Ask HN: What's the best way to get started with Vi(m)

IMO the only thing you can do is to start writing real code and force yourself to use it. Honestly, the vim help stuff was almost useless to me at first because I would forget it as soon as I learned it, since I didn't understand the vi mindset.

You will notice a big drop in productivity at first, but hopefully you should notice yourself getting faster in a week or so.

Then spend a week doing as much as possible from within vim. You will start to get the basic hang of it. Then as you want to do other things, assume vim can do them for you and try and figure out how. #vim on freenode is good for this, although much of the help comes in the form of :he X. This means, read the documentation, the topic keyword is x. You literally type that into the editor command line :) The vim documentation is very good -- in fact just reading a few things extra every time you use vim is a good idea.

A final note: I have been using vim for my main editor for years now, and still learn new stuff all the time. Playing with new scripts, finding new bits of workflow, and getting really fast at it all take time. This is natural. I try and pick a couple new things a week an use them. Sometimes I will then forget about them for weeks, months or years because I think they are useless, but "rediscover" them only to use them all the time. Its actually quite fun.

To become a vim power user, you will really need to understand how and why vim works the way it does and how you should think about editing while using vim. Once you have gone through some of the great tutorials on basic vim usage take a look at these:

Stay out of insert mode: http://cloudhead.io/2010/04/24/staying-the-hell-out-of-inser...

Good explanation of how vim commands are actually formulated (Stack Overflow answer): http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1218390/what-is-your-most...

Thats how I started.

Following this I also made it a point to read at least a little vim documentation (:h) every day. Its very detailed and helpful.

There is also the Vim book[1] by Steve Oualline which is also available free as a PDF.

Reading Vim tips[2] was also something that I found useful.

[1] http://www.vim.org/docs.php

[2] http://vim.wikia.com/wiki/Best_Vim_Tips

I just started using it do code everything I do. Found other coders I know through IRC that know how to use it, and we traded tips. Over time I found my self becoming more and more efficient with it. vimtutor, as mentioned in other comments also works really well.