Easiest way to learn vim is to force yourself to use vim
The only time I use vim is when I am forced to use it.
Show HN: I built an online interactive course that helps you learn Vim faster
111–120 of 283 posts
Re: Show HN: I built an online interactive course that helps you learn Vim faster
#112Hey y'all! I built this interactive course after a year of learning vim and finding it to be extremely useful in my day to day development experience. The course is designed to give you lots of interactive practice so you can develop the muscle memory needed to effectively use vim. Would love to hear what you guys think about it :)
I purchased the course but was disappointed that it doesn't go much beyond the basics. For example, there is no tutorial on the dot (.) command, which is one of the main productivity hacks for vim users. There's also no mention of the slash '/' command, moving to a particular line number with 'Shift-G', 'dw' for deleting words, or any number of things that are essential to know if you want to use vim effectively.
What does the dot command do?
Re: Show HN: I built an online interactive course that helps you learn Vim faster
#113Does anybody have recommendations on how to go from "comfortable" to "expert"? I've been using vim as my daily driver via the intellij plugin for a few years. I mostly just navigate and never do anything complicated, it gets the job done. For example I mostly use w, d, o, hjkl, y, p, w, b, t and recently discovered the `c+i` combo which is awesome. But I feel like there's still a side of vim I haven't conquered. Any…
Practical Vim by Drew Neil is definitely a way to go. It teached me stuff I wouldn't have discovered otherwise.
Re: Show HN: I built an online interactive course that helps you learn Vim faster
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
I purchased the course but was disappointed that it doesn't go much beyond the basics. For example, there is no tutorial on the dot (.) command, which is one of the main productivity hacks for vim users. There's also no mention of the slash '/' command, moving to a particular line number with 'Shift-G', 'dw' for deleting words, or any number of things that are essential to know if you want to use vim effectively.
What does the dot command do?
Repeats the same command previously run. So if you used 'ci"' for (change text in quotes) and entered a new string, you can jump to a new line and hit . to replay your last series of commands.
Re: Show HN: I built an online interactive course that helps you learn Vim faster
#115Want to learn vim and make it stick?
0. Learn the basic movements and UI interactions. Do NOT use the arrow keys. Your future self will thank you tremendously.
1. Search DuckDuckGo for "vim cheatsheet" and find one that provides a good summary of commands thats organized to your liking.
2. Print it out and post it somewhere easily accessible to your working space.
3. Each-ish day, review the cheatsheet a bit and pick one one new kind of command that looks useful. Try to integrate that command into your workflow throughout the day. It'll be clumsy at first, but after you do it a few times you'll be surprised at how much faster this gets.
Focus on movement and editing first. Take note of sequences that seem to take a lot of work, as almost guaranteed there is a faster way you can integrate in later.
Once you've got a small core built up, do another review and research more specialized topics:
- .vimrc, colors, and customization
- plugins
- buffers, windows, etc for quick workspace organization
- macros ... and macros within macros!
- visual blocks
- various useful commands for advanced editing (e.g. regex based find in replace in an entire doc or visual block is epic)
Give yourself time and try not to be too loud when you have your first "A ha!" moment when you randomly try a completely new key combo that you think should work and it actually does exactly what you hoped.
Re: Show HN: I built an online interactive course that helps you learn Vim faster
#116I know I felt a constant social pressure to learn vim or emacs over the years in order to fit in with those religions. I gave in to that social pressure early on. But even 30 years ago in the early 90s when I started learning vim (and Linux), vim and emacs were very dated programs. Over the course of thirty years I have managed to finally learn how to set up syntax highlighting, terminal colors, and spaces vs tabs an…
Lots of people use vim just to appear hardcore and not because it confers serious editing advantage.
Vim itself is a really really bad editor. It's so obvious that it was written by a programmer with commands like 5dd, 6gg etc. I find it so ridiculous that a computer program can be that much loved and yet it doesn't even provide line numbers out of the box nor indentation. Does a person really need to spend half an hour googling just to tell vim to indent Java code as they type.
Re: Show HN: I built an online interactive course that helps you learn Vim faster
#117nice site
could do with taking out your console.logs
```export default function KeyChar(props: any) { console.log(props); return ( {`${props.keyChar}`} ); } ```
Re: Show HN: I built an online interactive course that helps you learn Vim faster
#118I don't want to spend $15. Does it just tell you to run vimtutor? It should just tell you to run vimtutor.
Re: Show HN: I built an online interactive course that helps you learn Vim faster
#119Can someone please explain to me why I should learn vim? I've made several attempts in my lifetime because I thought there would be some magical "ah-ha" moment, but it never came.
Separate modes for command & insert just feels inherently clumsy and slow to me. Is there some other killer feature that can't or hasn't been reproduced by modern editors?
Re: Show HN: I built an online interactive course that helps you learn Vim faster
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
For anyone wondering, you use it by executing vimtutor in terminal (not in vim). Also, you exit by pressing ESC and then typing :q (hit enter)
How fitting that the tutorial for vim needs its own pre-tutorial for exiting.
It's also in the tutor, lesson 1.2
But there's actually nothing special about vimtutor here: all it does is write a temporary file and then open it in vim.