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It's not that you "can't" do certain things in Sublime. But Sublime and other "normal" editors have only a few primitives in terms of editing and moving, whereas vim has a language that lets you compose more complex commands from a set of primitives.

The general form of a vim command is:

(repeat)(verb)(motion/object)

That is, I want to perform 'verb' 'repeat' times on a 'motion' or 'object'. Examples:

  fX == 'f'ind the next occurrence of character 'X'
  3fX == repeat 'fX' 3 times
  w == go to the next word on the line
  3w == repeat 'w' 3 times, i.e. go 3 words right
  dw == delete word
  3dw == delete 3 words
  dfs == delete to the next occurrence of 's'
  yw == "yank" (copy to the buffer) the next word
  y3w == yank the next 3 words to the buffer
  H, M, L == move the cursor to the top, middle, or bottom of the screen
  zz == center the current line of text in the editor window.
  8j == move the cursor 8 lines down
  ma == create a bookmark 'a'
  `a == go to bookmark 'a'
  "ay == yank to buffer 'a'
  "ap == paste buffer 'a'
  . == repeat the last editing command (insert, delete, yank...)
I like vim because its commands are both efficient and precise. I don't need to look and make sure the cursor is at the right position or that I've selected what I want to cut/copy correctly. I know it's correct because I typed it in. And I don't need to move my hand to the mouse or arrow keys. And bookmarks and buffers are great.



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