After some practice with Vim I started to think about editing in terms of Vim's commands. That made me very effective. And it's not only about h j k l. It gives you many small tools that you can combine. The basics are actions and movements. Let me give you a few basic examples.
Some movements are:
- h, j, k, l,
- f <char> - the given character,
- w / b - beginning of the next / previous word,
- 0 / $ - beginning / end of the line.
Some actions:
- d - delete
- dd - delete whole line
- y - yank (copy to the Vim's clipboard)
- p - paste
- c - change
- <n> G - go to the n-th line.
Their combinations could be:
- d f . - delete from the cursor to the first period
- d w - delete the current word
- c w - change the current word
- d 0 - delete to the beginning of the current line
- dd 10 G p - delete the current line (that also puts it in the Vim's clipboard), move to the 10th line and paste the deleted one there.
Of course it gives you much more: searching, replacing, scripting, plug-ins, syntax highlight, auto-completion, browsing etc.