Vim for Humans

I will add some of my own opinions:

My feeling is that real value of Vim is its novel approach to modal text manipulation, and you shouldn't let the fact that it has a standalone lightweight reference implementation usefully installed on almost every machine that you use confuse you.

Vim script is not a great plugin language, and the vim runtime itself is not fantastic at doing things beyond the text editing. I think the activity around NeoVim is good evidence for this. The community recognizes the constraints of Vim, and seeks better plugin and runtime tooling to meet their needs.

My issue is: there are loads of great text editors that support the Vim interface. Emacs, Atom, Sublime, whatever, all have very good Vim interfaces and far superior languages and platforms for doing complex plugin work that you need to support IDE-ish environments. NeoVim seems like a bit of a waste to me, because I think it misses the point. Vim is not a platform. It's a unique modal editing paradigm. Why make yet another Vim-binding-having platform?

I guess what I mean is that vim should be left as vim. There are superior platforms that implement the same interface, should you feel the need to expand your tools. Vim does best as a portable minimal editor that you can use everywhere. If you need something with more power, pick a better platform, and run the Vim editing paradigm as an interface.

To perhaps go against the grain a little here, I appreciate a focus on customisation from the start.

I am beginning to use Vim more, mostly because I was introduced to the keybindings with Vim emulation from other apps, and I appreciate how it works. I had previously attempted to learn Vim through the normal ways, but it just was impossible; by default, Vim for me is barely readable and none of the included colour schemes ever made it any better. Plus, of course, some of the other things like size of tabs, line numbers, often even syntax highlighting. But finding out how to deal with plugins, themes, settings, etc. is difficult when you aren't already introduced to Vim, precisely because most people make the assumption that you've learned Vim "as is" already.

I think some concession has to be made to modernity. Vim is very old and "as is" it often just doesn't function very well for everyday use. Grinding through that until you know it well enough to be given the knowledge of how to make it nicer to use isn't worth it to most people. It certainly wasn't to me.

I disagree. Vim is bare, cold, and strange when coming from a traditional editor, and I probably wouldn't have gotten involved if it were not for a friend who already have a useful .vim and .vimrc for me to use as a starting point. He got me up and running with a Vundle, syntax highlighting for all my languages, autocomplete, and various settings that should have been default with stock vim. Though vimtutor was also very useful for getting used to the standard controls.

Edit: Forgot the most important thing, the setting that lets you use the mouse: set mouse=a. After I discovered this I knew I was never going back to Sublime.

I weaned myself off other editors by using vim for thought-intensive programming. When most of your time is spent trying to come up with efficient solutions to your problems, spending a little time learning more about vim isn't so bad... and can be a welcome distraction.

I still use editors like atom for web development where I go through frequent iteration cycles and make heavy use of the clipboard.

There's something to that, yes, that a lot of things become second-nature (e.g. once you learn Vim, when you're in Nano on an unfamiliar machine, you start finding yourself accidentally typing Esc-:w to try to save a file).

There's also something about "this is totally unfamiliar and not at all incremental upon what I know." I was vigorously against vim after trying to do it many times, eventually I found out a base set that allowed me to learn incrementally, now it's not so bad. The big thing is to totally forget all of these people who are saying "vim is like an awesome language for text editing." Maybe it is, but that's an awful sales pitch. This person wants to spend a few minutes editing source code, not spend a year learning a new language.

The minimal starter set for Vim is something like:

    # From Command Mode #
    dd     | deletes a line
    .      | repeat whatever you just did, for example pressing I, 
             then the delete key 4 times, then Esc is one command
             which dedents a space-indented line by 4; now you
             can go down a block hitting . at each line to 
             dedent it.
    i      | switch to edit mode at present cursor
    I      | edit at beginning of line.
    A      | edit at end of line.
    u      | undo
    Ctrl-r | redo
    

From there probably the next thing I would teach people is brace jumping with %, regex-jumping with /, visual-lines mode shift-V and either cutting with d or copying with y, then pasting with shift-P. Finally macros with qp ... q ... @p. After that, maybe dealing with multiple buffers. Just let people use the arrow keys to navigate, don't get too religious about the home row or letter repetitions like d5d.

I think that's a basic skillset that will let you say "okay, my thesis advisor is making me put two spaces after each period that's not an abbreviation in this document, what editor should I use for that? Well I want to step through everything just to make sure, but let's just use Vim where I know I can write "fix this one and then jump to the next period" as a macro, and interleave that with some basic navigation when it's not right."