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Comment by andkenneth | Hacker News Reader

I started going through it, and unfortunately it takes control away from you way too often. I want to be able to toy around with the concepts after I learn them. I'd still recommend `vimtutor`.

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I'd also recommend after vimtutor that you just keep a postit note on your monitor with a few commands. Replace it every week or two. You'll learn some commands you like and use all the time, others you'll forget because you don't use them. But it really makes it easy to become "an expert" really fast.

vimtutor is especially useful for beginners. Very interactive. Makes you want to learn more once you're done with it.

I remember reading this beautiful essay Seven habits of effective text editing by Bram Moolenaar, the main author of Vim.

http://www.moolenaar.net/habits.html

I agree, I really hated the fact that you could only try things out in exactly the ways prescribed. It makes sense, if you're writing a tutorial like that in javascript in the browser, you don't want to just rewrite Vim. But it makes it a pretty frustrating tutorial to follow and kind of beats of the point of it.

I like Vim adventures a lot. I think it's a better approach than this in a lot of ways.

Exactly, often changes happen so quickly that you cannot really tell what happened. You need to try it a few times to get used to the concept.

'vim adventures' also seems fun, but it's not quite the same (for me) without the context of actually navigating a text document.

I picked up vim very well from vim adventures. Once I finished the game those key movements were in my muscle memory, and that’s all that was really needed to get me up and running.

> 'vim adventures' also seems fun, but it's not quite the same (for me) without the context of actually navigating a text document.

On https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14658197 and its children I wrote something about the business model of VIM Adventures that you should consider before buying.

+1 for vimtutor. It's not really in dire need of replacement imo!

Vimtutor is great. For anyone who is vim shy but wants to learn I'd highly recommend setting a reminder every, oh, month maybe to just fire up vimtutor and go through it until you get bored or whatever. It's amazing how fast you'll pick it up.

The only real shortcoming of vimtutor is that it cuts off before taking really advanced topics like buffers and windows.

Definitely. Beyond vimtutor, I've found Practical Vim to be a fantastic book. I strongly recommend that book once someone has the basics of vim down.

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