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Comment by dbbo | Hacker News Reader

Putting the article's content aside, how many "beginner's guides" to Vim do we really need? It seems like every other week I find a new author writing about basic vim commands. Now, considering the article's content-- I'm not sure it contained anything that couldn't be learned from `vimtutor`, but it's been quite a while since I've run it.

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Pretty much nothing from this article is in vimtutor, as I learned using that and don't recognize any of these commands. It teaches cw, dw, things like that, but it doesn't go into depth like this article.

You're right. I mistook vimtutor for the first chapter of a Vim book I have, although I did make a point to indicate that I wasn't 100% sure in the OP.

I've been using vi for 15+ years and full-time for development for about a year. There were at least 3 of these that I wasn't aware of which I will now commit to memory.

Certainly a beginner could learn this stuff right away, but I wouldn't consider it inherently beginner-oriented. Personally I don't think one canonical tutorial or reference is as effective as a large number of articles focused on things that different individuals find useful. Vim is just too big to absorb through one gargantuan tutorial.

I'm not the author.

My guess is that it's a combination of a) a lot of people are learning Vim right now and b) a lot of these people have blogs.

Coming to Vim from some other editor is an awesome experience for them and they want to share.

I know: I've been using Vim daily since one year now (coming from TextMate) and I've posted 20+ random tricks as I learned them. I'm currently drafting my "one year with Vim" post.

If one person (even the author) learns one thing from any of those beginners guides, then it was worth it.

So if I rewrite an existing program from scratch and it takes 10x longer than just using the existing one, but one person uses the program, it's still worth the time?

I think that one person could have found the information from an existing source, such as _:help text-objects_. That isn't to say that the article is useless; it's just redundant.

The post covers material outside of Vim's help system (e.g. some Vim scripts that create new text objects), and provides a different presentation that might be helpful to someone learning the concept. I think that's valuable.

What's wrong with different ways of explaining the same lessons? What if you don't know what text-objects are in the first place?

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