc's. Instead, use
their .vimrc's for inspiration, transferring over only those parts you
understand and find useful.

~~~
wyclif
A thousand times yes to this, and not just because it's how I learned. It puts
the commands into your muscle memory. You should not be trying to memorise
anything; just follow the directions and don't move on until you complete each
step. Then when you're done, do it again. Do vimtutor as many times as you
need to until you really don't need to think about how to manipulate text.

And yes to the ~/.vimrc advice here. You should start with an empty dotfile
and build up from there. DO NOT make the mistake of starting out by installing
Janus. There shouldn't be anything in your ~/.vimrc until you understand what
it does, and editing that file should be done incrementally by the user
instead of being a copied file. This is part of the learning process.

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garethadams
The "Exercises and Challenges" page [<http://vim.begin-site.org/exercises/>]
states:

> VimGolf - “Real Vim ninjas count every keystroeke — do you?”

Obviously the writer isn't a ninja.

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Zoophy
I wish I spent the time trying to learn vIm learning something which is
actually productive instead of hoping to have a better editing/writing flow
with some deprecated, obscure CLI editor with a way too steep learning curve.

~~~
danneu
I learned Vim because the internet went out one day and I finally decided to
check out `$ vimtutor`.

15 minutes later after learning commands like A, I, o, O, dd, p, and P it was
clear to me that I wanted to use Vim seriously.

The hard part was arriving at a workflow, a set of plugins that I actually
liked using. I imagine a great deal of people don't get to that point. I
almost didn't. Especially since the commonly recommended plugins like NERDTree
are awkward and clunky.

I think discovering CtrlP was the turning point for me.

A lot of luck was definitely involved. Sometimes I stay up at night wondering
just how many versions of myself had given up on Vim when my wavefunction
collapsed and I happened to be the chosen eigenstate that stuck with it.

~~~
RegEx
CtrlP is the only plugin I use. It's really great.

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bstar77
Use this to learn vim: <http://learnvimscriptthehardway.stevelosh.com>

The parent's site offers nothing productive, in fact I think it causes more
confusion with it's terrible UI, terrible content and erratic layout. I feel
bad for being so critical, but resources like this are why learning vim was so
hard in the first place. Why, when I click on the gigantic "Learn Vim Now"
text, am I not directed to some actual learning resources?

~~~
zanny
It says this within the first paragraph:

> It is not a guide to using Vim. Before reading this book you should be
> comfortable editing text in Vim

I think a site like the OP (even if it is shitty) is aimed more at the "I know
what vim is, maybe I did visudo once and cried a bunch, but I have never
touched it" crowd.

~~~
bstar77
Then what is it for exactly? Vim has a bad enough reputation as being obtuse
and antique. Sites like this just reinforce that perception.

~~~
bradleyland
No, the fact that you're being obtuse is giving _you_ a bad reputation. Vim is
a very powerful and flexible editor. The site you linked to os titled Learn
Vim _script_ The Hard Way. Vimscript is not Vim, it is the scripting language
used to customize Vim.

Edit: Just to be clear, I'm not necessarily defending Vim here. The learning
curve is steep, but the "evidence" you're providing here only illustrates that
you can't spot differences in basic nouns (Vim versus Vimscript). This is a
challenge that any reasonably skilled problem solver would have resolved with
one Google query and 5 minutes of reading.

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ravichhabra
"Games that teach VIM" category was created for VIM Adventures. It has an
outdated information there. VIM Adventures now includes saving games. It
should also add that currently there are 10 levels consisting of 30 shorcuts
for the paid $9.90 version.

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keithpeter
Is this new? Very thin content, and I can't see how you nominate links.

