This seems overdone to me. Vim out of the box is a perfectly adequate text editor, and all you need to know to use it is /?xiap ESC 99dd :wq! and the arrow keys. With gq (formerly Q, RIP) you can then edit text. hlJG wbvn.fF;#% help too, especially for code, and c is nice, especially ci, which is a Vim innovation. ^F and ^B move around. Then, if you're programming, you probably want to build a tags file and use ^] an…
Vim out of the box is a perfectly adequate text editor, and all you need to know to use it is /?xiap ESC 99dd :wq! and the arrow keys. With gq (formerly Q, RIP) you can then edit text. hlJG wbvn.fF;#% help too, especially for code, and c is nice, especially ci, which is a Vim innovation. ^F and ^B move around. As somebody who never used Vim, I seriously can't tell if you are being sarcastic here.
/ search forward regexp
? search backward regexp
x delete character
i insert before the cursor
a insert after the cursor (useful at end of line)
p paste ("put") the last thing you deleted
ESC stop inserting (exit insert mode, return to command mode)
99dd delete 99 lines
:w RET save
:q RET quit
:w! RET save despite write-protection
:q! RET quit discarding changes
:wq save and, if successful, quit
arrow keys move as usual.
Occasionally you'll hit a wrong key and end up in some weird mode, which in Vim (unlike vi) displays at the bottom of the screen. Hit ESC to escape from the weird mode unless you feel like exploring it. If it split your screen and added another window (q: does this) then use :q to escape from it instead.
One more thing I forgot at first, which is kind of essential:
u undo
^R (control-R) redo
That's 22 commands to memorize, which you can do in less than a day. That much already gives you an editor dramatically better than Notepad, and probably better than Pico or Nano, too. You can now move around very rapidly, insert and delete, cut and paste, save or discard changes, and refill paragraphs. Unix was written with editors less powerful than this.
For additional power, a second level of common commands, once you're comfortable with the 20 or so above:
h move left (without having to take your hand off the home row)
l move right
G go to the end of the file
1G go to line 1 (the beginning of the file)
w move right by a word
b move left by a word
n repeat the previous / or ? search
fe find the next "e" on the line
Fe find the previous "e" on the line
; repeat the last f or F command
% jump to the matching parenthesis, bracket, or brace
# (or shift-click) search for the last occurrence of the word you're on
^F forward a page
^B back a page
J join the next line onto this one
> indent something (>> indent this line)
At this point you probably want to set a few options, which you can enter using : or put in your .vimrc without :.
:set incsearch makes / and ? search incrementally
:set hlsearch highlights search hits
:syntax enable enables syntax highlighting
:set shiftwidth=4 makes indent by four spaces
:set autoindent begins each new line with an indent
:set expandtab avoids putting TABs in the file (holywar)
:set textwidth=72 auto-word-wrap at 72 columns
There are some other commands I use on a regular basis (etyoIA*m',jkP|0^$^V^Z^GVC{}~:s) and others I use more rarely (Uq@, ZZ, :help, :set paste and :set nopaste, ^T and ^], ^W stuff, modelines, backreferences in regexp replacements) but I'm not confident that all of these are actually even valuable; I think knowing some of them just slows me down!
And of course there's lots more of vim I don't know at all (the jump list, quickfix, grep, spell-checking, cindent, cscope, abbreviations, editing files inside archives, the file explorer, folding, Arabic, Farsi, Hebrew, multiple buffers, key mapping beyond :map, and everything to do with plugins, to name a few areas).